Ramayana in Pahari Miniature Painting

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

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The Rāmāyaṇa In Pahari Miniature Painting
Hill states 30. A. Ghose later suggested Guler as the place of production. He had discovered that the miniatures bought by Coomaraswamy were originally from the collection of Raja Raghunath Singh of Guler (A.D. 1884-1920), a ruler of Guler31. Archer could verify in a conversation with the Raja's son Baldev Singh in the year 1954 that his father had sold those miniatures. He attributes this series to Guler, dated between A.D. 1725 and 173032.
How many pages of this series had originally existed, cannot be ascertained. Coomaraswamy had suggested a number between 50 and 10033. Here a series of 40 leaves, probably all belonging to this 'Siege of Lanka' series, from various Museums in India, Europe and America are presented and discussed. Following is the distribution of their locations:
Prince of Wales Museum (Bombay) Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) Metropolitan Museum ( New york)
British Museum (London)
Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio)
Collection George Bickford (Cleveland, Ohio)
Collection Howard Hodgkin (Chippenham, England)
The leaves of this series are found in two stages of execution:
1. fully painted and finished miniatures (9 leaves) and partly painted, but unfinished miniatures (3 leaves),
19 leaves
12
4
2
1
1
1
د.
33
leaf
33
33
2. black-and-white drawings which only show the motifs in black outline and are not painted at all (28 leaves). These form the larger group. The majority of them are in the Prince of Wales Museum (Bombay).
The leaves of this series are remarkably large in size. The whole miniature measures with border 53,5 cm in width and 80 cm in length. This fact caused Coomaraswamy to say that these miniatures might have been models for wallpaintings which needed only to be transferred from the paper to the wall34. Successive scholars mentioning this series adopted this view. J. C. French's words could be considered a standard statement in this connection that Indian miniatures
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