The illustrated Ramayana from Andhra Pradesh
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.
