Hand-Painted Makrana White Marble Neem Karoli Baba Darshan Murti 18in

The stone

Makrana white marble comes out of the quarries in Nagaur district, Rajasthan — the same beds that supplied the Taj Mahal, and still worked today about four hours by road from our Jaipur workshop. It is a dense, close-grained calcite stone with a slightly warm neutral white body and fine grey hairline veining, and it takes a soft satin polish without ever going glassy. That restraint matters on a figure like this one, where the light has to travel across a bald head, a heavy shoulder line and the deep folds of a wrapped blanket rather than skid off them. The block is chosen for even colour right through the section, so the exposed skin, the dhoti and the plinth all read as one piece of stone instead of a patchwork. Makrana is also why an 18-inch murti of this weight survives decades of daily handling and washing without chipping at the edges.

Maharajji as this murti shows him

Neem Karoli Baba — Maharajji to the devotees who filled Kainchi Dham in the Kumaon hills above Nainital — is carved here in the quiet darshan form: seated cross-legged in relaxed sukhasana on a plain rectangular plinth, both hands resting open in the lap, bare feet forward. The head is bare and bald, the beard short and trimmed, the build stout and unidealised, the expression elderly, warm and faintly amused. Every one of those choices is deliberate. He is not shown in padmasana, never with a turban or head cloth, never in a monastic or saffron robe, and never as a lean ascetic — those small departures are exactly what turn a Maharajji murti into somebody else. The face is hand-finished last and never machine-worked, because it is the part a devotee looks at first and longest.

The hand-painted blanket

He is Blanket Baba, and the chequered plaid he wore over both shoulders is as much his identity as the face is. On this piece the blanket alone carries colour — a woven check in blue, rust and cream, hand-painted over the carved folds so the pattern breaks across each ridge the way real cloth does. The white dhoti beneath it and the plinth below are left as bare Makrana marble, which keeps the colour in one place and lets the stone do the rest. Pigment goes on after the carving is finished and polished, over a sealed surface, and is protected afterwards, so it will not lift with routine dusting. Wipe it down with a soft dry cloth, and keep oil lamps far enough back that soot does not settle into the painted squares.

Sizing it for your pooja room

At 18 inches tall, roughly 9 inches across and about 13 kg, this is a murti sized for a household pooja shelf or the middle tier of a home mandir rather than a floor installation. Allow around 10 inches of shelf depth and a clear 24 inches of height above the plinth so there is air over the head — a seated figure this stout reads cramped the moment it is boxed in. Devotees usually place him facing into the room, at or slightly below eye level when they are seated, with padukas or an offering plate on the step below. If your niche is shallower or taller than that, the same form is carved to order at other heights, in plain white marble without the painted blanket, or seated on a carved takhat bench base.