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 opens today, 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 key films are 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 choice from the Marvel universe. The works are devotional in the oldest sense—made with the kind of attention that used to be reserved for the divine, now directed at the images a culture has collectively decided matter. The exhibition was initiated by Nilaya Anthology Creative Director Pavitra Rajaram, whose long-standing engagement with the Chitara family's practice forms its conceptual foundation. 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.

The Artist

Sumit Chitara and Vivek Chitara are fifth-generation artists from Ahmedabad's Chitara family, both sons of National Award-winning master artist 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. Between them, 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.)