Explore these 10 Phad paintings on Rooftop

A phad is a painted cloth that once travelled Rajasthan as a temple. The Bhopa who owned it would stretch it between two poles after dark and sing the story of the god painted on it through the night, while the Bhopi held an oil lamp up to each scene as he reached it. Phad paintings come from Shahpura in Bhilwara district, where Joshi families have painted them for generations, and their two great subjects are the folk gods Pabuji and Devnarayan. The ten Phad paintings below are hand-painted originals by Prakash Joshi, listed on Rooftop. Between them they hold the old hero epic of Pabuji, the Puranas, a Rajput romance and a full devotional prayer written out in paint.

The list follows the way a phad itself is read. Every traditional cloth opens with Ganesha, so this one does too. It then moves to Pabuji, the hero the form was made for, through the stories painters took up later, and ends with the Hanuman Chalisa, where the words of the prayer are painted into the picture.

How a Phad painting works

The name is usually traced to the local word for folding, since the cloth was folded or rolled to travel and opened out for each performance. Phad painting began as a commission. A Bhopa ordered a new cloth from a painter's family in Shahpura, carried it from village to village for years, and lived on the offerings made at each night's telling. A full performance usually starts after sunset and ends with an aarti at dawn.

In a long conversation with Rooftop, Prakash Joshi set right two things that are often written wrongly. Bhopa, he said, is an office, the role of the pujari, and not a caste. The faithful come from particular communities, with Pabuji's followers among the Rebari and Nayak and Devnarayan's among the Gujjar. The painters belong to the Chhipa community, and Joshi is the family name within it.

The length of a cloth depended on its god. Joshi puts a Pabuji phad at about 10–12 haath and a Devnarayan phad at 18 or 24 haath, where one haath, the length of a forearm, is roughly a foot and a half. A full Devnarayan cloth can therefore run past 35 feet, which is why the epic took several nights to sing.

The colour order

A phad is built up one colour at a time, lightest first, and every painter in the tradition follows a set sequence. Joshi gives it as a pale wash from palash flowers for the first sketch, then orange for the bodies of people and animals, and yellow for borders and ornaments. Green follows for trees and clothing. Gerua brown is used for buildings, horses and cows, then red for royal figures and their robes, then asmani blue for water, sky and demons. Black comes last of all, for outlines, eyes and black horses. In his account the colours are ground from mineral stones and bound with gum from trees.

Two habits hold the composition together. The god is always the largest figure on the cloth, usually dressed in red and on horseback, and everyone around him is scaled down according to his place in the story. Figures face each other across the cloth instead of looking out at the viewer, and ornamented arches mark where one episode ends and the next begins, so the eye travels along the scroll the way it travels along a line of text.

The eyes come last

The final stroke on a phad is the pupil of the god's eye. Once it is painted, Joshi says, the cloth counts as a walking temple, so it is never sat on or set down carelessly. When a phad wears out after years on the road, it is declared damaged and cooled, a rite called thanda karna, by immersing it in flowing water, traditionally the lake at Pushkar. After that it is never worshipped again.

The pictures follow a fixed visual vocabulary, which the symbols of Phad painting explain at length. The key below covers what you will meet across these ten cloths.

Key to the cloth: what you see	What it means
The largest figure, in red, on horseback	The god of the cloth, Pabuji or Devnarayan
A black mare	Kesar Kalmi, the horse Pabuji received from Deval, a Charan woman
A spear held before the rider	Pabuji
A black serpent before the rider	Devnarayan, whose mare is called Lilan
Four chiefs seated in the court	The samants who serve the god
Ganesha, Saraswati and the ten avatars at the start	The invocation that opens every traditional phad
Ornamented arches across the cloth	The break between one episode and the next
Lotus-shaped eyes, figures in profile facing each other	The house style of the Shahpura painters

The painter behind all ten

All ten are by Prakash Joshi, a Phad painter from Bhilwara who began learning at eleven under his father, Nand Kishor Joshi. He received the National Merit Award in 2008 and the National Award in 2009. Two of his changes show up in the paintings below. He brought figures that were once five to eight inches tall down to one or two inches without cutting the story, and he brought Devanagari writing onto the cloth. He also painted the first phad of Om Banna, a folk deity of Marwar, working from the accounts of Om Banna's own devotees.

He teaches Phad at IITs, IIMs, NIFT and NID. His younger brother Mukut trained under him and then took the family's skills toward Nathdwara, where he paints Pichwai temple cloths such as Annakoot. The two crafts share more than a surname, since in both the deity's eyes are the last thing painted.

Ten Phad paintings, in the order a phad is read

1. Vinayak

No hero rides out on a phad until Ganesha has been honoured, and this painting gives that opening its own sheet. In Vinayak, Ganesha sits on Sheshnag, the cosmic serpent, while Riddhi and Siddhi stand on either side waving chauris, the ceremonial whisks. His mouse waits in the foreground. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Narad and Lakshmi leave their own realms to pay their respects, and the Saptarishi stand in a row behind him. It is the smallest painting on this list and one of two here on paper, which makes it easy to frame for a doorway or a puja room.

