Marble & Soapstone: Carving Traditions of Rajasthan
One white calcite quarry in a Nagaur district village that has supplied the Dilwara Jain temples, the Taj Mahal, the Ranakpur Chaumukha, BAPS Akshardham, and the Ayodhya Ram Mandir. The Sompura silpi families who have carved it for a thousand years. And the softer Aravalli soapstones that still feed the Jaipur murti bazaars.
In a drawing studio in Ahmedabad in 2020, Chandrakant Sompura, seventy-seven years old and the grandson of the silpi who restored Somnath, sets three small samples of Makrana marble on his drawing board next to an elevation of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir. He is choosing the stone for the garbhagriha. The same Makrana quarries in Nagaur district of western Rajasthan have supplied the Vimal Vasahi at Dilwara (1031), the Chaumukha at Ranakpur (1437), the Taj Mahal (from 1632), the Victoria Memorial, the BAPS Akshardham temples at Gandhinagar, Delhi, and Robbinsville, and now the Ram Mandir consecrated in January 2024. The stone is a pure white calcite with unusually low porosity that does not yellow with age. The silpi lineage that has carved it for nearly a thousand years is the Sompura community, whose guilds designed Somnath, Ambaji, Akshardham, and the Ayodhya sanctum. This lesson walks into the Makrana pits, the Dilwara ceilings, the Ranakpur forest of pillars, the marble jali screens of Rajput Rajasthan, the softer soapstone murti bazaars of Jaipur, the 2015 Geographical Indication for Makrana Marble, and the Sompura drawing boards that connect Vimal Shah's minister in 1031 to Chandrakant Sompura's elevation for Ayodhya in 2024.
A Studio on C.G. Road
On a summer afternoon in 2020, in a second-floor drawing studio on C.G. Road in Ahmedabad, Chandrakant Sompura is leaning over a long wooden drawing board. He is seventy-seven years old. On the board is a large sheet of tracing paper with the east elevation of the proposed Ayodhya Ram Mandir drawn in fine pencil, the shikhara rising above the garbhagriha in the Nagara style his family has used for centuries. Next to the sheet sit three small polished samples of white marble, each about the size of a matchbox, each with a handwritten label in Gujarati: Makrana Doongri, Makrana Albeta, Makrana Kumari. These are three grades of pure white calcite marble, all from the same small town in Nagaur district of western Rajasthan, and one of them will become the floor and the sanctum screen of a temple that India has waited almost five hundred years to build.
Chandrakant Sompura's grandfather, Prabhashankar Sompura, rebuilt the Somnath temple in the 1950s after Sardar Patel decided to restore the shrine Mahmud of Ghazni had sacked in 1026. His father, Balvantrai Sompura, passed the silpi tradition on to him as a boy. For thirty years, ever since the first design briefs for a possible temple at Ayodhya were circulated in the early 1990s, Chandrakant has waited. The Supreme Court cleared the site in 2019. The foundation stone was laid in August 2020. In January 2024 the consecrated image of Ram Lalla took its place inside the garbhagriha whose elevation is being finalised on this drawing board. The screen that separates the inner sanctum from the pradakshina path will be a Makrana marble jali, perforated in a pattern the Sompura silpis have been drawing since the eleventh century.
This lesson is about the two Rajasthan stones that have carried the Sompura tradition and the wider Rajasthani carving economy for close to a thousand years. The first and most famous is Makrana marble, the pure white calcite that has supplied almost every great temple and tomb in the subcontinent. The second is a family of softer stones, grouped here as soapstone and its Rajasthan cousins, that feed the everyday murti bazaars of Jaipur and the temple workshops of Karauli and Dungarpur.