Iconomania: studies in visual culture
The Symposium Issue:
Spaces of Transformation

1 Kolam, South India (from Stephen P. Huyler, Painted Prayers: Women´s Art in Village India New York, 1994)

Ritual Domestic Threshold
Drawings of South India:
A Visual Trope of the
Socialized Hindu Feminine
—Santhi Kavuri



1. Ritual domestic threshold drawings of South India, kolam, are often described as visual testimony to the hermetic world of the Hindu woman, a world sealed off from political upheavals, societal ruptures and historical movements. The drawings (see figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5) are also thought to testify to the Hindu woman´s agentless being when she is seen performing the same rote, daily ritual of threshold drawing as did her ancestors. This sort of representation has contributed to the silencing of the voices of Hindu women and promoting their all too familiar image as victims subjected to alienating historical accounts, needing to be protected and spoken for by more centered subjects of history. This representation, a condition of a positivist analytic framework constructed around a subject/object dichotomy, is found reduplicated in innumerable images of the Hindu woman in video, photograph and text . It is this sort of representation that Trihn Min-ha in Woman, Native, Other poetically interprets for us when she writes:

   Here, where she lives, each door revolves like a mirror of his mirror, and repression takes on the form of both suppressed and forced speech. If she does not ravel and unravel his universe, she will then remain silent, looking at him looking at her. [ 1 ]

2. In contrast to this traditional representation of the Hindu woman and her ritual drawings, I argue that kolam are ritually prescribed and circumscribed performances of signification through which the Indian woman expresses and constitutes her socialized identity. The function of the kolam as a practice becomes clear only when the analytic gaze is shifted away from the product, the finished drawing, and redirected toward the moment and space of the drawings´ dual signification.

3. The process of this dual signification of the kolam is revealed when the performance of drawing is understood as a two­part activity composed of its formal execution and signification of the executed drawing. This process occurs during an interval which Homi Bhabha calls a time-lag or contingent moment from which the subject emerges as the agent of signification. As such an agent, the subject moves back and forth between two points. The first point is the individualized experience of drawing, where she starts off: consider the quiet of the morning, the specificity of gesture, the texture of rice flour. The second point to which she moves is the intersubjective or social sphere. Here she draws upon a vocabulary of traditional movements, prayers and patterns that delimit the practice of kolam. In this second sphere she is distanced from the experience of drawing, and negotiates its meaning. Having done this she returns to the first point, the individuated space of the drawing, and gives to it a significance. It is in the intersubjective space that the prevailing ideology of the feminine comes to influence the signification of the Hindu woman´s ritualized cultural performances. The power and influence of this ideology comes from her basic desire for social survival in a world dominated by men. The Hindu woman´s ritual performance of the kolam can then be seen as tactically choreographed by and signified through the ideology of the feminine which informs her contingent social and historical context.[ 2 ]

   2 untitled (photo: author) [back to text]

4. In this essay, ritual domestic drawings are interpreted as a visual trope of the feminine and understood as contingent and tactical manifestations of a signifying process. This perspective implicates not only the specific time and history of the drawings´ signification but also the experience and agency of the woman as she negotiates this connotative plain each time she executes the drawings. It is important to stress here that agency is not considered as perceived performative intention. Rather, agency is observed in the process of signification where the subject mindfully gives ideological meaning to her culture and her identity, always compelled by her immutable desire for social survival. To demonstrate this equation of agency, two moments of the Hindu woman´s history in which the ritual domestic threshold drawing was performed will be examined: these are the pre-colonial and the post-independence Nationalist periods.

   3 House in Hyderabad (photo: author) [back to text]

5. The ritual threshold drawing of South India—kolam—is a popular form of ritual abstract imagery found in and around the homes of most Hindu families. The drawings are executed only by women and according to knowledge passed from mother to daughter. Due to this gender exclusivity, Kolam is often characterized as a women´s art form.

6. 4 Hut in rural Andhra Pradesh (photo: author) [back to text]

   Before the threshold kolam is executed the space in front of the entrance is swept clean and then purified by sprinkling a fine spray of water mixed with cow dung. This mixture works as an antiseptic to kill any unhealthy impurities in the area and it allows the drawing to sit more firmly and strikingly on the darkened ground. Then rice flour is taken into the hand and deftly released in a moving stream that hits the ground and forms the lines of the drawing. The designs of the kolam are usually geometric and symmetrical, in forms of abstracted serpents and lotuses as well as reduplicated motifs such as swastikas and triangles. At the time of execution the woman is supposed to face the rising sun and align the kolam with the cardinal directions.

