5 unique ways to do your mandir

Marble is the easiest way to make a mandir look expensive, and it goes in two very different directions. Pick a rich, well-veined slab and use it plain as a backdrop, and you get something modern and minimal. Or go the other way and get a mandir carved to your own design — hand work and machine work are both available, and so is inlay if you want colour and detail in the stone itself.

If you have a large mandir space, this is where I’d spend. Carved marble is the one thing that never looks dated.

Wallpaper behind a mandir is one thing. Getting your favourite design printed and then hand-embroidered is another thing entirely. It’s the most unusual mandir backdrop I’ve come across — a way to bring in a god figure, a motif, a whole scene, with texture you can see from across the room.

This is the one that surprises people. With the light off, it reads as a quiet self-carved panel — subtle, almost plain. Switch it on and the whole design glows through. Any design can be cut, so you’re not choosing from a catalogue.

It also layers well. Here it wraps the niche as a jaali frame, with a hand-finished 3D mural sitting against the flat centre panel — depth instead of one flat lit wall.

No unit, no stone, no panel — just an artist and your back wall. Pichwai work is the obvious one and it suits a mandir beautifully, but gold leafing does something quieter and just as rich. The three below are all the same technique in very different moods, which is the point: you’re commissioning art, so it can go as loud or as restrained as your room needs.

You don’t need a vendor at all. Wall decals, peel-and-stick wallpaper, bells, ready-made shelves and small mandir units are all available online — the trick is combining them instead of buying one thing. A decal backdrop, a floating shelf, a string of bells, warm light. That’s a mandir, and it costs a fraction of everything above.