Behind the image of the god hangs a cloth — and in the temple town of Nathdwara, that cloth is one of the great painted textiles of India, changed with every season and festival, painted in ground stone and real gold as an act of worship.
✨ Fun fact: The word pichwai means, quite simply, “that which hangs at the back.” It is named not for what it shows but for where it hangs — behind the idol of Shrinathji — and it is swapped for a different cloth as the festival calendar turns, so the backdrop of the god is never the same for long.
The god, and his backdrop
The tradition belongs to the Pushtimarg, the devotional sect founded by the philosopher Vallabhacharya in the sixteenth century, whose beloved form of Krishna is Shrinathji — the god as a seven-year-old boy, his left hand raised above his head in the act of lifting Mount Govardhan to shelter his people from the storm. His home is the temple at Nathdwara, near Udaipur in Rajasthan, and there Shrinathji is not so much worshipped as served: dressed, fed, sung to, and shown to his devotees eight times a day.
The pichwai is part of that service. Hung behind the deity, six or eight feet of starched cotton painted with Shrinathji’s world — lotus pools, mango groves, dancing peacocks, gopis in flared skirts, cows with red-printed flanks — it sets the scene for each darshan. And because the temple keeps different pichwais for Janmashtami, for the monsoon full moon of Sharad Purnima, for the autumn feast of Annakut, the cloth behind the god changes through the year like a turning stage set. The textile is not decoration. It is a participant in the worship.
Stone, and gold
A pichwai is painted on cotton prepared and starched to take the colour, and the colours are the old mineral ones — ground stone and shell — laid on in the miniature manner but across an enormous surface. And crucially, for us: the finest are heightened with tin and real gold. Gold laid onto cloth by hand, to honour the divine, is precisely the impulse behind our own zari — whether the gold is painted onto the surface, as here, or woven into it, as in a Banarasi. Two techniques, one devotion to the gleam of gold on cloth.
Painting as service
The pichwai painters — chitrakars whose families migrated to Nathdwara from Kota and Kishangarh — treat the work itself as seva, service. The paintings are, characteristically, unsigned: the point was never the artist’s name but the god’s glory. It is the same humility we find in the anonymous weavers of a great Banarasi, or the bride who wove a Turkmen dowry — the maker disappearing into the made.
And the craft was never only painted. Pichwais were also woven, embroidered and block-printed; the tradition reaches into the Deccan, to Machilipatnam, the very home of the painted cottons we describe in Kalamkari. Painted cloth for the gods, it turns out, is a thread that runs the length of India.
The thread we love
A cloth made to stand behind a god, painted in ground stone and real gold, changed with the seasons, and made as an act of devotion by artists who never signed their names — the pichwai gathers together almost everything we believe about cloth: that it can be sacred, that it can hold gold, and that the finest of it is made in a spirit of service. That is the spirit we bring to a Banarasi. Explore our handwoven Brocade Fabric collection, or read how we set gold into cloth in What Is Zari?
Frequently asked questions
What is a pichwai?
A large devotional cloth, usually painted, hung behind the image of Krishna as Shrinathji in the Pushtimarg tradition, especially at Nathdwara in Rajasthan. The word means “that which hangs at the back.”
What is depicted on a pichwai?
Shrinathji and the world around him — lotuses, cows, gopis, peacocks, mango trees — and scenes tied to particular festivals and seasons, such as Janmashtami, Sharad Purnima and Annakut.
How is a pichwai made?
Traditionally painted on starched cotton in mineral “stone” colours, in a miniature style scaled up to six or eight feet, and often heightened with tin and gold. Pichwais were also woven, embroidered and block-printed.
Why are pichwais usually unsigned?
Because for the chitrakars of Nathdwara, painting a pichwai is an act of service (seva) to the deity rather than a display of individual authorship.
Sources & further reading
On pichwai and the Pushtimarg tradition, see the collections of the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Art & Photography (Bengaluru), and Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: kalamkari · Pattachitra · what is zari · Madhubani.