   5 untitled (photo: author) [back to text]

7. These ritual domestic threshold drawings are made by Hindu women all over India. Although they vary in name, material, and placement according to the region in which they are produced. In the South western state of Kerala the design´s outlines are filled in by flowers, while in Orissa, Rajastan, and other parts of the North the design is made from a mixture of rice flour and water and is applied with the finger or a brush (Figs. 6 & 7). In the north of India the drawings are found on the walls and the floor, and they are executed only during samskaras (religious festivals) or during vratas (personal ceremonies). In the South, kolam is found frequently at the threshold floor and is produced everyday.

8. The religious meaning and function of these drawings, as expressed by most women when interviewed, is to honor Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity, and to invite her blessings into the home.[ 3 ] The designs are also believed to sanctify and protect the dangerous and liminal space of the threshold. The liminal space is believed to be dangerous because it separates the auspicious, pure, protected, and safe world of the home from the inauspicious, impure, unprotected, and dangerous world of the outside. If the threshold is not constantly sanctified by the kolam inauspicious forces may trespass into the home and eventually disrupt the health and well being of the family. Thus this function of warding off inauspicious forces at the threshold by invoking the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi and sanctifying the space is the most commonly stated meaning attributed to the domestic ritual drawings. However, as will be seen in the discussion of the pre-colonial and post-independence periods, the kolam transcends this function to also become meaningful as a visual trope of the socialized Hindu feminine.

   6 Kolam of flowers in state of Kerala (from Huyler) [back to text]

   The Pre­Colonial Signification of Kkolam

   7 Kolam of flour and water in Orissa (from Huyler) [back to text]

9. The conceptual world and the lived experience in the pre-colonial society of India was organized by Hinduism. In this social context each member of society was given religiously prescribed functions and rules of conduct that led them to behave in moral and ethical ways acceptable to Hindu society. These functions and rules were codified in the dharma sastras, the texts of righteous behavior first composed and disseminated as didactic narratives or moral tales around the fourth century B.C.E. According to the dharma sastras the Hindu woman´s religiously sanctioned duty was to maintain the health and prosperity of her family, and to survive socially she had to fulfill this responsibility. This idea is expressed in the Manu Sastras one of the most famous of the dharma sastras texts where it states: "The ritual of marriage is traditionally known as the . . . transformative ritual for woman; serving her husband is (the equivalent of) living with a guru, and household chores are the rites of the fire." Thus, when the married Hindu woman took on the responsibilities of household chores as prescribed by the sacred texts she signaled her desire for social acceptance. And in order to visually and tactically punctuate the fulfillment of her religiously sanctioned function she performed a series of prescribed sacred rituals throughout the day. In the context of the Hindu ideology of the feminine, these rituals signified the Hindu woman´s acceptance of her prescribed responsibility to maintain her family.

10. One of these daily rituals was the execution of kolam at the thresholds of the home. The repeated performance of the drawings in the morning was thus translated as a visual index of the good Hindu woman who created these drawings to invite auspiciousness and the blessings of Lakshmi the goddess of wealth and prosperity into the home. The Hindu woman´s social imperative for creating these drawings was to visually communicate her virtue and social acceptability. This idea is explained by an eighteenth­century dharmic text: "If a woman walks over ground that has . . . not [been] marked with the auspicious sign of the svastika she will lose threes things: her wealth (vittam), long life and her good reputation." [ 4 ]

11. The kolam´s strategic placement at the threshold further signified identification—both spatially and metaphorically—with the liminal nature of the Goddess who was herself the macrocosmic embodiment of the Hindu feminine. As a liminal space, the threshold, was seen as symbolic of the ambivalent feminine nature of the Hindu Goddess and her microcosmic counterpart the Hindu woman. This ambivalent feminine nature was derived from their power as both creators and destroyers of the universe and the home. The woman and the Goddess were also believed to be dangerous because of this character and their ability to make things auspicious or inauspicious by virtue of their intermediary position and the acts they perform. Tracy Pintchman has described these auspicious/inauspicious qualities of the feminine essence in Hinduism as fluid categories which "appear to be associated more with processes or events taken in context rather than objects; thus auspiciousness can easily give way to inauspiciousness unless it is reiterated and reinforced." [ 5 ]

