Handcrafted Makrana White Marble Radha Krishna with Peacock on Lotus Base, 18-inch

Makrana marble comes out of the Nagaur district of Rajasthan, where the same quarries have been worked since long before the Taj Mahal was faced with it. The stone is dense and fine-grained, which is why it holds a crisp edge on small detail — the eye of a peacock feather, the bead of a garland, the reed line along a flute. On this 18-inch Radha Krishna, that closeness of grain is what lets the fanned tail read as a hundred separate feathers rather than one carved mass. Each piece is carved to order by the master sculptors we work with in and around Jaipur, and we stay with it from the first drawing to the day it reaches your door. Work moves from a rough block to primary massing, then to detail — the crowns, the jewellery, the folds of Radha's sari — before the surface is taken up through progressive hand-polishing to a soft satin. Faces, hands and drapery are always finished by hand; no machine gets near them. The jugal jodi is the paired form of Radha and Krishna worshipped across Braj. Krishna stands in tribhanga, the three-bend stance, flute lifted; Radha rests at his left. Behind them a peacock — the bird of Vrindavan, and the source of the feather in Krishna's crown — spreads its tail into what works as a prabhavali, the arched aureole usually carved as a separate frame. Here the halo is the bird, which keeps the outline of the piece whole rather than boxed in. At 18 inches the pair sits on a pooja shelf or inside a home mandir without crowding the lamps and the thali around it. The lotus base lifts the figures clear of the shelf surface, so the faces still read from a seated position during aarti. Allow roughly 13 inches of width for the base, and leave the back open — the peacock tail is carved through and deserves a little depth behind it. The same composition can be made in Vietnam white marble or black stone, at other heights, or with a gold-leaf highlight on the crowns and jewellery. Send us the shelf dimensions you are working with and we will size it to the space.