A Darshan a Day

Almost nothing in this gallery was painted to hang on a wall. These are manuscript pages — leaves from illustrated books of the Bhagavata Purana, Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, Keshavdas’s Rasikapriya, Surdas’s Sursagar — meant to be lifted one at a time from a cloth wrapper, held close, and looked at while the verse on the back was sung aloud. Most of those books were later cut up and sold leaf by leaf, which is why so many captions here say “dispersed”. The pages in this collection are scattered between Cleveland and New York; their brothers and sisters are in Delhi, London, Boston and private hands.

Each court had a hand of its own. Mewar and Malwa work in flat bands of pure colour with figures in strict profile. Bundi and Kota love dense foliage, animals and monsoon skies. Bikaner learned Mughal softness. Kishangarh invented the long-eyed, long-browed face that has become the face of Radha everywhere. The Pahari workshops of the Punjab hills — above all the family of Manaku and Nainsukh — brought a quietness nobody has matched.

The conventions are worth knowing, because they are not mistakes. A figure repeated five or six times in one picture is one person over an hour, not a crowd. A body turned impossibly at the waist marks someone who is more than human. Flat colour with no shadow means the land is as awake as the people standing on it. And a corner of the page is often given to the poet himself, sitting in a hut with cymbals — a reminder that the picture is a song being sung, not an event being reported.

There is a vocabulary too. The Yamuna is never scenery; she is a companion who hides the lovers and carries their messages. The kunj is the grove, the still centre of everything. The sakhi is the friend who serves the meeting of the Divine Pair and asks nothing for herself — the stance a devotee of the Radha Vallabh Sampradaya takes up. Birds are words: the parrot carries messages, the koel’s call is unbearable to anyone waiting, the peacock announces rain.

None of these painters belonged to the sampradaya, and no painting here is a temple image. They are what the wider world of Braj devotion looked like in the centuries after Śrī Hit Harivansh — the same stories, the same countryside, the same songs, seen through the workshops of a dozen courts.