Mewar and its Ramayan
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'The Mewar Ramayana'
A backgrounder
'The Mewar Ramayana/ Dawn/Guardian News Service/ August 26, 2008
[In 2008] The British Library has brought the Ramayana to London, mounting a remarkable exhibition that showcases 120 breathtaking miniatures from what is probably the most beautiful version of the story ever painted the 17th-century Ramayana commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (1628-52). This found a home in Britain thanks to the Scottish scholar Colonel James Tod (1782-1835), author of the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, whose almost complete absorption into Rajasthani culture led one rival to complain that he was “too much of a Rajpoot himself to deal with Rajpoots”.
The Mewar Ramayana — a seven-volume work that was produced by at least three different scriptoria and once included more than 400 paintings — is arguably the masterpiece of Rajasthani painting, and is certainly one of the supreme monuments of 17th-century Indian art. This great manuscript, one of the most spectacular of the many unseen treasures in the British Library's Indian collections, forms the core of the exhibition; yet the lavish show includes a huge range of other representations of the epic, demonstrating the way that the Ramayana has spread not only across India, but through the whole of south-east Asia, where it has worked its way into Buddhist and Chinese scripture and adapted itself to almost every known form of traditional media, from miniature and scroll painting to dance, drama, opera, shadow puppetry and, most recently, film and television.
As the exhibition shows through sound archive recordings and looped videos of the TV series, film posters and contemporary live performances of the epic in towns, villages and forest clearings across the subcontinent, the Ramayana — unlike the ancient epics of Europe, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Ring saga, which are now the province mostly of academics and of literature classes — is very much a living epic. Bards still tour villages telling the story with the help of painted scrolls, while singers sing devotional hymns recalling the valour of Lord Rama or the faithfulness of his Sita. Even more remarkably, some castes of wandering storytellers still know the 24,000-verse epic in its entirety.
An anthropologist friend of mine once met one such storyteller in a little village in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Despite being illiterate, this particular bard knew the Mahabharata which, with its 100,000 slokas, is longer even than the seven-book Ramayana; it is said to be roughly eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, and four times the length of the Bible. My friend asked the bard how he could remember so huge a poem. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and “read” from one pebble after another. Astonishingly, he said this was not the only epic he knew.
Resilience of Rajasthan
It is no accident that the Mewar Ramayana was composed in response to a catastrophe. In the late 16th century, as the Mughal emperors extended their control over Rajasthan, only the Ranas of Mewar managed to resist submitting to the authority of the Muslim rulers of Delhi. In the course of this resistance, their ancestral library, kept in the great fort of Chittor, was burned at the fall of that last redoubt to the Mughal war machine. Years later, when the Ranas re-established their capital at Udaipur, the Mewar Ramayana was commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh as part of the effort to rebuild his family's library, and it may have been under his influence that the manuscript came to link the Mewar dynasty with Rama (from whom it claimed descent), while connecting the demon Ravana with the Mughals. So it is that we see Ravana taking a ceremonial bath in a Mughal imperial tent, and appearing at his palace window to give darshan of himself as Jahangir and Shah Jahan did from the balcony of their apartments in the Red Fort; below the massed demons of Lanka give a salute to their king just as Mughal courtiers do in Mughal manuscripts.
The boldly coloured, wonderfully lively miniatures of the Mewar Ramayana are the principal glory of this exhibition. Most have never before been illustrated or shown in public, and up to now have been known only to a handful of art historians. While they vary in quality, and few achieve the fineness of detail of high imperial Mughal art, the best of them — especially those by master miniaturist Sahib Din — are some of the most swirlingly energetic images ever produced by Indian artists.
