Old Gods And New: The 300-Year-Old Textile Tradition That Just Walked Into A Cinema

Mata ni Pachedi means behind the Mother Goddess. The name describes what the textile was: a hand-painted cloth shrine, created by artists from Gujarat's Vaghri community after devotees were denied entry into temples. The goddess came to them instead, carried in fabric, painted in the tradition's characteristic red, black, and white palette, bordered with fish motifs, deity figures, and symbolic animals that have defined the form for roughly 300 years. It is, by any measure, a devotional art — specific in its community of origin, specific in its visual grammar, and specific in the kind of faith it was built to hold.

The Exhibition

Old Gods and New: Where Mata ni Pachedi Meets Contemporary Cinema opened on July 17, 2026, and runs through August 17 as part of Nilaya Anthology's Monsoon Film Festival. It reinterprets more than 40 iconic films, Sholay, Baasha, Vivah, Thor among them, through the visual language of the tradition. The natural pigments are unchanged. The symbolic motifs and decorative borders are unchanged. The fish, the goddess figures, the characteristic red, black, and white palette: all unchanged. What has changed is what the tradition is being asked to hold, not the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, but Rajinikanth at his most iconic and a Marvel superhero with a hammer.

The pairing was not a stretch for Nilaya Anthology Creative Director Pavitra Rajaram, who initiated the exhibition. "Mata ni Pachedi was born out of exclusion, a community denied entry into temples who responded by creating their own sacred space, their own gods, on cloth," she says. "Cinema, for me, represents something quite different. It is a space where everyone can connect, where everyone finds a place, regardless of who they are. Through cinema, Sumit and Vivek have been able to use the language of Mata ni Pachedi to paint a world that all of us recognise, connect with, and feel a part of. So the pairing wasn't really a stretch once I saw it; it felt more like uncovering a connection that was already there."

Rajaram is careful to draw a distinction between continuity and tension in the exhibition's premise. "I wouldn't call it tension so much as continuity," she says. "The Chitaras aren't being asked to abandon devotion for pop culture, they're extending the same instinct that built Mata ni Pachedi in the first place: if you're kept out of a space, you build your own, and you decide who belongs in it. Shah Rukh Khan, Rajinikanth, Thor, these are simply the deities of a newer, wider imagination. I'd actually push back gently on 'secular' too. For a lot of people, cinema is devotional. The way an audience feels about a star on screen isn't so far removed from how a community feels about the goddess on the cloth."

The key films chosen were not incidental. Sholay is the artists' mother's all-time favourite. Vivah was the first film Sumit watched with his wife. Thor is Vivek's pick from the Marvel universe. Speaking about how the films were selected, the brothers explain that the process was collaborative from the start: "We selected around 40 films together, Sholay, 3 Idiots, Hera Pheri, Dhurandhar, and films we had made before. Whatever film one of us wanted to do, we did, and we also worked together on a few of the paintings." The mapping between film and motif followed the tradition's own visual logic. In Mata ni Pachedi, every deity has a designated vehicle, the lion for Durga among them, and the brothers looked for those same parallels within the films, extending the tree of life and other traditional symbols into the new compositions where a direct match did not already exist.

Colour choices, too, were negotiated between the source material and the tradition. "For Dhurandhar we felt it needed a darker mood, so we used a black background. For Hera Pheri, red suited it better," the brothers say. "We took the main colours from the movie posters themselves, then adapted them into the reds and blacks of Mata ni Pachedi."

Their father's reaction mattered most. Sanjay Chitara, a National Award-winning master artist under whom both sons trained, responded with open enthusiasm to seeing his tradition applied to a new subject. "He loved seeing his traditional style turned into something contemporary," the brothers recall. "He was surprised at how the two could be mixed and still feel true to Mata ni Pachedi. The whole family got involved, everyone had an opinion on which painting worked best, and we had a lot of fun with it."

Old Gods and New is the clearest articulation yet of Nilaya Anthology's position, backed by Asian Paints' over 80 years of design leadership and operating as India's first and largest international design destination, that traditional craft can remain deeply rooted in its heritage while finding entirely new forms of cultural expression. "MFF is themed Journeys, and I can't think of a more fitting journey than watching a centuries-old ritual art form travel into the language of movie posters without losing its own grammar in the process," Rajaram says. "It felt like the show MFF didn't know it was missing until it was there."

The Artist

Sumit Chitara and Vivek Chitara are fifth-generation artists from Ahmedabad's Chitara family, both sons of Sanjay Chitara, under whose guidance both learned the craft, Sumit beginning at age 11. Sumit holds a National Award of his own, presented by the President of India for his contributions to preserving and elevating the tradition. Vivek is the one who pushes the visual boundary most deliberately, describing his practice as a bridge between ancient sacred storytelling and contemporary imagination, a bridge that is, in this exhibition, quite literally illustrated by a Marvel character rendered in the palette and grammar of a 300-year-old Gujarati ritual textile.

Rajaram traces her engagement with the family back over a decade. "I met Sumit when he was fourteen, already painting Mata ni Pachedi alongside his father, Sanjay," she says. "What stayed with me wasn't just his skill, it was the doodles on the side, the autorickshaws with Shah Rukh Khan's portrait on the back. That's when I realised his visual world was so much bigger than the frame he was working within professionally, and that the craft language itself was elastic enough to hold both. This show has genuinely been on my mind for years since. It needed the right occasion, and the Monsoon Film Festival gave us that."

Looking ahead, Rajaram sees the exhibition as the start of a broader approach rather than a one-off. "I think our role is to keep insisting that heritage craft isn't a fixed, finished thing to be preserved under glass, it's a living language, and living languages evolve when the people who speak them are given room to bring their whole selves to it," she says. "Sumit and Vivek didn't stop being Mata ni Pachedi painters by including Sholay or Thor in their work; they expanded what that title can mean. This exhibition is very much the beginning of that for both of them, and for us."

Between the brothers, they represent both the continuity and the expansion of a form that has survived by remaining faithful to its origins while refusing to be confined by them.

Old Gods and New is on view through till August 17, 2026, at Nilaya Anthology, Peninsula Corporate Park, Peninsula Point, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel West, Mumbai.