The Warlis or are an Indian indigenous people, who live mostly in Dahanu and Talasari talukas of the northern Thane district, parts of Nashik and Dhule districts of Maharashtra, Valsad District of Gujarat,[1] and the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.[2] They have their own beliefs, life, customs and traditions, which is the part of the Composite Hindu Culture. The Warlis speak an unwritten Varli language which belong to the southern zone of the Indo-Aryan languages, mingling Sanskrit, Marathi and Gujarati words. The word Warli is derived from warla, meaning "piece of land" or "field". Anand niketan school of ahmedabad in gujrat, india has done a play of a girl of the warli tribe, " Niyati". She is not real but they made this girl come into life.
Their oral tradition tells us that the Warlis moved southwards in search of lands for shifting cultivation to the foothills of the Sahyadri (also known as the Western Ghats), where they live now. With a view to putting an end to what they considered the wasteful practice of shifting cultivation, the British evicted Warli villages deep into the forests, and resettled them on the fringes.
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In her book The Painted World of the Warlis Yashodhara Dalmia claimed that the Warlis carry on a tradition stretching back to 2500 or 3000 BCE. Their mural paintings are similar to those done between 500 and 10,000 BCE in the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, in Madhya Pradesh.
Their extremely rudimentary wall paintings use a very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle and a square.There paintings were monosyllbic. The circle and triangle come from their observation of nature, the circle representing the sun and the moon, the triangle derived from mountains and pointed trees. Only the square seems to obey a different logic and seems to be a human invention, indicating a sacred enclosure or a piece of land. So the central motive in each ritual painting is the square, known as the "chauk" or "chaukat", mostly of two types: Devchauk and Lagnachauk. Inside a Devchauk, we find Palaghata, the mother goddess, symbolizing fertility.[3] Significantly, male gods are unusual among the Warli and are frequently related to spirits which have taken human shape. The central motif in these ritual paintings is surrounded by scenes portraying hunting, fishing and farming, festivals and dances, trees and animals. Human and animal bodies are represented by two triangles joined at the tip; the upper triangle depicts the trunk and the lower triangle the pelvis. Their precarious equilibrium symbolizes the balance of the universe, and of the couple, and has the practical and amusing advantage of animating the bodies.
The pared down pictorial language is matched by a rudimentary technique. The ritual paintings are usually done inside the huts. The walls are made of a mixture of branches, earth and cow dung, making a red ochre background for the wall paintings. The Warli use only white for their paintings. Their white pigment is a mixture of rice paste and water with gum as a binding. They use a bamboo stick chewed at the end to make it as supple as a paintbrush. The wall paintings are done only for special occasions such as weddings or harvests. The lack of regular artistic activity explains the very crude style of their paintings, which were the preserve of the womenfolk until the late 1970s. But in the 1970s this ritual art took a radical turn, when Jivya Soma Mashe started to paint, not for any special ritual, but because of his artistic pursuits.
The Warli culture portrays one of the best examples of man - environment interaction. Their indigenous practices are proof of how the tribals, though illiterate, had the mechanism to preserve the environment.
Life of the Warlis begins with the cradle ceremony by which a child is admitted into the tribe. The next is the lagin (initiation into adulthood with marriage); and the third is the maran and the dis (rites of death and ancestor-ship). The fourth is the zoli ceremony which has two parts: 'empowering' the child to face life in the forest and introducing the child to the community, which is the basis of Warli life.
The Warlis are simple people with simple beliefs. According to art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, an expert on tribal anthropology, the Warlis are frugal in their habit and speech. So, before cooking supper, a Warli woman asks her family members how many bhakris each one of them would eat and makes only that many. This is done every day because their values are that, the bhakris are cooked on the back of Kansaari (their Goddesss of Harvest) and they don't want to give her more pain than what's absolutely necessary.
Warlis speaks very little, almost in monosyllables. That's because they believe that words have an uncanny habit of becoming real. So, they ensure they don't speak anything, lest it comes true.
Nature is considered as mother by the Warlis. It is central to all their customs and traditions. The midwife gives a newborn male an axe and a female a sickle - the two tools necessary to access the bounties of nature. She tells the child not to fear the tiger or the bear or any wild animal; and not to flee from the 'forces of nature'. He should live in harmony with them.
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