Pichwai art, handmade to order

What Pichwai depicts

Traditional Pichwai panels change with the festival calendar. Each one shows scenes from the life of Krishna as Shrinathji — the lotus pond, the cows of Vrindavan, Annakut with its mountain of food offerings, Sharad Purnima under a full moon.

The recurring elements are lotuses, cows, peacocks and decorated elephants, usually arranged with strict symmetry around a central figure or arch. It is a devotional art form first, which is why the compositions are so ordered.

How mine are made

The classical work is painted on cloth with natural pigments and real gold. What I make is a hand-painted panel in an arched jharokha form, with mirror work set into the surface and gold detailing on the motifs.

The arched top is deliberate — it echoes the temple niche the original panels hung in, and it frames the subject the way the tradition intends.

Reading the elements

The cows are the place to start. Shrinathji is Krishna as a seven-year-old cowherd, and the cows in a Pichwai are not background. They are the devotees. Painted in rows facing the central figure, often with decorated horns and painted flanks, they are the composition telling you who this deity is before you read anything else in it.

Lotuses do the same work differently. A pond of them across the lower third of a panel places the scene, and the open flower is the standard image of purity in almost every Indian tradition, so it carries without explanation.

Peacocks appear for the monsoon and for Krishna himself, who wears a peacock feather. A panel heavy with peacocks is usually a monsoon panel.

The elephants are the formal element. They turn up in the processional panels, caparisoned and symmetrical, and they are the signal that a piece is depicting an occasion rather than a pastoral scene.

The arch at the top is the one people read as decoration and it is not. It is the temple niche the original cloth hung in, reproduced in paint so the panel carries its own setting with it.

Gopis, the cowherd women, appear around the central figure in the fuller compositions. Their number and arrangement is where a painter has most freedom, and it is usually where you can tell two versions of the same subject apart.

The calendar it follows

A temple does not hang the same painting all year. At Nathdwara the pichwai behind the idol is changed through the year to match the season and the festival, which is the single thing that most distinguishes this tradition from the other Indian painting schools. The painting is liturgical furniture rather than a fixed artwork.

Annakut, the day after Diwali, gets the most elaborate of them. The subject is a mountain of food offered to the deity, and the panels are dense, crowded and deliberately excessive, because excess is the point of the festival.

Sharad Purnima, the autumn full moon, goes the other way. Those panels are usually white and silver on a dark ground, with the moon as the brightest thing in the composition and the raas leela dance arranged around it. They are the quietest Pichwais made.

Janmashtami brings the birth scenes, and Holi brings colour thrown across the whole panel, with the figures loosely placed and the symmetry relaxed.

Summer panels tend to show water, fountains and gardens, for the obvious reason.

None of this constrains what you can have on a wall at home, and most people choose on colour and subject rather than season. It is worth knowing because it explains why Pichwai compositions vary so much more than Madhubani or Lippan do. They were made for different days of the year.

Why the originals were cloth

Cloth was a practical choice before it was a traditional one. A painting that gets swapped out a dozen times a year has to come down, roll up and go into storage without damage, and then hang flat again. Starched cotton does that. A rigid panel does not.

It also had to be large. A pichwai hung behind an idol in a temple hall is sized for that hall, which puts the classical pieces well beyond anything that fits a home.

What I make keeps the composition and the arch and moves it onto board, because a piece that lives on one wall in a flat has the opposite requirement. It needs to stay flat, carry relief and mirror work that cloth could not support, and survive being dusted rather than rolled.

The trade is honest to state. You lose the drape and the scale of the original. You gain depth, mirrors that catch light, and something sized for the wall you actually have.

Where it works in a home

Pooja rooms and prayer corners, which is the closest use to its origin. Entrance walls, where the symmetry and the gold do their work. Above a console or sideboard, where the panel has something to sit against.

Because the compositions are symmetrical, a Pichwai panel usually wants to be the single focal point of a wall rather than one of a cluster.

Questions before ordering