Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

they sit in mournful contemplation”. 2
Elsewhere, the triple actions of Rama
lifting, stretching and aiming the bow
stretches the scope of the dramatic
moment in rhythmic stages of time, in
the manner of repeating a stanza in a
poetic recitation.
Quite often, this repeated
representation of the supra-heroic or
the miraculous feats of the
protagonist increases his iconicity
manifold. The absence of continuous
narration, on the other hand, makes
him a mortal human hero; the poetic
narrative is restrained by a quest for
plausibility within a one-action-oneframe
constraint. In pre-Mughal
practice, the opening of horizontal
folios held by loose strings
necessitated the turning of the page
upwards by both hands for a lateral
reading of images. In comparison the
vertically bound book held in one
hand with the page turned by the
other involved a reading ‘into’ the
page to access the vista of landscape
tended by a locally grown
naturalism. It changed the way of
‘looking’ and ‘reading’. In the
preceding practices the mise-enscene
was construed through props
charged with synoptic motifs of the
environment: like the sun or the
moon to denote the time of day or
night, or the tree, monument, lake or
Reading Visuals – Gulammohammed Sheikh
river to define locations. These
motifs alongside the equally potent
and abbreviated figuration were
meant to be projected upon the space
of the stage and animate it rather
than recede into the distance as in
other pictorialisations of the idea of
landscape.
Interestingly, however, the episodic
nature of visual narrative held within
the vertical folio seems to avoid
climactic dramatisation (although
arguably it may contain that potential)
without losing its focus on the
narrative that holds the individual
events. The formal incorporation of
the device of the hashiya or margin as
a parallel pictorial register outside the
frame opens up a potentially
alternative visual zone to extend the
narrative. A full-scale illusionism that
takes naturalism into the ambivalent
territory of realism, which Ravi Varma
attempted, did not enter Indian
painting for another three centuries.
The portrayal of action swings
tantalisingly between the static and
the animated and refuses to be cast
into binaries. In that sense the new
naturalism is self-assured and based
upon local prerogatives. Despite
employing some relativity in the
proportions of figures and
backgrounds and drawing upon some
aspects of European landscape, it
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