The first folios

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is getting ready to welcome about 100 miniature paintings from the royal courts of Rajasthan and the Punjab hills into its permanent collection. These works, dating from the 16th to the early 19th century, have been promised as a gift by Steven M Kossak from his family’s Kronos Collections. Kossak was formerly a curator at the Met’s Department of Asian Art and built his private collection in the fertile art markets of New York since the 1980s. The miniatures are currently on display (till September 12) at an exhibition titled Divine Pleasures: Paintings from India’s Rajput Courts — The Kronos Collections, after which select works will make it to the museum’s Department of Islamic Art, which houses paintings, jewels, and textiles from the Sultanate, Mughal, Deccan, Jain, Rajput and Pahari courts of India.

As the name of the exhibition suggests, most of the works are painted episodes from the epic and poetic literature of the Indian subcontinent. Prominently featured are narrations from the Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana, Gita Govinda and Ragamala. Though less coveted than their Mughal counterparts, Rajput and Pahari miniatures embody the easy cosmopolitanism of Indian art — guided by the rasa theories, and harking back to the iconography of temple sculptures, mythological episodes are interpreted using a sophisticated Mughal idiom. Here are three works from the collection that you can use as a cheat-sheet to learn more about Indian miniature painting.

‘In Attacking Naraka’s Fortress at Pragjyotishpur, Vishnu Slays the Demon General Mura’

Miniature paintings are generally not individual works but belong to albums consisting of several paintings and accompanying texts and, hence, these paintings are referred to as ‘folios’ to indicate that they were once part of a book. While books in the Mughal court were portrait-oriented and read right to left, Hindu texts were landscape-oriented and read by flipping the page upwards — a throwback to the days of palm leaf manuscripts. This illustrated folio belongs to the ‘Palam’ or ‘Scotch-Tape’ Bhagavata Purana and is dated to circa 1520-30. The series derives its first qualifier from the Delhi suburb Palam, where it is thought to have been painted, and the second from the scotch-tape that a previous owner used to reinforce the fraying edges of the folios.

According to the legend, king Narakasura, who usurped territory from the gods and abducted 16,000 women, was killed by Krishna. In this painting however, we see Krishna in his true cosmic form of Vishnu, accompanied by Satyabhama/ Lakshmi, flying in from the left. Garuda props them up on a lotus cushion. In the centre, the five-headed Mura, Naraka’s general, has had his heads cut off. Meanwhile, Naraka, unaware of what has happened, sits in his palace with his knees bound with a meditation strap. He also seems to be making a paan for himself. Two women — perhaps ones he abducted — are seated on the floor above him, and are enjoying paan as well. The artist has imaginatively depicted the remoteness of the king’s mountain citadel through scalloped borders, differentiating realms of space.

‘Bakasura, the Crane Demon, Disgorges Krishna’

This folio dated circa 1690 comes from Bikaner. Reverse perspective, typical of all miniature paintings, is employed here. (It is because of reverse perspective that the cows that are closer to the viewer appear smaller; they are less important.) Like all Bikaner paintings of this period, this work has a strong Mughal idiom. The detailed patterning of each leaf on the trees, the curviness of the clouds, and the fact that there is a monstrous bird within the frame is reminiscent of the Hamzanama, a series of 1,400 paintings commissioned by Emperor Akbar in 1562, depicting the heroic adventures of Amir Hamza.

The folio depicts Krishna being disgorged by the demon crane Bakasura. The artist has tactfully used gold as a motif to convey heat and light in the evening sky, and then again to convey the heat that Krishna is emitting (which makes Bakasura spew him out). Balarama, at the centre of the composition, watches in astonishment.

‘The Nightmare Dream of a King’

Albums containing miniature paintings were made by fairly large ateliers. Akbar, for instance, had commissioned over 100 artists, gilders and bookbinders to work on the Hamzanama, which took 15 years to complete. Specialisation was key, with several artists working on various aspects of the same painting.

Attributed to the artist Manaku, the Nightmare Dream of a King comes from the Pahari kingdom of Guler, circa 1740. Manaku belonged to a remarkable family of painters: his father was Pandit Seu and his younger brother was Nainsukh, who within the tradition of miniature paintings, is considered a superstar by art historians. The folio illustrates the sight Yudhishthira beholds after the war between the Pandavas and Kauravas at Kurukshetra. The righteous king cries out that he will suffer 10,000 years of hell-fire for causing the deaths of so many innocent men. The painting is unusual in its unsympathetic depiction of violence with purple-red blood allowed to drip all over the folio. Even in this nightmarish vision, however, every jewel and saddle is elegantly detailed in silver and gold. The regality does not diminish the tragedy and, in fact, the detailing individuates the densely-packed mass of corpses.

Blessy Augustineis an art critic based in New York

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