12. What were these processes and events taken in context then that must be reiterated and reinforced to create auspiciousness? On the divine level this process was the active use of the feminine power, that leads to the creation or maintenance of the cosmos. On the human level the process was the reiterated rituals prescribed by the dharma sastras for being a virtuous Hindu woman. The Hindu woman through the performance of the kolam drawing was thus like the Goddess on the macrocosmic level reiterating and reinforcing auspiciousness. As Pintchman explains this metaphorical association: "On both the divine and human levels, the paradigms are substantially the same, for both microcosm and macrocosm, society and cosmos, are said to participate in the same essential patterns." [ 6 ]

13. Thus the ritual performance of the kolam was infused with the Hindu ideology of the feminine when the macrocosmic acts of the Goddess that produce auspiciousness was connected to the symbolic gesture of creating the kolam on the microcosmic level. The performance of the ritual of kolam as a daily activity exemplified the Hindu notion that auspiciousness can be evoked and maintained through the reiteration of certain prescribed acts. Therefore, the significance of the Hindu woman´s performance of kolam made by the metaphorical connection to the liminal space of the threshold and the auspicious acts of the Hindu Goddess further infused her identity with the Hindu ideology of the feminine. Like her macrocosmic counterpart, the Hindu woman had the power to bring her world to an end if she did not reiterate and reinforce the rituals that maintained the well being of her home and family—that is, her universe. The Hindu woman´s logic for this metaphysical and manifest signification of the kolam with the Hindu feminine was to compel the male dominated pre-colonial society to revere and protect her, thus insuring her social survival.

    Post-Independence Nationalist Period and the Kolam

    8 Kolam in a personal sketchbook, Andhra Pradesh (photo: author) [back to text]

14. After the societal rupture caused by British colonialism and the formation of the post-independent modern-nation state of India the Hindu woman´s ritual drawings came to be resignified by a new Nationalist ideology of the feminine. While she continued to practice the ritual of domestic drawing their meaningfulness changed. This change was an effect of the Indian society moving from a Hindu based social system to one based on the ideology of the modern nation-state. This cultural and structural transformation of Hindu society was not authored by the British but by the new Indian bourgeois civil society during their political movement toward individual and national sovereignty. The nationalists, in working toward this endeavor of an imagined Indian community, strategically negotiated between Hindu traditions and western modernity. It was within this discourse of the new Indian nation state that the Hindu feminine was redefined.

    9 Computer generated kolam [back to text]

15. According to Partha Chatterjee in his essay, "The Nationalists Resolution of the Women´s Question,"[ 7 ] the feminine was resignified by the political absorption of the Hindu woman and her culture into the nationalist world. The pre- and post-independence Indian nationalist movement strategically divided the world into two parts—the material and the spiritual. The material world was the world of science, technology, and rational public debate. It was essentially the world which the British dominated and where the Indian was subjugated. The spiritual world by contrast was imagined as the inner world of Indian spiritual culture. It was a space where the Indian found the superior essence of his/her identity. In the national struggle for independence this space had to be guarded and preserved if the movement was to be affective and legitimate.

16. Thus a spatial binary was imposed on the universe of all Indians involved with the nationalist struggle. In the nationalist cosmology the material world was masculine, threatening and outside. The spiritual world was feminine, nurturing and inside. The woman came to define and be defined by this new space. Chatterjee is careful to state that this new delineation of space did not mean a regressive step back into the "traditional" and isolated life of the pre-colonial Hindu woman. Instead she was allowed to step outside in the public sphere the boundaries of her home, to become educated and dress in western fashions, the signs of a modernized Hindu woman. However, while outside she was to maintain the essence of the inner spiritual world and never show signs of giving this essence away to westernization. Chatterjee addressed these contradictions, writing:

    To the extent that the family was itself entangled in wider social relations, it too could not be insulated from the influence of changes in the outside world. Consequently, the organization and ways of life at home would also have to be changed. But the crucial requirement was to retain the inner spirituality of indigenous social life. The home was the principle site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality. No matter what the changes in the external conditions of life for women, they must not lose their essentially spiritual (i.e. feminine) virtues; they must not, in other words become essentially westernized.[ 8 ]

    Within this new cosmology, then, the space of the feminine was transformed from the physical threshold of the Hindu woman´s domestic world to the imagined threshold of the nationalist´s material and spiritual worlds.

