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It
has taken long, but slowly
and surely the work of the painters of the southern part of our country
is coming into sharp focus. Sculpture is another matter—for the sheer
brilliance of southern sculpture was always recognised —but time was
when one barely spoke of any traditional painting in the south, apart of
course from that called ‘Deccani.’ Every general survey, every
volume on Indian painting, almost naturally veered towards the schools
of miniature painting that flourished in the North: Jaina, Sultanate,
Mughal, Rajasthani, Pahari, and the like. All the debates and the
speculation was about them. It was as if painting practised in
the ateliers of the South was a poor cousin: to be noticed as a matter
of courtesy but not necessarily dwelt upon. Whatever the reasons for
it till now – and at least one is that it was slow in coming out of
royal repositories or public collections – things seem to be changing.
Attention is now being accompanied by enthusiasm. It is no longer a
matter of listing the southern centres, large or small, where painting
was seriously practised, but of the quality of the work that emanated
from it. On my part, I recall seeing with bedazzled eyes a volume of
what is now being widely referred to as ‘the Mysore Manuscript’ of
the Bhagavata Purana in the Binney collection. Densely filled
with paintings with accompanying text in Kannada, this single volume
alone is capable of challenging all our sad notions about the decline of
painting in India in the 19th century, for so exquisite is its
workmanship and so rich the imagination of which it is a product. From
the very first illustrated page in it, the reader/ viewer is taken hold
of and transported into a world of incredible visual excitement. As
action unfolds–Arjuna throws up a canopy of arrows over the Khandava
forest, men flee the Gomanta mountain on fire, the citadel of Narakasura
is stormed–rich, saturated colours invade the senses; streaks of gold
shimmer and gleam; tiny little figures bustle about, moving, embracing,
glancing, combating; seas surge, clouds rumble, elephants move with
incredible dignity. But in the work there is no attempt at creating any
‘effects’, or setting up theatrical contexts: for over everything
falls the even, warm light of deep devotion, bhakti. That this
‘Mysore Manuscript’ is not a lone swallow from the south is
increasingly clear, for there is other, equally compelling, work one now
knows about. However, regrettably, even at this time, little is being
published. It is against this context that I was especially delighted
some time back to receive, completely unsolicited, a copy of a book
written and published recently by a young scholar from Vishakhapatnam:
Sistla Srinivas. The entire volume is devoted to the study of a single
series of paintings – to call it an illustrated manuscript might be
excessive – that has the Ramayana as its theme. Titled "Rajamahendri
Ramayana Paintings", after the relatively little-known centre where
the work was done, Srinivas’s book is rich and resonant despite its
unpretentious appearance. For in it not only does he reproduce and
comment upon every single one of the 53 paintings that make the series
up: he also provides carefully researched art historical data relating
to the volume, establishes the cultural context in which the work was
produced, even reconstructs the route through which the volume
containing these paintings, now bound and gold-stamped in resplendent
leather, landed up at Hamburg in Germany. The manner in which he leads
one into the subject is engaging, and especially moving – and artless
– is his description of how, from his childhood, impressions about the
Ramayana started getting embedded in his mind to resurface later
when he, as a grown up researcher, chanced upon this series of
paintings. The gradual awakening, the realisation of the place of the
sacred text in our daily lives, the difficulties of accessing materials,
the excitement of pursuit, are all there, forming a frame within which
the study of this series of paintings is neatly set. It is fortunate
that there is a great deal of information about these Ramayana
paintings within the same volume. There is another series of 33
paintings dealing with sacred places that has survived. And Srinivas
draws our attention to it repeatedly. One knows, thus, through long
inscriptions in Telugu and Persian, that the series was painted by two
artists, Nandigam Nagesam and Kamaroutu Venkatesam, in 1757, and that
there is a descriptive note on each of the paintings, interpreting the
visual narrative. One can speculate that these very artists were
responsible for another, closely related, Ramayana series, one
leaf of which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But all this
amounts to information. The delight is in the work itself,
relatively simple and unpretentious as it is. For there imagination
takes over. In these leaves, sacred characters move with nimble ease and
then break suddenly into fierce action, birds tower over everything in
sight, unlikely rocks glisten and shine, and trees assume shapes that
belong not to nature but to the lyrical flow in the painters’ minds. |
