Ragamala paintings

also: Ragamālā · Garland of Ragas

genre 16th-18th centuries Rajasthan Deccan

Ragamala - 'garland of ragas' - albums rank among the most distinctive achievements of Indian miniature painting. Each folio visualizes a single raga, one of the classical musical modes, as a mood, a season and an hour, usually embodied by a hero (nayaka) and heroine (nayika) whose tryst carries the melody's emotional content, with presiding deities such as Shiva or Devi nearby. The iconography grew from the twelfth-century Sangita Ratnakara and from Sanskrit contemplation verses compiled from the fourteenth century; in 1570 the priest Kshemakarna of Rewa codified a scheme of six principal ragas and their families. From the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries virtually every Indian school painted them - Mughal, Deccani, Rajasthani and Pahari - and the finest sets survive from this era of royal patronage. Production faded by the nineteenth century.

Bhairavi Ragini, Manley Ragamala, an album painting. Amber, Rajasthan, India. (cropped version) Two women worship Shiva in a lotus-filled la
Bhairavi Ragini, Manley Ragamala, an album painting. Amber, Rajasthan, India. (cropped version) Two women worship Shiva in a lotus-filled laPublic domain (credit: Unknown author Unknown author) · source

Defining characteristics

  • One mode per folio: a heroine or hero embodying the raga's prescribed mood and hour
  • Flattened, saturated colour fields keyed to the raga's assigned colour and season
  • Gouache on paper with burnished surfaces, crisp outlines and fine gold and jewelled detail
  • A verse panel set above the image, the picture filling the page below
  • Time-of-day and seasonal cues - monsoon clouds, night skies, lotus ponds - embedded in the scene
  • Presiding deities (Shiva, Devi, Krishna) placed beside the lovers as the raga's divine form

Key figures

  • Kshemakarna (fl. 1570) — Priest of Rewa whose Sanskrit text fixed the canonical six-raga, 86-member ragamala family
  • Nasiruddin (fl. c. 1605) — Mewar painter of the Chawand Ragamala (1605), an early dated Rajput ragamala set
  • Sahibdin (fl. 1628-1655) — Mewar master whose dated 1628 ragamala series is the best-known set of the tradition
  • Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1570-1627) — Sultan of Bijapur, painter-patron of the Deccani ragamala tradition

Example works

  • Malasri Ragini (Chawand Ragamala) — Nasiruddin (1605)
  • Lalit Ragini (Sahibdin Ragamala) — Sahibdin (1628)
  • Bhairavi Ragini (Manley Ragamala) — Unknown (c. 1610-1620)

Sources

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