Devlog 1 - Drawing Sunarhai Devi of Jabalpur

Friday, 22 May 2026, 07:53 PM
# art culture tech

The work in progress drawing that you see is of Sunarhai devi. This is part of a creative tech project that I am making. I have always been fascinated with this statue of Goddess Durga 🕉️ as it's style is incredibly peculiar and unique. Add the fact that I am from Jabalpur where this statue comes from, I have an emotional connect as well given I have been seeing this avatar of Goddess since my childhood.

There is a mystery around why the Goddess's roop is like this. Is this a certain tribal form which mesmerised the local people so much that an entire town became devotees (myself included clearly). Or may be a sculpturer experimented and people naturally loved the avatar, and gave it a continuity of an ongoing 150+ years. Her limbs are much larger than her face, and her pose is clearly very strong (she is Mother Durga afterall). Her vaahan is also a unique imagination of a lion. I never found the answers. May be I am asking unnecessary questions, I may be over thinking. 🤔

I plan to create layers from this line art, which I will be animating with GLSL shaders, mostly with animating colors. The layers themselves may have slight animations to give the jhanki some motion dynamism too, although I have not thought through things that far.

Inital idea is to write the whole thing in C and compile it to WebASM to give the animation a good performance. Will be deployed on this very site 🌐. To learn more about my process, you are welcome to take a look at my first devlog related to this project.

I would love if you share your thoughts in the video's comments. Thank you for reading this post, Sunarhai devi is very close to my heart.