Devlog 2 - Coloring Sunarhai Devi of Jabalpur

Saturday, 19 September 2026, 05:44 PM
# culture art sketch

The creative part is done. Now the tech part begins. In this second devlog of my Sunarhai Mataji project, I take the digital artwork one step further by coloring the Durga murti art and preparing it for the technical work that lies ahead.

Devlog 2 - Coloring Sunarhai Devi of Jabalpur

This project is inspired by the beautiful Sunarhai Devi 🕉️ of Jabalpur, a tradition that I find absolutely fascinating. There are around 7–8 idols placed at different locations across the city, with an estimated 150–175 years of cultural continuity. During the celebrations, around 10–15 kg of gold jewellery is placed on the idol by the people of Sarafa Bazaar, Jabalpur's jewellery market 💍. There is even a Nunhai idol where the jewellery is made from silver instead of gold.

The scale and continuity of this tradition genuinely blows my mind.

Devlog 2 - Closeup photo of Sunarhai Devi of Jabalpur

Something else special happened after my first devlog. It reached a lot of the right people, and one of them, Ashish Gupta ji, kindly sent a voice message to my friend Pranav, who then forwarded it to me. I loved the message so much that I asked Ashish ji if I could include it in this video, and thankfully 🙏, he agreed. Watch the devlog below.

With the artwork now moving forward, the project is entering a very different phase. There's a lot of engineering ahead: building the asset pipeline, packing textures, writing C code, getting into OpenGL and GLSL, and eventually compiling the whole thing to WebAssembly with Emscripten.

So this is the point where a digital artwork starts turning into a piece of realtime graphics technology. And that's where things get really interesting. Hope you enjoyed this post. Follow me on X to find out more, thanks.