Ramayana in Pahari Miniature Painting

Author(s): Jutta Jain
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 13

The Rāmāyana In Pahari Miniature Painting
Ramayana, which is a superior composition to the Mahabharata. ... The story is about Ram Chand Rajah of Oudh, whom they also call Ram. And the Hindus pay him worship as a god in human form.... And there are many contradictory idle tales like this, which the intellect is at loss whether to accept or reject. ... Hence it is evident that these events are not true at all, and are nothing but pure invention, and simple imagination, like the Shahnamah, and the stories of Amir Hamzah, or else it must have happened in the time of the dominion of the beasts and the jinns-but God alone knows the truth of the matter." 4
This note in his diary Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh indicates that Badaoni, basically a historian and searcher for facts and truth, was rather displeased with the task assigned to him to translate the Indian texts into the Persian language. Emperor Akbar had also commissioned the illustration of this Persian translation of the Rāmāyana but the pages of this have been lost. A copy of these is believed to be kept in the Freer Gallery, which is a complete manuscript with more than 350 pages and 135 illustrations. Illustrations to the Rāmacaritamānasa of poet Tulasidāsa are found in the Museum fur Indische Kunst, Berlin (West Germany) as some inscriptions on the reverse of the miniatures indicate. Although these fourteen miniatures have been executed in the rather late style of Pahari painting during the 19th century, often with a stale impression, one can perceive, in some of the miniatures, the impact of bhakti, for example in the scenes depicting the slaying of Rāvana and Sita's fire ordeal.
The Rāmāyana miniatures of the third type are based on local stories of themes connected with the Rāma legend. These legends and stories form the local oral tradition that prevailed simultaneously with the 'high' Sanskritic or classical one. The illustrations for the Rāma legend of this type were not necessarily painted by professional painters or on commission from a patron, Often the bards and storeytellers themselves, who wandered from village to village to give their performances, created their own paintings. These paintings served as illustrative demonstrations to the audiences, while the bards were narrating the story. Whereas nowadays the bards have ceased to wander from place to place to perform their storey-telling sessions, a large number of their paintings, however, have survived and are evidences of their