Rice Flour, Memory, Mathematics, and a Living Tamil Tradition in The Good City written by Janani

Before sunrise, across towns and cities in Tamil Nadu, women still step outside their homes with rice flour in hand. In a movement learned through observation rather than instruction, they bend toward the earth and begin drawing patterns that are at once ephemeral and ancient. Traditionally drawn during brahma muhurtham, the time believed to be spiritually charged before sunrise, the kolam marks the meeting point between the internal and external world. It welcomes prosperity, invites positive energy, and in its oldest form, feeds ants, birds, and insects through rice flour offerings.

By evening, the designs may disappear under footsteps, rain, or traffic. By dawn the next day, they return.

American art historian Stephen Huyler, recalling his first encounter with kolams in Tamil Nadu as a 20-year-old traveller in the 1970s, talks about waking before dawn to find women outside every house “painting designs” on the street. As daylight spread, he watched entire roads transform into “a huge mural”, only for the drawings to disappear within hours under the movement of daily life. He would later describe himself as “bewitched by their ingenuity”. That impermanence perhaps lies at the heart of the kolam itself.

The kolam remains one of the oldest surviving forms of visual expression in South India. What appears simple on the surface is layered with symbolism, history, mathematics, spirituality, and memory.

Versions of floor art traditions exist across India under different names: rangoli in Karnataka, muggu in Andhra and Telangana, alpana in West Bengal, pookalam in Kerala, chowkpurna in Uttar Pradesh. Yet the Tamil kolam occupies a distinct cultural space because of its everyday nature. It was never restricted to festivals or ceremonies alone. It belonged to ordinary mornings, thresholds, routines, and women’s labour.

Historical references to kolams can be traced back to Sangam literature between 300 BCE and 300 CE. Andal mentions kolams in Nachiar Tirumozhi, while Shaivite texts and medieval Tamil poetry contain repeated references to decorated thresholds and ritual drawings. What began perhaps as the sprinkling of rice at entrances gradually evolved into intricate visual systems passed down across generations.

Historian Meenakshi Devaraj notes that the practice of sprinkling rice at entrances eventually evolved into kolam-making, turning everyday ritual into visual language. Writer and researcher C. S. Lakshmi has also observed that kolams embody rhythm, symmetry, recursion, and continuity, even when practitioners themselves may not articulate them in mathematical terms.

The kolam has always functioned as more than decoration.

In many Tamil households, specific kolams marked specific occasions. Some belonged to Fridays and Lakshmi worship. Others appeared during Margazhi mornings, weddings, puberty ceremonies, harvest festivals, or temple rituals. In certain communities, kolams once communicated social information too: signalling auspicious events, births, or gatherings within the neighbourhood. Designer and photographer Udhaya Sankar has pointed out that in parts of Tamil Nadu, specific kolams once indicated whether a family was celebrating a birth or preparing for a ceremony.

The threshold itself mattered. A kolam was not meant for galleries or preservation. It was public, visible, participatory, and ephemeral.

Huyler observed another striking detail during his travels through Tamil Nadu: women reportedly prided themselves on never repeating a design. In streets where every threshold held a different pattern each morning, the kolam became not merely ritual, but a daily act of invention.

Each dot, curve, loop, and line carries symbolic value. Triangles, circles, lotus forms, lamps, and geometric grids reflect older ideas about balance, energy, rhythm, and cosmic order. Particularly in sikku kolams, where continuous lines weave around dots in complex loops, the designs begin to resemble puzzles as much as visual art.

And this is where the conversation around kolams has shifted significantly in recent years.

For decades, women created highly sophisticated geometric systems without ever calling them mathematics. Today, mathematicians, designers, and computer scientists increasingly study kolams for their structural complexity involving symmetry, recursion, looping systems, and algorithmic thinking.

Recent studies have even examined pulli kolams as frameworks for physical data representation and computational mapping systems, demonstrating how traditional practices continue to intersect with contemporary design and technology conversations.

What is remarkable is not only the mathematics itself, but the fact that generations of women practiced these principles intuitively through oral tradition and repetition.

There is also an ecological philosophy embedded within the practice. The use of rice flour was historically tied to the belief that every household carried a responsibility toward other living beings. The kolam fed ants, birds, squirrels, and insects even as it beautified the threshold. As writer Gayathri Ramachandran notes, the kolam became “a ritual of generosity.”

At the same time, urban life has transformed the practice. In apartment complexes and rapidly changing cities, rice flour has often given way to chalk powder, acrylic colours, sticker kolams, and stencil designs. Time, space, and changing lifestyles have altered how kolams are made.

Yet the practice has not disappeared.

Instead, it has adapted. Kolams now circulate through Instagram tutorials, digital archives, animation projects, textile design, and diaspora communities across the world. During the pandemic, online kolam challenges became a way for people to reconnect with routine and continuity during uncertainty.

Meenakshi observes that intricate kolams, especially sikku kolams, are slowly beginning to disappear from everyday life as simpler rangoli-style patterns increasingly replace them. At the same time, she points out that these traditional designs have found new takers in fashion and textile spaces, with designers incorporating kolam motifs into clothing and contemporary design.

Yet, she believes preservation must move beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. According to her, one of the most meaningful ways to sustain the tradition would be to introduce kolams into school curricula through subjects like mathematics and science. “Recently, a school mathematics question used kolam structures as part of a case study for students to solve; it is an important step toward making learning more rooted and engaging,” she adds. Integrating kolams into classrooms, she argues, could break the monotony of conventional teaching while helping students discover mathematical thinking, symmetry, and pattern recognition through living cultural practices.

She also notes that Tamil Nadu needs stronger institutional recognition for kolam practitioners. A state-level award or formal recognition for kolam artistes, she says, would help accord greater dignity and visibility to what remains one of the state’s most enduring yet largely unstaged art forms.

But even as the kolam evolves through education, fashion, and digital culture, it has also found a place within political expression and public resistance.

The kolam has also entered political space. Protest kolams emerged during anti-CAA demonstrations and civic movements, transforming domestic art into subtle forms of dissent. Slogans and political symbols appeared within traditional designs, turning thresholds into spaces of public expression. These newer conversations have also reopened questions about labour and gender. For generations, kolam-making was viewed merely as domestic duty despite the memory, precision, discipline, and design knowledge it demanded. Today, scholars and artists increasingly view kolams as repositories of women’s intellectual and cultural labour.

Perhaps that is why the kolam continues to endure.

Not because it remains unchanged, but because it absorbs change while retaining memory. It survives in villages and apartment corridors, in ritual and rebellion, in rice flour and digital grids.

And every morning, before the city fully awakens, someone still bends toward the ground and begins drawing.