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BEFORE THE FIRST RAYS OF sunlight stream across the rice fields and mud roads in the Nilgiri Mountains, before they force their way through the high-rises in the urban jungle of Chennai and Madurai, the women of Tamil Nadu are up for the day. In the dark, they clean the threshold to their home, and, following a centuries-long tradition, painstakingly draw beautiful, ritualistic designs called KOLAM, using rice flour. Taking a clump of rice flour in a bowl (or a coconut shell), the KOLAM artist steps onto her freshly washed canvas: the ground at the entrance of her house, or any patch of floor marking an entrypoint. Working swiftly, she takes pinches of rice flour and draws geometric patterns: curved lines, labyrinthine loops around red or white dots, hexagonal fractals, or floral patterns resembling the lotus, a symbol of the goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi, for whom the KOLAM is drawn as a prayer in illustration. The making of the KOLAM itself is a performance of supplication. The artist folds her body in half, bending at the waist, stooping to the ground as she fills out her patterns. Many KOLAM artists see the KOLAM as an offering to the earth goddess, Bhūdevi, as well.
But the KOLAM is not just a prayer; it is also a metaphor for coexistence with nature. In her 2018 book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the KOLAM, Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that Hindus have a “karmic obligation” to “feed a thousand souls,” or offer food to those that live among us. By providing a meal of rice flour to bugs, ants, birds, and insects, she writes, the Hindu householder begins the day with “a ritual of generosity,” with a dual offering to divinity and to nature.
The word KOLAM means beauty. What it also embodies is a perfect symmetry of straight or curved lines built around or through a grid of dots. Nearly always, the grid of dots comes first, requiring spatial precision to achieve symmetry. The dot in Hindu philosophy represents the point at which creation begins—it is a symbol of the cosmos. No tools other than the maker’s deft fingers, and the rice flour, are used. Sometimes the designs are one continuous line that loops over itself, snaking to infinity. Intersecting into infinite figure eights, in a style known as pulli KOLAM, the KOLAM is also believed to be a representation of infinity, of the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth that forms a foundational concept in Hindu mythology.
Mathematicians and computer scientists have keenly studied the KOLAM. The KOLAM is “an unusual example of the expression of mathematical ideas in a cultural setting,” writes Marcia Ascher, a professor emerita of Mathematics at Ithaca College. Citing her ethnomathematical research (a field of study combining anthropology and mathematics), Nagarajan adds that “The KOLAM is one of the few embedded indigenous traditions that have contributed to the western mathematical tradition.”
While the KOLAM-makers themselves may not be thinking in terms of mathematical theorems, many KOLAM designs have a recursive nature—they start out small, but can be built out by continuing to enlarge the same subpattern, creating a complex overall design. This has fascinated mathematicians, because the patterns elucidate fundamental mathematical principles. Nagarajan writes about how the symmetry of KOLAM art, such as the recurring fractals in the design, have been likened to mathematical models such as the Sierpinski triangle, a fractal of recursive equilateral triangles.
Computer scientists have also used KOLAMs to teach computers language fundamentals. KOLAM designs can be studied as a picture language. Quoting Ascher, Nagarajan notes that “akin to natural languages and computer languages, picture languages are made up of restricted sets of basic units and specific, formal rules for putting the units together.” Teaching the computer to draw KOLAMs gave computer scientists insight into how picture languages function, which they then used to create new languages. “It’s actually helping computer scientists understand something elemental about their own work,” said Nagarajan, in a presentation on the geometry of KOLAM.
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