From Temple Wall to Living Room

Posted on

By Dhanya

11 min read

Add as a preferred source on Google

Using this Article for Research?

Summarize with AI

Introduction

Picture the same story in two very different places. In the first, Krishna is painted on the plastered wall of a temple in Kerala, seen by lamplight by people walking past on a festival evening. In the second, the same Krishna, in the same jade green and with the same bold outline, hangs above a sofa in an apartment in Chennai, Singapore, or Delhi. For most of history, that second scene would have been unthinkable. The art belonged to a wall, and the wall belonged to a place.

Many of India's most distinctive traditional art forms began this way. They were not made to be bought, framed or moved. Kerala murals covered temple and palace walls. Saura Idital painting lived inside village homes and served a single ritual. Mysore rosewood inlay decorated palace doors, and Tholu Bommalata puppets were made to glow for one night behind a lit screen. Today, all of them travel. This is the story of how sacred and ceremonial art left the wall, and what it carried with it.

Krishna and Kuchela In Kerala Mural By Jijulal

When Art Was Architecture

Walls, Homes and Palaces

Kerala mural painting is the clearest example of art built into a building. For centuries, its bold-outlined figures and panchavarna palette were painted directly onto the lime-plastered walls of temples, palaces and churches, where they could not be taken down or carried away. A viewer experienced them by walking through a space, moving from panel to panel, much as one might move through the chapters of a story.

Saura painting, from southern Odisha, was even more closely tied to place. An Idital is painted on the interior clay wall of a Lanjia Saura home, often in a quiet or darker corner, because it was never meant to be displayed. It is made for a specific purpose, such as healing, honouring ancestors, or marking a harvest, and is treated as a dwelling place for ancestral spirits and deities. Once its purpose is served, it stays on the wall until weather and time wear it away. In that tradition, impermanence is part of the meaning rather than a flaw.

Mysore rosewood inlay began in a different setting again: the royal court. Its finest early showcase is the carved and inlaid rosewood of the Mysore Palace, where doors such as those in the Amba Vilas Hall carry the craft of the Wadiyar era.

Art Made for a Single Night

Tholu Bommalata is a reminder that art does not always live on a wall. Its large, translucent leather puppets were made for performance, brought to life behind a backlit screen, often across an entire night at a festival such as Shivaratri. The puppet and the performance were inseparable: the object existed to be animated, and the show traditionally ended at dawn.

Kathakali In Kerala Mural By Jijulal

In each of these traditions, the art belonged to an occasion or a location. Understanding that original setting is what makes the modern journey so interesting.

The Turning Point

Documentation and Recognition

The first shift came from outside the communities. Saura painting, for example, was documented in the twentieth century by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, whose studies of Saura religion and art introduced Idital painting to scholars and museums. As interest in India's indigenous art grew, Saura artists began adapting the visual language of their ritual wall paintings to paper, cloth, and canvas. Works that had once existed only inside village homes could travel for the first time. Our guide to Saura art tells this story in more depth.

Changing Patronage

The second shift was economic. Kerala's mural tradition flourished under strong royal and temple patronage between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. As that patronage faded under colonial rule, the labour-intensive craft came under pressure, and its revival after independence depended on institutions such as the Guruvayur Devaswom Board's Centre for the Study of Mural Paintings, the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady, and the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi.

Tholu Bommalata followed a similar path. Its peak came under the Vijayanagara Empire, and once that patronage ended, puppeteer families increasingly turned to other work. As cinema and television reduced the demand for all-night village performances, many families adapted the same skills into standalone leather artworks that could be displayed rather than performed.

Changing Homes

The third shift was in the buildings themselves. Traditional Idital paintings were made on mud-plastered walls. As villages moved towards brick and concrete homes, the surface that had supported the ritual began to disappear. Painting on paper, cloth, and canvas offered a way to keep the visual tradition going while the original setting changed. In many Lanjia Saura villages, ritual idols are still painted today, and the two forms of the tradition now exist side by side.

Life of Saura: Through Brushes and Strokes Pattachitra painting by Purusottam Swain

What Travels and What Stays

Technique and Iconography

When an art form changes its surface, the natural question is what is lost. In the traditions above, remarkably little. A contemporary Kerala mural still follows the same sequence of stages: a light sketch, confident outlines, flat colour applied from light to dark, stippled shading and a final black line. The figures still follow the iconography described in the Dhyana Slokas, and the colours still carry their meaning, with green for the noble and divine and warm reds and yellows for power and energy.

Saura artists retain their symbolic vocabulary too, including the sun and moon, the tree of life, and simple, gender-neutral stick figures set in scenes of daily and ritual life. Tholu Bommalata artists continue to treat and cut hide by hand, paint with the same conventions, and perforate the surface so that light passes through in fine detail. The subject, the discipline and the symbolism all travel intact.

A New Surface: Canvas and Acrylic

What does change is the surface, and this has been a gift to the craft. Acrylic on canvas preserves the same layered process while offering rich colour vibrancy, excellent durability and a finish that holds up for years without the specialised upkeep a wall painting needs. It also makes the art far easier to own: a collector no longer has to commission wall work or travel to a temple to live with a Kerala mural. This combination of authenticity and practicality is a large part of why acrylic Kerala murals are among the most loved pieces in our collection. If you would like to try the method yourself, our step-by-step guide to Kerala mural painting on canvas walks you through it.

