More than a decade ago, a twelve-year-old in Ahmedabad was filling sketchbooks with auto-rickshaws and Pepsi logos. What made the drawings unusual was not the subject matter but the grammar. He was rendering them in the visual language of Mata ni Pachedi, the ritual textile tradition his family has practised for five generations. The person who noticed was Pavitra Rajaram, now Creative Director at Nilaya Anthology, and the observation sat with her for years before it became an exhibition. Sumit Chitara has since won a National Award, among the youngest recipients ever, as has his brother Vivek. Their father, Sanjay Chitara, won one before them. Old Gods and New, which opened at Nilaya Anthology in Mumbai on 17 July as the centrepiece of the Monsoon Film Festival, is the result of Rajaram finally asking the question out loud.
The form itself was born of exclusion. Barred from formal temple worship, the Vagari community of Gujarat painted their own goddesses onto cloth, creating shrines that could be carried and installed anywhere. When a textile wore out it was returned to the Sabarmati, binding the practice to a specific river and a specific place. What the Chitara brothers have done is keep almost everything and change one thing. The cotton ground, the vegetable dyes, the bamboo stick used for drawing, the fish motifs and the decorative borders all survive intact. In the position where the goddess stood, there is now Sholay, or Lagaan, or Thor. Across more than forty works, the films run from Mera Naam Joker and Phir Hera Pheri to Pushpa and The Grand Budapest Hotel – a list that reads less like a critical canon than like a record of what two brothers in Ahmedabad actually watched.
The obvious risk is that this reads as a mashup, and the traditional-form-meets-pop-culture move has been made often enough by now- Gond artists painting superheroes, Madhubani painting cricketers – that the novelty can swallow the technique whole. There is a market question underneath it too, and it is the one the Indian art world has been slow to answer. Hereditary practitioners are still priced, catalogued and exhibited as craft, even as the vocabulary of contemporary art is applied to their work when it suits a show. If a fifth-generation painter selects his own subjects and composes his own frames, the category he is sold in starts to look arbitrary. I spoke to Sumit Chitara and Pavitra Rajaram about the film list, the line between evolution and dilution, and who exactly was the author of these forty works.
Sreerupa: Your film choices range from Sholay and Lagaan, which sit deep in Indian cultural memory, to Avatar and Marvel. Was the pull the story, the visual, or something from childhood?
Sumit: My brother Vivek and I both really liked these films. With Lagaan, we especially liked the cricket and the story around cricket, so that was the main reason we chose it. With Avatar, I really liked the fighting and action scenes, and I liked the film overall. For Sholay, I already felt that it would look good as a painting. It is such an old and famous Bollywood film, and I really liked some of the scenes, especially the scene with the music and dancing and the scenes with the horse. Those were some of the visuals that I wanted to bring into my painting.
Sreerupa: What did your father and the older practitioners in the community say when they first saw these?
Sumit: When my father first saw the work, he felt that although it was based on a traditional art form, the style was very different. He felt that people and customers would really like it, and he was very happy when he saw the work. I also showed the paintings to my family members, and they were very happy to see what I had created.
Sreerupa: The paintings retain the grammar of Mata ni Pachedi – vegetable dyes, borders, motifs, but radically change the subject. Where do you personally draw the line between evolution and dilution?
Sumit: We have used the traditional Mata ni Pachedi technique in the work. The artwork is done on cotton cloth, with natural colours, and the drawings are made using bamboo sticks. We have also used some of the traditional motifs and drawings in the contemporary works. So while the subjects are different and contemporary, the traditional technique, materials and elements of Mata ni Pachedi are still retained in the work.
Pavitra Rajaram, Creative Director of Nilaya Anthology, curated the exhibition and has known the Chitara family since Sumit was a boy.
Sreerupa: Traditional-form-meets-pop-culture is by now a familiar curatorial move. How did you guard against the novelty of the mashup overshadowing the mastery of the technique?
Pavitra Rajaram: I think the important thing is to look beyond the idea of a ‘mashup’. Art is not about creating something that is immediately glamorous or recognisable. it is about looking closely at the practice, the skill and the story behind it. When I first met Sumit years ago, he was very young, and even then, I was struck by his instinct to look at the world around him through Mata ni Pachedi. That stayed with me. With Old Gods and New, the cinema is really a way of creating an entry point for people who may otherwise never encounter Mata ni Pachedi. Once you look beyond the familiar characters, you begin to notice the extraordinary detailing, natural pigments, composition and storytelling that sit behind the work. For me, that discovery is the real point of the exhibition.
Sreerupa: Who decided what got made? Walk me through where the artists’ authorship begins and yours ends – brief, film list, scale, palette, titles.
Pavitra: The relationship with Sumit began many years ago, when I first encountered his work as a young artist, and it has evolved through a continuing conversation about what Mata ni Pachedi can become. I had shared a list of films and characters that could be interesting to explore through the form, but ultimately, Sumit and Vivek selected the 40 films they wanted to interpret. From there, the creative interpretation was theirs. Their choices around composition, scale, detailing and how each character could exist within the vocabulary of Mata ni Pachedi are very much their own. My role was to create the framework and the opportunity, while giving them the freedom to take the work in their own direction.
Sreerupa: Several works depict characters owned by Disney and Marvel. How are you thinking about that, both legally and conceptually?
Pavitra: What interested me was the opportunity to take something that is already deeply embedded in popular culture and use it to lead people towards something they may not know at all. Most people recognise these cinematic characters immediately, far fewer may know what Mata ni Pachedi is, where it comes from or the depth of skill involved in creating it. So the relationship between the two is quite deliberate. The familiar becomes the doorway to the unfamiliar. Once that doorway is opened, the craft itself has the opportunity to hold your attention. From a legal standpoint, we have been mindful of the relevant considerations around the use and presentation of these references as part of the exhibition.
Sreerupa: The exhibition challenges the expectation that hereditary artisans should only preserve inherited forms. Do you see this as part of a broader argument about authorship and agency within India’s traditional craft communities?
Pavitra: Absolutely. I don’t think preserving a tradition means freezing it in time. If anything, a tradition survives because artists can respond to the world around them and bring their own experiences into it. Sumit and Vivek are fifth-generation artists. They have inherited an extraordinary body of knowledge, but they also have their own imagination, influences, and points of view. It is important that we give artists from traditional craft communities the same creative freedom that we instinctively give contemporary artists. For us at Nilaya Anthology, it is about creating opportunities for these artists to bring that perspective forward. There are so many regional art traditions in India that even we may not have encountered, and giving them a platform allows a wider audience to discover the skill, detailing and storytelling within these practices.
Old Gods and New ran at Nilaya Anthology, Mumbai, from 17 July to 9 August 2026.
