Madurai, September 6, 2013: As many as 20 women have drawn 50 ‘kolams’ this year. This practice has been in place for over 35 years now. Women get together before Navarathri to adorn the temple with ‘kolams.’

Leela Venkatraman, the senior-most member of the group, has been their teacher. “The unique idea of adorning the temple with ‘kolams’ was initiated by my late friend Lalitha Shankar in 1979. “We both learnt how to draw ‘kolam’ from our teacher Master Savithambiras,” said septuagenarian Leela.

On their unconventional patterns, Ms. Leela said, “We use a combination of two columns and three rows of dots and there are only seven designs possible from this permutation. We use a number of these combinations and create big designs. This method was put into practice by our master after almost 20 years of research,” she said.

Making a distinction between the traditional ‘kolam’ patterns and rangoli designs, Vinodhini Arun Shankar, who comes from Chennai every year to be a part of this team, said,

“There is a lot of precision involved in the work. When we pick a spot to draw the ‘kolam,’ we make sure that the centre is right and use tracing paper to draw dots that are equidistant from each other.”

A couple of years back, the same group, but with around 50 members, managed to draw nearly 1 lakh ‘kolams’ in a short span of six days. “We haven’t drawn as many designs this year since the number of members willing to participate is steadily dwindling,” rued Ms. Vinodhini. “We hope that more youngsters will take interest and learn our methods. It is an extremely creative and challenging exercise,” she asserted. The temple authorities have extended support for this yearly initiative.

Source: The Hindu, September 6, 2013