A long-standing ritual practice; on paper and canvas since the 1970s · North Sahyadri, Maharashtra: Dahanu, Talasari, Jawhar, Palghar and Mokhada
Warli painting
Wall painting of the Warli people of Maharashtra, white on an earth-red ground and built from circles, triangles and squares. Since the 1970s it has moved from hut walls to paper and canvas.
How to recognise it
- White only, from rice flour and water, on a red-brown earth ground
- People and animals as two triangles joined at their tips
- The chauk, a square sacred enclosure, at the centre of ritual paintings
- The tarpa dance: a ring of dancers circling a musician
- Farming, hunting, fishing, trees and animals all around
The Warli are one of the largest tribal communities near Mumbai, and farmers by tradition. Their paintings were made on the inside walls of their huts, built of branches, earth and brick, which give the red ochre ground. The only paint is white: rice flour and water, with gum as a binder, applied with a bamboo stick chewed at the end into a brush. Walls were painted for weddings, festivals and harvests, and traditionally by women.
The vocabulary is three shapes. Circles come from the sun and moon, triangles from mountains and pointed trees. The square is a human invention, a sacred enclosure or a piece of land, and the central motif of a ritual painting is a square called the chauk. Inside the Devchauk is usually palghat, the mother goddess. People are two triangles meeting at a point, which balances them and also makes them look as though they are moving. A favourite scene is the tarpa dance, in which men and women link hands and circle the man playing the tarpa, a trumpet-like instrument, never turning their backs to it.
In the 1970s Jivya Soma Mashe, born in 1934 in Talasari taluka, began painting not for a ritual but every day, and his son Balu Mashe did the same. Mashe’s work went to Magiciens de la terre at the Pompidou Centre, and many younger men followed him. Warli painting holds a Geographical Indication, registered with the help of the tribal organisation Adivasi Yuva Seva Sangh.
What to look for
Economy. The best Warli paintings do a great deal with very little, and the figures move. Warli motifs are now copied widely as decoration; a painting by a named Warli artist is a different object.