Handcrafted Hand-Painted Marble Dust Khatu Shyam Ji Darbar Murti, 9in

The darbar form at altar scale

Shyam Baba stands in darbar darshan, his right hand raised in ashirwad and his left lowered open at his side — exactly two arms, as the Khatu tradition holds him, and the youthful beardless face of Barbarika under a jewelled mukut topped by a single peacock plume. Carved marigold-and-leaf garlands fall from the neck almost to the knee, and the dhoti is worked in the saffron and green of a Khatu shringar. Nothing about the form is reinterpreted: the piece follows the darshan a devotee already knows from the Shri Shyam Mandir at Khatu, in Sikar district.

Hand-painted polychrome over cast marble dust

The murti is cast in marble dust — crushed marble bound and cured — then finished and painted by hand. Polychrome is the substance of this piece, not a surface extra: warm fair skin tones, black hair, a vermilion tilak, and gold laid into the mukut, the earrings, the necklace, the armlets and the waistband. The moulded lotus plinth is deliberately left unpainted, so the natural cream of the cast stone reads plainly beneath the figure and steadies all that colour. Marble dust holds fine detail cleanly and keeps a nine-inch murti at roughly 1.5 kg, light enough to lift onto a shelf one-handed.

Where it sits, and how to keep it

Nine inches is altar scale — a murti for the daily home shrine rather than a temple hall, and one that travels well as a gift for a griha pravesh, a Shyam jagran, or Phalgun Ekadashi when the Khatu Lakhi mela draws its lakhs. Keep it elevated on a chowki or altar shelf at roughly chest height, the diya in front of it and nothing stacked above the crown. A soft dry cloth is all the painted surface needs; household cleaners dull gold detailing over time, so leave them out of the mandir.

Commissioning yours

Tell us the form, the stone and the size, and we design the piece with you, brief the sculptor in Jaipur, and follow it through to your door. A fresh commission is carved and painted to your brief over eight to twelve weeks. If your date is tighter than that, ask us — a finished piece may already exist with one of the artist families we work with, and we will send you photographs of that actual murti before you decide anything. Height, the depth of the shringar and the plinth profile are all adjustable, and the same iconography scales up into Makrana or Vietnam white marble.