2. Traditional Pabuji ki Phad 3

This is the nearest thing on Rooftop to the scroll a Bhopa would have carried. It keeps the long horizontal format at eight feet across, and it won Joshi a National Merit Award. The cloth runs in the order of the sung epic. It opens with Ganesha, the Dashavatara and other sacred invocations, then follows Pabuji Rathore as he searches for his mare Kesar Kalmi and meets the snake god Goga ji.

At the centre sits a promise. At the wedding of his niece Kelam, Pabuji pledges her a gift of camels, and he sends his companion Harmal to Lanka to find them, a journey that in this telling lies beyond the Indus. Rooftop's listing compares the mission to Hanuman's search for Sita. Further along come Pabuji's romance with Princess Phulwanti of Soda and his death defending the cows of a Charan woman. The nomadic Rebari herders still treat Pabuji as a god, and when their animals fall sick they pray before his phad.

3. Traditional Pabuji ki Phad 1

A Bhopa unrolls Pabuji's story sideways. Here Joshi stands it on end and fits the whole life into a cloth a little under four feet tall. Ganesha and Saraswati sit at the top with the ten avatars of Vishnu, and below them the expedition across Sindh to recover the camels plays out as a run of battle scenes. Pabuji's wedding comes next, then a formal picture of his court. Look beside the court for Kesar Kalmi, his black mare, painted with the Charan women from whom she came. The bottom of the cloth closes with small panels of Pabuji overcoming demons. On a narrow wall it reads top to bottom, the way a page does.

4. Traditional Pabuji ki Phad 2

Joshi painted this cloth to look old. The surface has been aged so that it reads as a phad a century into its working life, its colours settled into a weathered tone quite unlike the fresh palette of his other cloths. It is the tallest of the three Pabuji paintings here, and it gives the most room to the end of the story.

After the invocations, Pabuji's birth and his court, the cloth moves through his wedding and his fight with Ravana of Lanka, then to the raid by his enemy Jindrav Khichi and the war that follows. In the epic the news of the raid reaches Pabuji in the middle of his own wedding, and he cuts the bridal knot and rides out to keep his word to Deval. The cloth ends with that last battle, where he falls and reaches veergati, a warrior's death in a just fight.

5. Shiv Puran

Once Shahpura painters began working for buyers instead of Bhopas, the subjects widened past Pabuji and Devnarayan to the Puranas and the epics. Joshi's Shiv Puran tells the courtship of Shiva and Parvati as one continuous sequence. It begins after Shiva has lost Sati, with Parvati's birth, and follows her long penance to win him. The gods then persuade Shiva to agree, and the Saptarishi go to her father, King Himavan, to settle the match. The wedding procession arrives and Queen Maina receives it. The last episode is the birth of Ganesha, shaped from clay by Parvati and given an elephant's head after Shiva intervenes. Hung beside Vinayak, it tells how the god at the start of every phad came to be.

6. Krishna Leela

Joshi lays Krishna's life out as a map. The Yamuna runs through the middle of the cloth, with Mathura on the right bank and Gokul, Barsana and Vrindavan on the left, so the river divides the city of Kansa from the villages of Krishna's childhood. The story starts in Mathura with the wedding of Devki and Vasudev, their imprisonment by Kansa and Krishna's birth, then shows Vasudev carrying the infant across the water.

On the village bank come the demons Putana and Bakasura, Govardhan lifted on a single finger, and the Raas Leela. The cloth closes back in Mathura, where Krishna and Balaram subdue a maddened elephant, kill Kansa and free their parents. Reading it means crossing the river twice, which is also how the story moves.

7. Krishna Raas Leela

The Raas Leela is the dance Krishna holds with the gopis on Sharad Purnima, the full-moon night of autumn, and it belongs first to Pichwai painting, the temple cloths of Nathdwara. Joshi carries it into Phad. The gopis circle Krishna in two concentric rings rather than one, and at the centre Radha and Krishna stand with the flute beside the Yamuna, among lotuses and fish. The sky above is packed with stars and with gods who have come to watch. Gold and black outlines pick out the costumes in finer detail than folk cloths usually carry, and almost nothing on the surface is left empty. It is the nearly square shape that sets it apart on a wall, since most phads run long.

8. Prithviraj Chauhan and Sanyogita

Rajput history came into Phad through the same Shahpura studios. Shree Lal Joshi, the master who reshaped the form in the twentieth century, painted subjects such as Haldighati, Padmini and Maharana Pratap on smaller cloths, and this painting follows that path with the best-known love story of Rajput Delhi.

