Makrana White Marble Mahavir Swami Murti, 15in

The stone

This murti is cut from Makrana white marble, quarried in Rajasthan's Nagaur district about 350 kilometres from Jaipur. It is the stone Jain temple-builders have returned to for centuries (the shrines at Dilwara on Mount Abu and the Chaumukha temple at Ranakpur are both worked in it), and the reason is physical rather than sentimental. Makrana is dense, calcite-rich and very low in porosity, so it takes a crisp edge without chipping and holds a satin polish for decades of daily abhishek and dhoop without going dull or yellow. Light travels a short way into the surface before it returns, which is what gives a Jina's face its quiet inner glow in lamplight.

How the murti is made

We design the piece with you, brief it, and stay with it until it reaches your derasar; the carving is done by the master sculptors we work with in Jaipur, who carve Tirthankar murtis to Shvetambar convention as routine work. A block is squared and roughed to the seated silhouette, the lotus cushion and the stepped pedestal are blocked in, and only then does detail work begin. The face, the stacked palms, the kandora waistband and the lion on the pedestal are cut entirely by hand, with no machine on them, and the surface is brought up through progressively finer abrasives to a soft satin polish that reads warm rather than glassy.

Reading the iconography

This is Bhagwan Mahavir in the Shvetambar Murtipujak convention: seated in padmasana on a lotus cushion, palms stacked flat in the lap, right over left, in dhyana. The srivatsa is carved on the chest and the gaze is lowered to the nose-tip: nasagradrishti, the sign of a soul turned inward. A kandora waistband sits above the pleated kachota, the elongated earlobes are cut deep, and a plain arched stele rises behind the shoulders. What names him is the lanchhana on the pedestal: the lion, which belongs to Mahavir alone among the twenty-four. Nothing here is decorative licence. A Tirthankar murti is iconographically fixed, and that is the point of it.

Where a 15-inch murti sits

Fifteen inches is a home scale. It is the size that works as the mulnayak of a domestic derasar or on the upper tier of a pooja room shrine, where it is seen at seated eye level from a foot or two away and the srivatsa and the lion stay legible. Allow roughly twenty inches of clear width and a foot of depth for the pedestal and for a thali of offerings in front. A pale wall or a simple wooden ghar-mandir behind it suits the stone better than a patterned backdrop, which competes with the carving.

Making it yours

The same murti can be commissioned larger for a community derasar, cut in black stone or Vietnam white instead, given a full parikar with the toran arch and attendant figures, or set on a taller stepped singhasan. Tell us the height of your shrine and the day you would like it installed by. A murti at this scale takes eight to twelve weeks from the day the drawing is approved, plus crating and transit.