Warli painting is a form of tribal mural art created by the tribal people from the North Sahyadri Range in Maharashtra, India. The Warlis or Varlis are an indigenous tribe living in mountainous as well as coastal areas of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
They speak an unwritten Varli language which belongs to the southern zone of the Indo-Aryan languages. The Warli Tribesmen and women are traditional storytellers; they follow the oral practice of passing down traditions, knowledge and culture.
This oral tradition translates into beautifully painted elaborate tales on the wall of their houses, and other common areas of the community. These visual canvases capture their daily rhythms in life; the forces of nature they worship, their simplistic belief systems, their laughter, regret, victories, and tears.
Jivya Soma Mashe is known as the father of Warli art because he pulled it out of the traditional domain to popularize Warli art beyond the Sahyadri Mountains in Thane district, Maharashtra, where the ritualistic tribal art form originated. It was traditionally practiced by women of the Warli tribe called Suvasinis, who decorated the Lagn Chowk or the wedding square. Layers of cow dung slapped on the walls of village homes formed the canvas. When the dung dried, they were painted in mud brown to create a background, and bamboo-stick paint brushes were used to meticulously craft scenes, figures, and objects. The primary pigment is white, and is derived from a paste of rice flour. The act of painting is called lihane, which is also the Warli word for writing. Jivya Soma Mashe was the first male artist to enter the female-dominated bastion of Warli art. Known as the master of movement and geometry, he gave a new meaning to the minimalistic strokes and introduced highly imaginative compositions capturing the constant cyclical movement of life.
Since then, Warli painting has been adapted to different surfaces such as paper, cloth and canvas, and has incorporated the use of different materials such as acrylic colours and gum instead of the traditional rice paste. In 2014, it received a Geographical Indications (GI) tag from the Indian government.
