A motif is a recurring visual element that carries meaning — a lotus, a lamp, a conch — drawn inside the structural scaffold. Motifs travel across traditions and festivals, keeping their symbolic associations as they go. Each article separates what a motif observably is from the meanings communities attribute to it, per this encyclopedia’s standing rule.
Read together, the motifs form a vocabulary: most carry several meanings at once, context decides which meaning is doing the work, and nearly all of them descend from two sources — close observation of the natural world, and the geometric repertoire of dot, circle, and line. The chapter essay describes how that vocabulary works; the articles below are its dictionary.