It sat in a small tin box on your grandmother’s dressing table. A wheel of colour, punching out dots on your forehead. There was a particular pleasure in a kumkum box. The round ones, some aluminium, some plastic, some steel, held rows of stamped designs like flowers, moons, the occasional snake. And you pressed the chosen shape into the pigment and then onto your forehead.
Priyadarshini N (she/they), an artist, remembers the box on her grandmother’s wall-mounted vanity, a small hanging cupboard in the corridor. “The colours were so cool to the feel each time they touched the space between my eyebrows,” she says. They began wearing bindis simply because they watched their mother and grandmother do it first. Rona Theresa, an actor describes putting two white dots at the ends of her eyebrows when she was just a kid. “I was inspired by the Kolkata weddings where the eyebrows are dotted with bindi. I used to press the colour wheel on so many times, just layering the dots,” she says.
City-based professional, Sai Sahana traces her earliest memory of the box, not to a woman in the house but to her grandfather. He was the one who combed her hair, smoothed Nivea moisturiser onto her skin, and set her bindi before school each morning. Sriprada Muralikrishnan, founder of Karpanai Foundation, remembers her sister commandeering the full round of colourful bindis the moment the box arrived home, drawing a cascade of dots above her eyebrows to resemble Radha. “We’d get dressed and roam around like Radha,” she says.
These are the memories that surface when you ask Chennaiites about their earliest encounters with the bindi. Harper’s Bazaar India reported in 2026 that the year is shaping up as the year of bindis, bangles, and Indian baddies. The magazine traced how the #ReclaimTheBindi movement emerged as a direct response to cultural commodification, with South Asian women photographing themselves wearing bindis alongside accounts of the shame they had internalised. The resurgence has moved loudest on Instagram and TikTok, where a maximalist aesthetic has brought traditional Indian adornment back into everyday styling. To understand why a small dot can carry that much weight, you need to go back to where it began.
The dot between the brows: The bindi gets its name from the Sanskrit word ‘bindu’, meaning a point or drop. The word appears in the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda, where bindu is described as the point at which creation begins. Archaeological evidence from the Indus Valley Civilisation, dated between 3300 BCE and 1300 BCE, suggests that both men and women applied forehead markings for religious rituals and social distinction. The practice spread beyond South Asia. According to global websites, similar forehead markings appear in Bali, Java, and other parts of Indonesia, worn by brides and grooms regardless of religious belief. The ancient Chinese adopted comparable marks for decorative purposes from the 2nd century CE, a tradition that became particularly fashionable during the Tang dynasty.
Evolution
By the time stickers arrived in the 1990s, the round rubber stamp had mostly retired. Bindis became adhesive, and bejewelled. They came in packets of hundreds. Pavithra Velusamy recalls, “I’ve always loved colourful bindis. I don’t even remember what inspired me, but as a kid I used to put tiny colourful dots above my eyebrows all the way till the end. It made me feel so beautiful”
As years passed, that love slowly faded. She adds, “In college, I rarely wore bindis because it felt more fashionable not to. But now, I’ve fallen in love with them again. A bindi, especially a big one, adds such a soft, feminine touch.”
The caste question: The male equivalent of bindi, tilak, carried caste markings in ancient practice. The Vedic Tribe explains that in the Varna system, Brahmins wore white sandalwood tilak signifying purity, Kshatriyas wore red signifying valour, Vaishyas wore yellow signifying prosperity, and Shudras wore black. The Madras Courier has argued that bindi, like other religious symbols, remains rooted in a history of caste oppression. Scholars at Round Table India have noted that within feminist discourse, Dalit and Christian women who wear traditional adornments are often perceived as less politically conscious, a framing that places upper-caste aesthetic choices at the centre of feminist legitimacy. Pew Research Centre’s 2021 survey of religion in India found that 84% of Hindu women and 78% Buddhist women report wearing a bindi, but so do 22% of Christian women and 18% of Muslim women. In eastern India, the figure rises to 31% across communities, reflecting regional cultural fusion. The bindi, in practice, has always moved across religious lines.