Often the more urban or palace images are compartmentalised into two or three separate areas by architectural frames and blocks of primary colour. In contrast, the rural scenes tend to be whole-frame, with the artists showing a marked and very Indian love of the natural world dark-skinned elephants charge, trunks and tails curling with pleasure, over forested Rajasthani mountains; peacocks, white ibis and red-crowned hoopoes flit between mango orchards and banana plantations; deer nuzzle each other in the forest, as wild boar root around for nuts and berries. All Indian life is here haggling shopkeepers decorate their stalls for a festival; groups of meditating sages and wizened ascetics with their hair woven into beehive topknots and dreadlocks sit on the ghats of a sacred river performing their austerities; palace ladies lounge amid the fountains of their zenanas and sit gossiping in their quarters; boatmen row villagers over rivers swollen in full Monsoon-spate; dancers dance, drummers drum and lovers love.
Especially effective are the fabulous scenes of the advance of the monkey army on Lanka against a vivid red ground, the monkeys move forward in great waves like a succession of breakers on a Goan beach. A blue-skinned Rama, with garlands of jasmine around his shoulders sits, bow at the ready, on the back of Hanuman; Lakshman follows, sitting astride a saddle of mango leaves, a quiver of arrows at the ready, and sword and dagger flashing from his waistband. Yet the Mewar artists can do pathos and beauty as well as energy and movement Sita is invariably shown large-eyed and melancholic, as she sits mournful and pensive in her red Rajasthani gagra choli amid Ravana's pleasure gardens, awaiting her lost lover.
The finest image of all, however, is the wonderfully comic image of the demon army trying to wake Ravana's brother, the giant Kumbhakarna as the portly, moustachioed figure of the colossus lies horizontally across the length of the miniature in his red underpants, mouth open to emit loud snores, Lilliputian demons swarm around him, poking him with tridents and knocking him with hammers and clubs. A band of singing women is brought forward to try to rouse him; another demon brings a braying ass; two elephants are manoeuvred to trumpet into one ear, while a dog-headed demon barks into the other. To one side lie the great pitchers of wine and heaps of meat — dead humans and monkeys — intended for the giant's breakfast when he awakes. The composition is set against a yellow ochre ground that highlights the brown bulk of the giant.
Around the central exhibit of the Mewar Ramayana is an array of supporting material that shows the spread of the epic from oral narrative to painted text, as well as from local dynastic history to pan-Asian epic stone images of Hanuman from Vijayanagara, papier-mache masks of Sita from the Bengali Durga Puja, dance costumes and Kathakali headdresses from Kerala, Thanjavur ivories, Company prints, Malay shadow puppets, Kalighat woodcuts, Nayaka bronzes, Andhra textiles, Javanese paintings and Burmese embroidery.
J.P.Losty on the historical background
Losty, J.P., The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts, The British Library, 2008
Mewar and its Rāṇās
It was not, however, for reasons of personal or state piety that Rāṇā Jagat Siṅgh of Mewar (r. 1628–52) commissioned his lavishly illustrated Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts towards the end of his reign. The Mewar Rāṇās ruled their state as vicegerents of Ekliṅgjī, a form of the god Śiva, while their personal devotions like most of the rulers of Rajasthan were paid to Kṛṣṇa in one or other of his forms. Mewar in southern Rajasthan comprises a more fertile plain to the east and a more arid region to the west where it is divided by the Aravalli Hills that cut across Rajasthan.
Mewar and Gwalior, to the north-east of Rajasthan, were the two leading centres of Hindu culture in north India in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but were destined to be overrun by the armies of the Muslim Mughals. The Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556– 1605) was intent on subjecting as much as possible of northern India and the adjacent north-western territories to his rule; his empire at its height stretched from Afghanistan to Assam and from Sind to Orissa. Even the princes of Rajasthan who had managed to maintain a precarious independence since the first Muslim invasions of India in the late twelfth century were forced into submission.
