Tamil Nadu is the kolam heartland: the state where threshold drawing remains a daily practice, where the dot-grid and interlaced families reached their fullest development, and where the art carries its deepest documented scholarship. In many households the day still opens before sunrise — the entrance swept, water sprinkled, and a kolam drawn from memory in rice flour or white stone powder, the grid laid point by point and the curves carried around it by hand and eye alone, without instruments.
The practice names its own families, and the names describe construction: pulli kolams built on dot grids laid straight (ner pulli) or staggered (idukku pulli); the sikku kolam’s continuous line looping around its dots; kambi line-drawing; the ceremonial straight-line register called padi kolam; and the freehand festival work that carries the art through Margazhi, its greatest month. The articles in this chapter describe the named families; the chapter essay surveys the style system whole.