Colours of an epic canvas
ANJANA RAJAN
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Author J.P. Losty on his “Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic — The Ramayana”.
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Living hues Bharata and Shatrughna prepare to follow Rama to the forest and entreat him to return — a painting from the Mewar Ramayana manuscripts.
As one of the world’s best loved stories, the Ramayana has lost none of its attraction in the cyber and celluloid age. But if today’s producers use special effects to get just the right mix of action and emotion, the illustrators of old
were certainly not far behind. The fact comes home with J.P. Losty’s “Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic — The Ramayana”, published by the British Library, London, and Niyogi Books recently.
The aesthetic volume reproduces some 130 paintings from the illustrated Ramayana commissioned in the 17th Century by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar. The 400-odd paintings that make up the work use a technique called “simultaneous narration” in which every episode of the story is represented. The artists even went beyond Valmiki at times, the author notes, painting moments not described in the verses they accompanied. Can we say this is how a story metamorphoses and grows across artistic disciplines?
“You could,” says Losty in a chat from the U.K., “which is how the variations in the text of the different Ramayanas (Tamil, Bengali, etc.) arose, but in this instance I think the artist consciously made decisions to heighten the emotive power of his paintings.”
discernible
The figures veritably dance. Even hand gestures (mudras) are discernible, like the one in which the tips of the thumb and index finger touch. “It’s the ancient vyakhyana mudra (indicating speech) of Hindu/Buddhist iconography, and surely of the dance/drama too,” explains Losty. “Many other similar gestures are employed, including one from Persian painting indicating surprise — pointing the right forefinger at the mouth. Some are more generic than iconographic, such as the heads and upper bodies bowed in grief.”
The author’s scholarly introduction is a fund of information on the Mewar rulers and the painting and pothi (manuscript) tradition of the region. Not surprising, since he was a curator of Indian visual materials in the Asian Department of the British Library for 34 years.
“I have been working on these Ramayana manuscripts for over 30 years,” says Losty, who retired in 2005. “With such an enormous number of paintings it is very difficult to publish them properly, and a full but obviously expensive facsimile edition is really needed. This is the first time so many of the paintings have been published together. The manuscripts have until this year been bound up in large heavy volumes. These were taken apart, since the paintings were suffering from the way the pages were turned, and all the paintings are now being mounted up in standard window mounts and hence for the first time exhibitable. The book was published to accompany the British Library’s exhibition of the same name (16 May-14 September 2008).”
Losty is the author of “The Art of the Book in India” (1982) and “Calcutta City of Palaces” (1990). Due next are “A Picturesque Voyage – William Daniell’s Journal” and “The Daniells’ Vision of India”.
With observation spans reportedly shrinking, one wonders if there are enough takers for the intricate detailing of works such as his “Ramayana”. The author reasons, “I would imagine that such illustrated manuscripts in their original royal context were looked at with the help of pundits or bards who knew the epic by heart to explain the episodes for an audience of Rajput princes (or their wives?), who would not necessarily understand the Sanskrit text. I doubt if they were actually ‘read’ by a single reader as we would an illustrated book today.”
With his captions, modern readers can enjoy the story on another level, though. As also the visual effects — take the ‘animation’ of repeated figures, or the lovely translucent veils. He notes, “Little technical work has been done on Indian painting. The pigments are built up in layers, each layer burnished before the next is employed. Thus a clothed figure would have the exposed skin painted, then the next layer of garments, and in the case of white jamas or dupattas, thin washes of white pigment would be applied over the lower garments to achieve this translucent effect.”
As for colours, usually made of standard mineral or earth pigments mixed with gum Arabic, he says, “Red was the standard background colour of early Rajput painting, and Sahib Din [the artist] uses it a lot in his book two of the Ramayana, but by book six, he is much freer with his background colours, as are the artists of books four and five who came from a different tradition.”
The questions could go on. Because both are fascinating — the story of the paintings, and the painting of the story.
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