Only Mewar refused to submit to Akbar, even after the capture and sack of its capital Chittaur in 1568. The court of Mewar had first retreated to Lake Pichola in a valley in a spur of the Aravallis, where Rāṇā Udai Siṅgh (r. ca.1540–72) had founded a more easily defensible city named after himself and had begun building a palace in 1567. Driven eventually from Udaipur also, his son Pratāp Siṅgh (r. 1572–97) took refuge in the small village of Chavand in the southern part of the kingdom. When Akbar’s son Jahāngīr (r. 1605–27) renewed the assault on Mewar early in his reign, even Chavand was taken in 1609 and Pratāp Siṅgh’s son Amar Siṅgh (r. 1597–1620) became little more than a bandit chief in the hills before finally bowing to the inevitable and surrendering to Prince Khurram, the future Emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–58), at Gogunda in February 1615. He was received with kindness and, unlike all other www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts 5 Rajput chiefs, neither his personal attendance at the Mughal court nor the giving of his daughters to the imperial zenana were required. Military service as a commander in the Mughal army was also not exacted from him, although it was from his sons and chiefs. Both his son Karaṇ Siṅgh (r. 1620–28) and grandson Jagat Siṅgh (r. 1628–52) attended the Mughal court, although as a consequence they were deemed at the Mewar court to have lost precedence to those who did not perform such service at the imperial capital. This was one reason therefore why the Rāṇās of Mewar regarded themselves as superior to all the other chiefs of Rajasthan, who to a large extent went along with their claims even allowing their Mewari wives precedence over all their other wives. The other reason was their illustrious descent, for the Sisodiyā princes of Mewar claimed descent from the Sun and numbered among their ancestors Rāma himself.
From 1615, therefore, Amar Siṅgh was able to return to Udaipur and to restart work on the palace begun by his grandfather and, after his death, the work was carried on by his son Karaṇ Siṅgh. Walls, halls, courtyards and pleasure pavilions rose rapidly upon one another around the bluff on the east side of the Pichola lake until, by the mid-seventeenth century, the palace had assumed much of the appearance it has today (fig. 1). Only the pavilions and garden crowning the northern end of the palace remained to be added early in the next century. Karaṇ Siṅgh seems to have been too preoccupied with his building work to have much time for commissioning paintings and manuscripts and it was left to his son and successor Jagat Siṅgh to begin to restock the Royal Library destroyed in 1568 with the Mughal sack of Chittaur. After commissioning some smaller illustrated texts at the beginning of his reign, in the 1640s he turned his attention to the large religious and epic texts of Hinduism, of which the manuscripts of the Rāmāyaṇa are the crowning achievement.6
Painting in Mewar
Although we can be certain that the walls of all the Rajput palaces were decorated with wall paintings in the mediaeval period, scarcely any have survived. All that survives of Hindu painting from this period is manuscript painting and with very few exceptions (cloth scrolls for example) all are of the loose-leaf format known as pothī, a Hindi term derived from the Sanskrit pustaka, meaning ‘book’.
The earliest writing material used in India consisted of prepared palm-leaves and the shape of such manuscripts was necessarily very wide but not very high. Even when paper reached the plains of India in the fourteenth century, traditional manuscripts made of this new material imitated the shape of palm-leaf manuscripts. Sheets of paper were made or cut so that they were always wider than they were high. The leaves were written upon parallel to the long side and were consulted by turning them over along the long axis, so that on the verso the text would be upside down in relation to that on its recto but the right way up in relation to the next recto.
Mewar was a major centre for the production of such pothī manuscripts with illustrations in the sixteenth century, both of religious texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (now dispersed) and of devotional poems such as Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda (CSMVS Museum, Mumbai), both texts dealing with the exploits of Viṣṇu’s other major avatar Kṛṣṇa. Their illustrative style is one-dimensional and the rhythmically lively figures in profile confront each other amidst flowering trees or within schematic renderings of architecture, all brightly coloured against a dark background.
The latter is often divided into two by a wavy white line with a lighter blue element above suggesting that the line marks a horizon, but while the upper part may indeed represent the sky, the lower part does not represent a receding landscape leading back to it. At this stage this is simply a bicoloured non-representational background. The paintings normally occupy most of one side of the page. The text if from a small series of verses was written along the top and if from a large work on the back of the folio. It would seem to have been the intention to illustrate every verse of the former type and as much as possible of the latter, the ideal being a type of illustrated manuscript in which the text was superfluous and the narrative was carried along by the illustrations.