That drift from childhood enthusiasm to adolescent hesitation and back describes an arc many women recognise. Along the way, the bindi accumulated questions that had nothing to do with the object itself, but what people say it symbolises.
Sai Sahana learnt about the entanglement of the bindi with identity politics from her relatives. She had started wearing a smaller one as she grew older. “People would bring culture and caste into it. They would say, are you a Christian? Are you a Muslim? Are you trying to convert? Why are you keeping a small bindi? You should keep a big one. This is our Hindu culture,” she says. She then stopped wearing bindis entirely for a while. She has since returned to them, slowly, on her own terms.
The red bindi and the marriage question: The red bindi has functioned historically as a marker of marital status across many Hindu communities. However, a 2026 academic study published on Zenodo titled ‘Compression, Not Continuity: Bindi, Sindoor, and the Historical Construction of Hindu Marital Symbolism’, challenges how far back this association actually goes. The study argues, through analysis of colonial-era legal records and pre-colonial material culture, that Anglo-Hindu law does not codify any visual marker, including the bindi or sindoor, as a legal requirement of marriage. The study’s authors contend that the apparent universality of these symbols as marriage markers emerged only in the late colonial and post-colonial periods, driven by print culture, visual media, and nationalist discourse.
Parvathy, an illustrator, recalls the aluminium stamps she played with as a child from her mother’s collection. “A friend visited Rajasthan in 2017 and got me stamps and pigments. I used them for a while. Just a few days ago, I saw a reel of a merchant going around the streets, stamping people’s hands. I really want to get one again. I just want the pigment to not stain my face.”
She has been thinking about making her own line of bindis. “India needs to experiment with the bindi. I see more decorative and visual bindis, but I am not seeing anything that experiments with identity or actually displays something the wearer wants to say. I have always wanted to do type-based bindis, sayings, icons, smileys. A poop bindi, just to communicate a mood. People in the mainstream are not quirky enough for it yet, but design students and art people would enjoy it. The problem is finding a vendor who makes bindis in small custom batches. That process is still not transparent in India, and that is the problem,” she says.
Regional variations: The bindi takes different shapes depending on where in India you stand. In Maharashtra, the large crescent moon-shaped bindi, called chandrakor, is worn with a smaller dot above or below. It is associated with the chandrabindu and the bindu chakra, represented by the crescent moon. In Bengal, a large round red bindi is standard, and brides are decorated with alpana designs on the forehead and cheeks. In South India, a smaller red bindi is worn with a white tilak at the bottom, and the bindi is more commonly referred to as pottu or tilak. Tribal communities often use bindis made from natural dyes, reflecting a connection to the land.
Divya Ravi, a production analyst at NatWest Group, describes the keychain of stamps her family owned, the different metals, the kajal or chandhu pressed into them and then onto the forehead. “It hardly lasts half-a-day,” she says. She has moved through liquid bindi, then stickers, then stone ones. She now wants to go back to the stamps with kajal.
Icons who inspire
The pop stage has lately become a site where bindi travels furthest. KATSEYE member Lara Raj opened up about how wearing a bindi helps reclaim her cultural identity. Lara, who was mocked for wearing a bindi as a child, wanted to change that mindset.
At the Indian Sneakers Festival in Mumbai in December 2025, Grammy-winning South African singer Tyla, who has Indian, Zulu, Mauritian, and Irish ancestry, performed with a bindi on her forehead, styled with the help of fashion designer Nancy Tyagi, and greeted the crowd with “Namaste, Mumbai.” No one has worn the bindi longer, or more visibly, than singer Usha Uthup. When she walked into a Chennai nightclub in 1969 wearing a sari and a chandu pottu instead of the standard black dress, she was already making a statement. She has not walked back in over five decades. Her bindi always matched her sari.
From kutti shops to The Bindi Project, pottus come in every form — black circles ascending in size, red rows rimmed in gold, stone-set shapes catching tube light. The choice of how, when, and whether to wear one has always belonged to the keeper. The new trend simply confirms it.