History of Rangoli

The history of rangoli is written less in stone than in memory. Every design the tradition has ever produced was made to disappear — which leaves the historian a puzzle: how do you reconstruct the past of an art whose artworks do not survive? The answer is a method, and this chapter is built on it: combine archaeology’s silences, literature’s indirect witness, the documentation of the modern era, and the strongest evidence of all — the unbroken continuity of living practice. The essays that follow trace that story from deep antiquity to the digital present, saying plainly at every step what is documented, what is inferred, and what is honestly unknown.