Chavand is in southern Mewar and was temporarily out of the reach of the Mughal armies. There, in 1605, was produced a series of paintings illustrating the verses of a Rāgamālā, verses that attempt to describe the musical modes or rāgas and whose imagery was interpreted by artists in their compositions. This is a loose-leaf, almost square, series of 42 painted pages, with the text inscribed at the top. Its format indicates awareness of similar loose-leaf series done for other Rajput patrons responding to the upright format of contemporary Mughal book production. The artist www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts 7 of the Chavand series named as Nisaratī (Naṣīr al-Dīn) was obviously a Muslim. He continued the tradition of placing his figures against a dark ground often divided into two by the wavy white line. His figures remained silhouetted in stark outlines against the ground, but their lines were somewhat softened from the angularity of the earlier sets. He also introduced for the first time a rocky landscape screened by trees, a compositional format much employed by later artists.
When Chavand was finally overrun by the Mughals in 1609 Rāṇa Pratāp Siṅgh’s son Amar Siṅgh surrendered to Prince Khurram in February 1615. Both his son and grandson, Karaṇ Siṅgh, who was born in 1584, and Jagat Siṅgh, who was born in 1605, were made to attend the Mughal court. In due course both princes became familiar with the habits of the Mughals. Khurram took Karaṇ Siṅgh back to the Mughal court then at Ajmer, where the Emperor Jahāngīr remarks in his memoirs that he loaded him with presents valued at 200,000 rupees and made him a grandee of the empire with a mansab of 5,000 horse. He must also have become fairly intimate with Khurram, as he went with him on his first great military expedition to the Deccan in 1616, and with him had rejoined Jahāngīr in Mandu a year later when Khurram was given the title of Shāh Jahān.
The young Jagat Siṅgh had paid his first visit to Jahāngīr at Ajmer in July 1615, staying until February 1616, and made a considerable impression on Jahāngīr who records in his memoirs that ‘Kunwar Karaṇ’s ten-year-old son Jagat Siṅgh came to pay homage and deliver a letter from his father and grandfather, Amar Siṅgh. Traces of nobility and aristocratic lineage were visible in his countenance. I won him over by giving him a robe of honour.’
Jagat Siṅgh’s further spells of duty at the Mughal court can be traced in Jahāngīr’s memoirs between September 1616 and May 1623, when the court was at Ajmer or Agra, while he also served in the army in the Deccan. Karaṇ Siṅgh and Jagat Siṅgh were clearly familiar with the habits of the Mughals. Jahāngīr had thought it politic to impress Karaṇ Siṅgh by showering presents on the young warrior, whose whole life had been spent fighting the Mughals and who knew nothing of palaces and the arts of peace. An artist was at hand to record the reception of Khurram at Ajmer in 1615 when he brought with him Karaṇ Siṅgh, the son of the defeated Rāṇā, and his presence at court is recorded in various paintings.
Karaṇ Siṅgh must have sat for an artist for his likeness to have been taken and, as Jahāngīr was so anxious to impress the young prince, he would surely have been shown the finished painting. Perhaps even Akbar’s great manuscript of the Rāmāyaṇa completed in 1588 was brought to Ajmer or to Mandu to impress the Sisodiyā princes with Jahāngīr’s knowledge of their ancestry, while Jagat Siṅgh of course may have seen it at Agra. Unlike his father, who never seems to have gone farther north than Ajmer, Jagat Siṅgh would have known Agra. What the effect of his first sight of Jahāngīr at Ajmer www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts
and the magnificence of the Mughals must have been on this ten year old boy, who had been born and had lived for all of his young life as a rebel in the barren hills of Mewar, can easily be imagined.
Jagat Siṅgh must have come to know of the illustrated manuscripts glorifying the histories of the ancestors of the Mughals: Genghis Khān, Timur, Bābur and Akbar. The germ of the idea of producing a Rāmāyaṇa manuscript on a similarly epic scale as a kind of family history of his own ancestors may then have been implanted in Jagat Siṅgh’s mind at an early date, as a Rajput rejoinder to their alien overlords by invoking Rāma’s righteous rule. For paradoxical as it might seem, the earliest known illustrated manuscripts of the Rāmāyaṇa are all Mughal.
