Vietnam White Marble Standing Sai Baba with Raised Hand, 36 in

Vietnam white marble comes out of the Thanh Hoa quarries with a bright, even, faintly cool white — closer to porcelain than to the warm cream of Makrana — and it carries a fine crystalline grain that takes detail cleanly. On a figure like Sai Baba, where almost everything is drapery, that matters: the long vertical folds of the kafni read as separate planes of light instead of dissolving into one bright mass. Worked at 36 inches, the murti is tall enough for the face to sit close to eye level once it stands on a low plinth. Carving is done for you by the master sculptors we work with in Jaipur, artist families who have shaped devotional stone for generations. The block is roughed out, the standing proportion set, and then the work slows right down — the knotted head cloth, the trailing end over the left shoulder, the fingers of the raised hand, the toes at the hem. Faces and hands are never left to a machine; they are cut and finished by hand, then brought to a soft satin polish that keeps the grain readable rather than glassy. We design the piece with you, brief the sculptor, and follow it through to delivery at your door. Shirdi Sai Baba is most often shown seated on a stone slab in the Dwarkamai, one leg crossed over the other. The standing form is the less common counterpart and reads differently: the raised right palm is abhaya, the gesture of reassurance, and the figure addresses whoever walks in rather than waiting to receive them. The full-sleeved ankle-length kafni, the wrapped head cloth knotted with its loose end over the left shoulder, the bare feet — these are the fixed markers of the Shirdi tradition, and they are what hold the murti to Sai Baba rather than to a generic ascetic figure. An upright 36-inch figure suits a threshold — an entrance alcove, the front bay of a Sai mandir hall, or a landing where a seated murti would sit too low to be read. Allow roughly 18 inches of clear width and a backdrop of about five feet so the raised hand has room above it. The plinth should lift the base a few inches clear of the floor; devotees garland the plinth rather than the figure, so leave a hand's width of clearance all around it. Height, stone and plinth are all open. The same standing form is regularly made in Makrana white marble or black stone, at anything from a 24-inch altar scale up to a five-foot hall murti, with a moulded or lotus plinth in place of the plain round base. Message us on WhatsApp with the space you have in mind and we will work the proportions back from it.