Interview with Amirtha Thanam

I recently interviewed the rangoli artist, Amirtha Thanam, who lives with her family in Theni, Tamilnadu, near Madurai district. Most of her rangolis that had been shared in ikolam have gotten rave reviews from our members, and have proved to wow us all. Amirtha is a Physics teacher and teaches in Nadar high school, in Theni. She has practiced and perfected the art of drawing rangolis for the past 25 years, regardless of her lack of formal training in the fine arts. Amirtha has expanded her collection of rangoli powder colors to great lengths over the years, and still adds to it today. She enjoys mixing her own sets of colors from the basic white rangoli powder, and has close to 400 different shades. She maintains her stock of colors in a room set aside only for her rangoli materials, and also has a separate room exclusively used as a craft room to store her painting supplies since her other hobbies are painting and embroidery. Her themes during the Margazhi months are mostly religious, and she devotes herself to making rangolis of Gods and Goddesses. She makes huge masterpieces exclusively for the Indian Thanksgiving festival known as Pongal. These rangolis take her from the last day of Margazhi, which is the day before Pongal, and to the morning of Pongal, the first day of Thai. Visitors from her neighborhood make it a point to check out her rangoli, since they know about her love for this art. Last year, there were close to 2000 people on the day of Pongal who stopped by her place to admire her creation. Amirtha says she now continues the tradition of making religiously themed rangolis for Pongal, mainly to meet the expectation of her neighborhood. Over the years, Amirtha had participated in many rangoli competitions, and has won multiple prizes. She does not clean up or erase her rangolis made for Pongal, and prefers to let nature take its course. The courtyard around her house where she makes the rangoli is situated near a tree. Usually, the flowers and leaves drift away in wind and land up on her rangoli. The colors don’t fade away easily; once, one of her rangolis ended up lasting nearly seventy-five days. A few weeks ago, we had featured one of Amirtha’s creations, a Goddess Laskhmi rangoli, in our website which got wonderful reviews. She had made that on the occasion of a marriage, in her friend’s house, and it remained undisturbed for a year. Amirtha finds inspiration in nature for her rangolis, and has made numerous flowers and birds-themed creations. She colors in layers in order to give a 3D effect to her rangolis, which can take her multiple hours. For example, for a rose rangoli, she needs around ten different shades of red to make it look realistic enough to her liking. She has close to seventy different shades of green, and about fifty shades in blue. Although she makes rangolis every morning, she somehow did not think of taking pictures of them, until recently. Amirtha came to know about ikolam through her older daughter, who had helped upload some of her creations in the website. On her way to work, she stops to notice other people’s kolams/rangolis and soaks in the beauty in the different techniques. She takes her time to pay attention to the kind of strokes, the dot placement, the shape of the petals, the colors, and so on. Amirtha concluded by mentioning that in her opinion, the rangolis capture and reflect the true state of mind of the artist, at the time of execution. A calm and quiet mind produces an artistically balanced piece of work. Lord Ram rangoli In her Lord Ram rangoli (seen above), the yellow part on the attire has about fifteen different shades of yellow, which helped create the 3D effect on Lord Ram’s dhoti. This rangoli had taken her close to 14 hours in total, from start to finish. Since making such a big rangoli spanning 14 feet takes her full concentration, her husband takes over the task of answering the curious questions that comes their way from the spectators.