Akbar had ordered this text as well as the other Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, to be translated into Persian to increase understanding between his Muslim and Hindu subjects and the first illustrated version was presented to him in 1588. Another imperial version is known from 1594 that was owned by Akbar’s mother Hamīda Bānū Begum, who had the manuscript brought to her on her deathbed. It has been plausibly suggested that she felt a particular affinity with the sufferings of Sītā, for she and her husband Humāyūn were driven into exile by rebellions in 1540 and endured great hardship in crossing the deserts of Rajasthan and Sind, where she gave birth to Akbar in 1542.
Two further Mughal versions are associated with Mughal noblemen. There must, however, have been an earlier iconographic tradition of illustrating the Rāmāyaṇa for Mughal artists, many of them Hindus, to draw upon, as many details in the first imperial Mughal version such as the crowns and dress of Rāma and his brothers are derived from mediaeval Indian exemplars. Earlier Rajput examples must have perished in the storming of Hindu strongholds such as Gwalior and Chittaur by the Mughals. Akbar’s great Rāmāyaṇa manuscript now in Jaipur has not unfortunately been published sufficiently for it to be possible for meaningful comparisons to be drawn either with other Mughal versions or with later Rajput ones.
The earliest surviving Rajput Rāmāyaṇa comes from a court in central India from c. 1635–40 in the extremely simple but expressive Malwa style, with which Jagat Siṅgh is unlikely to have been acquainted. Even if he had been, it could only have served to reinforce his understanding of the difficulties in immediately setting about so immense a project. Not only would it be hard to recruit enough artists to illustrate it on a comparable or superior scale to that of the Mughal version, but he would also have realised that Mewar painting was simply not at that stage a sophisticated enough vehicle. It was fortunate, therefore, that one artist then appeared — Sāhib Dīn — who was able to render the story in a way that realised Jagat Siṅgh’s vision of rivalling the Mughal version in complexity, but it was to be twenty years before Sāhib Dīn reached the necessary level of artistic sophistication to be able to achieve it.
Between the Chavand Rāgamālā of 1605 and the next dated document of Mewar painting, another Rāgamālā of 1628 by Sāhib Dīn, there is little evidence of painting activity at the Mewar court. Karaṇ Siṅgh was busy with the completion of the new palace at Udaipur. Some paintings in the so-called ‘Popular Mughal’ style seem to have been made by visiting artists in Mewar at this time. Popular Mughal painting is a broken down version of the imperial style that accommodated the ‘silhouette’ tradition of Rajput painting to the high ‘bird’s eye’ viewpoint of the Mughal style.
Manuscripts and paintings in this tradition, as well as some imperial-quality works, may well have started being collected during the last few years of Amar Siṅgh’s reign and during that of Karaṇ Siṅgh. Some works in a more obviously Mewar style can be attributed to this period also. Both Karaṇ Siṅgh and Jagat Siṅgh would have been given portraits of Jahāngīr. There are at least two near-contemporary portraits of the Emperor by Mewar artists based on a Mughal portrait of the Emperor seated (fig. 2), here adapted to Rajput taste with handmaidens fanning him. A dispersed Rasamañjarī of 1620-25 (fig. 3) is indicative of the sort of work being done in the court studio in which the Mewar style has been influenced in its approaches to landscape and architecture by Popular Mughal work and in its bands of scrollwork by Malwa painting (Rajput work from central India). The text is concerned with the description and classification of nāyikās and nāyakas (heroines and heroes in a literary genre) and it has been suggested that the hero of the series is possibly based on the appearance of Karaṇ Siṅgh. As compared with the earlier — almost square pages of the Chavand Rāgamālā, the Rasamañjarī has now adopted a rectangular upright format with the relevant panel of text at the top of each page similar to other sets produced for Rajput patrons.
