Conservation and Heritage

Every design this encyclopedia describes will be gone within days of being drawn; the tradition that produces them has lasted centuries. That inversion — perishable works, durable knowledge — is the whole problem and the whole answer of rangoli conservation. This chapter is about what preservation means for an art with no originals: knowledge held in practising hands, families and communities as its custodians, and documentation — from pattern books to digital archives — as support for living practice, never a substitute. The essays read heritage the way the tradition itself does: as something kept by being done.