- The Warli community inhabit the west coast of Northern Maharashtraaround the north Sahyadri range
- Married women play a central role in creating their most important painting called Chowk to mark special occasions.
- Closely associated with the rituals of marriage, fertility, harvest and new season of sowing, Chowk is dominated by the figure of mother goddess, Palaghat, who is chiefly worshipped as the goddess of fertility and represents the corn goddess, Kansari.
- The cord goddess is enclosed in a small square frame decorated with ‘pointed’ chevrons along the outer edges that symbolize Hariyali Deva, i.e., the God of Plants.
- The central motif of Palaghat is surrounded by scenes of everyday life, portraying acts of hunting, fishing, farming, dancing, mythological stories of animals
- These paintings are traditionally painted with rice flour on earth coloured walls of their homes.
- A very basic graphic vocabulary like a circle, a triangle and a square are used in these rudimentary wall paintings which are monosyllabic in nature.
- The circle and the triangle come from their observation of nature.The circle represents the sun and the moon, while the triangle depicts mountains and conical trees.
Figure: An example of Warli painting