Definition
Pulli kolam is the dot-grid family of the Tamil kolam: designs constructed on a counted grid of dots (pulli), which the drawn line then connects or encloses. The dot count is the design’s identity — practitioners and this site’s design library alike name designs by their grids, such as “5×5” for a square grid or “13 to 7” for a diamond grid that steps down from a widest row of thirteen dots to seven.
History
The pulli grid is the kolam’s oldest documented scaffold and the basis of its formal study: the Siromoneys’ 1970s work modelled pulli kolam families with array grammars, and later researchers in ethnomathematics — Ascher among them — used the grid notation to catalogue and compare designs across practitioners. The grid also makes the repertoire teachable: a design can be dictated as counts and moves.
Description
The practitioner first sets the dots, in square or stepped-diamond arrangement, spacing them by eye. The line then works in one of two modes: joining dots to form motifs and lattices, or looping around dots to leave them visible at the centres of cells. Symmetry — fourfold in square grids, bilateral in diamond grids — is usual but not required, and a single grid supports many designs: the same 7×7 field yields stars, flowers, birds, and abstract lattices depending on the path chosen.
Cultural Context
Because the grid is counted, pulli kolam carries the tradition’s most explicit sense of skill progression: households speak of moving from small odd grids to large festival counts, and the grid size of a street’s kolams rises visibly at Margazhi and festivals. The dots themselves are sometimes described by practitioners as obstacles the line must honour — an attributed reading that the interlaced sikku kolam makes central.
Regional Variations
The dotted method crosses the language border intact: the Telugu chukkala muggulu uses the same counted grids under its own name, and dotted rangoli styles such as Maharashtra’s tipkyanchi follow the same logic. Within Tamil practice, the pulli family shades into the sikku family whenever the line stops connecting dots and starts weaving around them.
Related Topics
The parent tradition is Kolam; the sibling family is Sikku Kolam; the Telugu counterpart is Muggulu. The design library can be browsed by exactly these grids — every dotted design records its count.
Gallery
References
- Gift Siromoney, Rani Siromoney & Kamala Krithivasan, “Array grammars and kolam”, Computer Graphics and Image Processing 3(1), 1974.
- Marcia Ascher, “The Kolam Tradition”, American Scientist 90(1), 2002.
Further Reading
- Vijaya Nagarajan, Feeding a Thousand Souls, Oxford University Press, 2018 — for the practice surrounding the grids.