Radha Krishna Kerala Mural Painting by Adarsh

New Formats, New Homes

Light, Wood and Leather

Once the surface is free to change, so is the format. Tholu Bommalata is a good example. The craft was built around light, and artist Sindhe Sriramulu has brought that light back into the home in the form of hand-painted lampshades, including designs of Radha and Krishna, peacocks and elephants among floral vines. The glow that once came from a lamp behind a screen now comes from a bulb inside a lampshade, but the leatherwork is unchanged. Alongside these, Sindhe Siva's individual characters and Kanday Anjanappa's large narrative panels show the same technique on flat artworks. You can browse the full range in the Tholu Bommalata collection.

Mysore rosewood inlay has made a similar journey. What was once palace furniture and doors now appears as wall panels, including artist Mohan Kumar's sculptural Gita Updesha, with its Mahabharata chariot scene, and quieter compositions such as Rural Landscape. Every piece still relies on nothing but the grain and tone of different woods.

Gita Updesha in Wood Inlay 3D panel by Mohan Kumar

Learning the Craft at Home

Living with a piece is one way to connect with a tradition. Learning a little of the craft is another. Kanday Anjanappa's Tholu Bommalata masterclass kit lets owners try a simplified version of the leather-puppet process themselves, which turns an object on a wall into an understanding of how it was made.

The New Temple Wall: Public Installations

If the wall was the original setting, then the atrium and the airport terminal are its modern counterparts. In these public spaces, thousands of people walk past a story every day, much as devotees once moved along a temple wall.

MeMeraki's Tholu Bommalata work has taken this idea to a large scale. The first installation, Airavas: Airavata and Uchchaihshravas in Telangana's Ecology, was created for the Domestic Departures terminal of GMR Hyderabad Airport. Led by master artist Kanday Anjanappa with artisans, woodworkers, and craftsmen from the region, it places the mythical elephant and horse from the Samudra Manthan alongside the native flora and fauna of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The second, Illuminating Diwali, was installed at DLF Promenade in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, for Diwali 2025. A cluster of glowing cuboidal lamps, each hand-painted in Tholu Bommalata style, narrated episodes from the Ramayana, the Krishna Leelas and the story of Nav Durga, and remained on display from the beginning of Navratri to the end of Diwali. The third large-scale installation is now at GMR Visakhapatnam Airport.

The same idea has travelled abroad. For the Indian Heritage Centre in Singapore's 2024 Deepavali celebrations, MeMeraki worked with Kanday Anjanappa on Puppet Tales, Story of Light, a shadow puppet show and installation that ran for four weeks and was seen by thousands of children and visitors. Kerala mural has gone global too: artist Adarsh Appukkuttan created a large-scale Kerala mural for the fifth edition of Kathaa in Hong Kong, translating the classical vocabulary into a monumental public artwork.

In each case, a craft that began on a temple wall, a village home, or a village screen now meets audiences it could never have reached before.

The Heroic Deeds of Lord Vishnu and his incarnations: A Masterpiece in Tholu Bommalata by Kanday Anjanappa

Bringing Sacred Art Home

If you are thinking of bringing a piece of this heritage into your own space, a few simple ideas can help.

Start with the story: Choose a subject that speaks to you, whether that is a favourite episode of the Ramayana, a Krishna Leela or a Saura scene of village life, and take a moment to learn what the figures and symbols mean. The more you know, the more the piece gives back.

Think about scale and palette: A large panel can anchor a wall, while a lampshade or smaller piece can bring the same tradition into a corner of a room. Kerala murals, with their saturated reds, greens and golds, tend to make a strong statement, whereas Saura art and inlay work often suit quieter, earthier spaces.

Choose a place that feels right: Many people hang devotional pieces in prayer spaces, while others display them as art in living rooms, entrances or studies. There is no single right answer, and many families follow their own customs about where and how to place sacred images.

Look for authenticity: A handmade piece carries the marks of the artist: slight variations in line, hand-cut edges, the texture of real paint or hide. Ask who made it and how, and look for a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Buying directly from platforms that work with the artists also means your purchase supports the families and communities who keep these traditions alive.

Conclusion

The wall changed, but the craft did not. A Kerala mural on canvas is still built stage by stage, a Saura painting on paper still speaks in the same symbols, and a rosewood inlay panel still turns wood grain into a picture. What began as architecture, ritual, and performance has found new homes, and in doing so has reached more people than any temple wall could. A piece in your home is not just decoration. It continues a chain of hands that stretches back centuries.

References

FAQs

Q1. Is it appropriate to hang religious folk art in a living room?

Yes. Many of these art forms began as devotional or ritual art, and today artists create canvas and panel versions specifically for homes. Some owners place them in prayer spaces, and others display them as art, and many families follow their own customs about where and how to hang sacred images.

Q2. Do canvas versions keep the same technique as the original wall paintings?

In the traditions covered here, largely yes. A contemporary Kerala mural follows the same stages of sketching, outlining, colour application, shading, and final outlining, while Saura and Tholu Bommalata artists keep their symbolic vocabulary and hand techniques. What changes is the surface and, often, the pigment.

Q3. Why did these art forms move from walls to canvas and paper?

There were several reasons: outside documentation and growing interest in indigenous art, the decline of royal and temple patronage, changes in performance economies, and the shift from mud houses to brick and concrete homes. Portable formats let artists continue their craft and reach new audiences.

Q4. How can I tell an authentic handmade piece from a print?

Look for small variations in line and texture, the feel of real paint, hide, or wood, and details such as hand perforation or hand-cut inlay. Ask for the artist's name and a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, and buy from sources that work directly with the artists.

Q5. Which art forms on MeMeraki began as ritual or temple art?

Kerala mural painting began on temple and palace walls, Saura painting as ritual wall art inside village homes, Tholu Bommalata as festival performance theatre, and Mysore rosewood inlay as palace decoration under royal patronage.

Latest Blogs