King Jaichand of Kannauj holds a swayamvar for his daughter Sanyogita, and to insult Prithviraj Chauhan he sets up a statue of him at the gate as a doorkeeper. Sanyogita has already written to Prithviraj in secret. At the centre of the cloth she places her garland on the statue, and the king himself steps out from behind it. The rest of the cloth follows their escape, the battle between the armies of Kannauj and Delhi, and their arrival together in Delhi.

9. Hanuman Chalisa

Phad figures were always meant to be sung over, and in this cloth Joshi writes the words in. The full Hanuman Chalisa, three dohas and forty chaupais in Devanagari, runs through the painting beside the scenes each verse describes. The palette is red and gold. Hanuman's mood changes between panels, fierce in one and gentle in the next, beneath bands of painted cloud. In a home where the Chalisa is recited, the cloth can be read aloud standing in front of it, which brings the form close to where it began, as a picture made to carry a recitation.

10. Hanuman Chalisa (miniature)

The same forty-three verses also fit on a sheet of handmade paper about a foot across. This is the miniature phad Joshi developed himself, and Rooftop's listing records his view that nothing this complex had been tried at this scale in the form. All three dohas and forty chaupais are written out beside their scenes. Colour is rationed. Blue marks Ram and orange marks Hanuman, while everything else is drawn in fine black line on a muted ground, so the two figures find the eye first. The listing suggests reading it with a magnifying glass, and the script is small enough to need one. Of the ten, it asks the most of the painter's hand.

Three more cloths by the same painter

Summer is a rare secular phad, a day at a royal court with the king and queen playing chaupar, an evening boat ride and a hunt, divided by a river and outlined in gold and black. At 22 × 16 inches it suits a small wall, and so does a compact Krishna Leela that repeats the river map with Mathura on one bank and Gokul, Barsana and Nandgaon on the other. A second, larger Krishna raas leela shows the dance under a single glowing moon, with Brahma, Shiva and Indra looking on.

Each painting is a single original sold by Rooftop Collections with a certificate of authenticity that records the artist, the origin and the medium. All of them ship unframed and insured. An order cannot be cancelled once it is placed, and returns are accepted only when a painting arrives damaged, which Rooftop asks to hear about within 24 hours of delivery.

How to care for a Phad painting at home

A Phad painting is mineral colour held by plant gum on starched cotton, and the gum is its weak point, because water softens it. Never wash the cloth or wipe it with anything damp, and hang it away from kitchens, bathrooms and walls that collect moisture. Keep it out of direct sun as well. Light fades natural pigment and dries out the cotton, slowly enough that nobody notices until a wall-side edge is brighter than the rest.

Every painting here ships unframed, so the first choice is yours. Bhopas folded their cloths for the road, but a phad that will spend years at home lasts longer rolled than folded, since repeated folds crack the paint along the crease. To store one, roll it with the painted side facing out around a wide tube and lay acid-free tissue between the turns. Painted side out keeps the colour layer gently stretched instead of pressed inward.

When you frame it, choose a framer who works with archival materials and keeps adhesive off the cloth, and ask for spacers so the glass never touches the paint. Vinayak and the miniature Hanuman Chalisa are on paper, which needs a different mount from cotton, so mention that before the work begins. Dust a hanging phad with a soft, dry brush and nothing else. If a cloth starts to flake, take it to a textile conservator before trying anything yourself.

If you would rather paint one

Much of today's Phad teaching runs through Chitrashala, the Bhilwara studio founded by Shree Lal Joshi, who received the Padma Shri in 2006. His son Kalyan Joshi now heads it, and he teaches a six-hour Phad painting course that starts with making colours and preparing the cloth before working through borders and full compositions in basic, intermediate and advanced chapters.

Children and beginners can learn the form at home with Artventures of Phad, a set of three books at essentials, elementary and expert levels. And for anyone who wants to sit with a teacher, Rajasthan Studio runs a one-to-one Phad masterclass with Pradeep Mukherjee and Shamsher Khan.

Whichever cloth you choose, it was finished the way a Bhopa's phad was, with the pupil of the god's eye, and the rest of Joshi's work sits among the Phad paintings on Rooftop.

References

• Rooftop product listings for the thirteen paintings named above, linked in each entry, accessed 10 October 2026
• Prakash Joshi, artist profile, Rooftop
• The Keeper of the Scroll: Phad artist Prakash Joshi settles everything the internet gets wrong, Rooftop blog
• Phad: Indian Folk Art Tradition, Rooftop Art Wiki
• Phad Painting Symbols Decoded, Rooftop blog
• Kalyan Joshi, artist profile and Phad course page, Rooftop
• Phad Sacred Art, Hinduism Today, October–December 2020
• Pabuji ki Phad: Sacred Shrines that Move, Live History India
• The story of Pabuji, Pabuji epic project, bombay.indology.info
• Shree Lal Joshi, Wikipedia entry for the Padma Shri year
• Do you know the legend behind Phad painting, Rajasthan Studio