Radha Krishna

Nearly everyone who arrives here is buying for a wedding, and the reason the pair works is worth saying plainly. A single deity is a statement about faith. A pair is a statement about two people, and it lets you wish a couple devotion and companionship in the same object without having to say either word out loud. That is a hard thing to buy and an easy thing to hand over.

It also avoids the two things that sink most wedding gifts. It rarely duplicates, and it does not end up in a cupboard, because it has an obvious place to go.

Yes, you can give one to a married couple

Somebody will tell you that a Radha Krishna murti is wrong for a married couple, on the grounds that Radha and Krishna were never married to each other. We have looked for the source of that and cannot find one, and the tradition points firmly the other way.

Radha and Krishna worshipped together are the central form of the Nimbarka, Gaudiya and Pushtimarg lineages, three of the largest devotional traditions in North India. A marriage narrative appears in the Garga Samhita, and Phulera Dooj commemorates it every year in Braj. Millions of married households keep the pair on a shelf. Give it and stop worrying.

A pair asks for width, not height

The measurement that matters on a paired murti is width, and almost nobody checks it. Two figures share a base, and if they are angled towards each other the base gets deep as well, so a six inch pair can take twice the footprint of a six inch single figure. Measure the shelf before you choose a size, and if you are buying for someone else's home and have not seen the shelf, buy small.

Five to six inches sits comfortably in most home mandirs and is the safest size to give blind. Anything above eight inches wants a surface of its own rather than a spot in a crowded mandir, and those are the pieces that go out of stock first, so check the listing rather than assuming. The northeast is the quadrant the vastu tradition associates with the household shrine, and that part has a real textual lineage. Which way the murti faces is local custom rather than text, and nobody will mind.

Brass, marble dust or plated, and what actually decides it

Decide this by what the couple will do with the piece, not by how it photographs.

Buy brass if it will be bathed or handled daily. Ours is solid brass, poured slowly into a mould made for that one idol and broken open once the metal has cooled, so every casting gets its own mould. That is why the detail holds where a reusable sand mould softens it, and it is why the alloy has to be high grade, since a lesser brass will not fill the shape cleanly. On a pair this shows up faster than on a single figure, because one pour has to carry two crowns, two sets of drapery and the flute between them. Brass takes milk, water, kumkum and turmeric indefinitely, darkens between cleanings as surface oxide rather than as a fault, and comes back with lemon and salt. See brass idols.

The white and gold pieces are a resin core coated in marble dust, which is what gives them the surface and the weight of marble. The jewellery is made separately in brass, electroplated, and applied to the figure by hand one piece at a time, which is why the finish varies a little between pieces. On a paired composition that hand work is most of what you are paying for, because there are two figures' worth of it. Keep it dry, lift it by the base rather than by the jewellery, and do not perform abhishek on it. See the white and gold range.

Gold plated is a resin core, a layer of copper over it, then gold or silver electroplated on top. The copper is the part worth explaining: resin cannot be plated directly, so the copper is what the precious metal keys onto. It is also why these pieces are light, why the detail stays crisp at a small size, and why water is the one thing that takes the finish off them. A dry cloth is the entire care routine. This is the finish that dominates the gifting end, because it arrives looking its best and needs nothing done to it before it is handed over. See gold and silver plated idols.

What is here, and what is not

The paired murtis run from a five inch brass tribhanga, the classical three bend stance where the body curves at neck, waist and knee, to the white and gold pieces in three and six inch. A pocket temple that closes around the pair is the easiest thing here to post, to pack, or to give to someone who is about to move house, and it is also the one that gets used daily by somebody who is simply devoted to the pair rather than newly married.

Two things people arrive looking for are worth being straight about. The framed piece here is Krishna on his own rather than the pair, so if you specifically want Radha and Krishna on a wall, we do not make one; the rest of the framed work sits in wall decor. And for a car dashboard we make the flute held in a pair of hands rather than the figures, because two figures on a shared base put the weight high and wide, which is the wrong shape for a moving car. Those live in dashboard idols.

On price, so you are not hunting: there is nothing here under 500 and nothing under 1,000. Under 2,000 you are choosing between a pocket temple, the framed piece and the smallest of the hands. A proper paired murti in brass or in marble dust starts above 4,000, and the large brass pairs run well past 10,000. If the budget is firmly under 500, a diya or a single small figure from wedding return gifts is a better use of it than a Radha Krishna piece bought thin.

It arrives ready to hand over

Every piece is checked at our own warehouse before it goes out, and everything ships in our own packaging, made to be opened rather than merely to survive the journey. That matters more here than on most pages, because a wedding gift is usually unwrapped in front of a room. A plated piece has the further advantage of presenting at its best straight out of the box, with no polishing and nothing to assemble.

Weddings are not the only occasion this works for. It is a good anniversary gift for the same reason it is a good marriage gift, and it is a common griha pravesh gift because a new home usually has an empty mandir waiting. See wedding gifts, wedding return gifts, griha pravesh and housewarming gifts and Janmashtami gifts. For quantity, corporate gifts or the bulk order enquiry page.

For Krishna on his own, including Laddu Gopal, Kanha ji and Shreenathji, see Krishna idols. To furnish the mandir it is going into, pooja essentials, and for the rest of the pantheon, god idols.