17. 10 Kolam made from a roller (from Huyler) [back to text]

    After modernization, the Hindu woman enacted the nationalist ideology of the feminine. But how was this newly defined ´femininity´ articulated? According to Chatterjee: ". . . the essential ´femininity´ of women was fixed in terms of certain culturally visible ´spiritual´ qualities, they could go to schools, travel in public conveyances, watch public entertainment programs, and in time even take up employment outside the home. But the ´spiritual signs of her femininity were now clearly marked: in her dress, her eating habits, her social demeanor, her religiosity."[ 9 ] The kolam within this new spiritual world defined by nationalist ideology was just such a mark. It was still situated in the feminine space of the threshold but now it was performed between the material and spiritual worlds of Indian society to visually indicate the Hindu woman´s new responsibility as guardian of the essential spiritual identity of Indians.

18. The kolam thus moved into new places much like the Hindu woman but still signified the Hindu feminine. One such place was the portable and personal notebook (Fig. 8) where new and innovative drawings were

    11 Titan Captures India (advertisment from a popular Indian cultural magazine)

    recorded for the first time and kept for memory. More recently, the drawings have moved into cyber space (Fig. 9) where new designs are created and sent by electronic mail to sisters or friends. Time saving devises such as rollers (Fig. 10) or plastic sticker decals also indicate the modernization and connotative evolution of the kolam. These drawings mark the virtues of the Hindu woman who can maintain a morning tradition even while getting her family and sometimes herself ready for work and school.

19. The new presence of the kolam extends to commercial and commodity culture, as well. In magazine advertisements and mass produced, personal aesthetic expressions such as fashion watches (Fig. 11) the spatial transformation of the kolam from the thresholds of the home into the thresholds of the imagined material and spiritual worlds of the Indian is complete. In these advertisements (Fig. 12) the Hindu woman is given an image of herself as living a liminal existence between the worlds of tradition and modernity.

20. In conclusion, I would like to underline two points developed in this

    12 Advertisment from a popular Indian cultural magazine

    discussion of the threshold ritual domestic drawings of South Indian Hindu women. First, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the Hindu woman does, in fact, exhibit agency through kolam. This agency was not mapped here by locating the Hindu woman´s performative intentionality, but by locating her various strategies of social survival. These strategies are visually articulated in the kolam by the process of signification through which is enacted the ideology of the Hindu feminine. In pre-colonial Hindu society, the drawings served as a visual index of the Hindu woman´s feminine virtue and as a metaphor for her feminine nature as the purveyor of auspiciousness. Thus, she was able to signify her social acceptability and spiritual importance, for without her presence there would be no family. As the Hindu woman´s life transformed after the imposition of modernization first by the British and then by the Indian nationalists her culture was resignified and her identity reconstituted. The kolam was seen again as a trope of the Hindu feminine. But now the kolam signaled the essential spiritual identity of the Hindu woman and her important function as the guardian of the liminal space between the spiritual and material worlds. Thus we must understand the Hindu woman and her material culture not as silent and essentialized objects of history but as enunciatory subjects of a specific social and cultural context.

    ——Santhi Kavuri
    Department of Art History
    University of California, Los Angeles
    Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417
    "Ritual Domestic Threshold Drawings of South India: A Visual Trope of the Socialized Hindu Feminine" Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/arthist/Icono/kavuri/kolam.htm) 1998.
    skavuri@ucla.edu

    ---

    
    Notes to Text
    

          ¹ Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 47.[back] 

          ² See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 184-185.[back] 

          ³ Vijaya Nagarajan, "Hosting the Divine: The Kolam in Tamilnadu," Mud, Mirror and Thread (Santa Fe, Museum of International Folk Art, 1993), 197-199.[back] 

          ⁴ Julia I. Leslie, The Perfect Wife, The Orthodox Hindu Woman According to the Stridharmapaddhati of Tryambakayajvan (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64.[back] 

          ⁵ Tracy Pintchman, The Rise of the Hindu Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 202.[back] 

          ⁶ Pintchman, 203.[back] 

          ⁷ Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women´s Question," Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. KumKum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 233-253.[back] 

          ⁸ Chatterjee, 243.[back] 

          ⁹ Chatterjee, 247-248.[back] 

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