Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
tender tale of the meeting, wooing,
caressing and ‘marrying’ of the ‘lovers’
before the doe departs. Expanded
temporality, seamlessly woven into
visuals, breaks the bounds of a ‘frame’.
Like the incredible story depicted, it
marries the fantastic and the real in a
tender union. And who could have
achieved such a feat but the Mewar
master Sahibdin?
The Mewar Studio
The master painter Sahibdin, who
was assigned to conduct the project,
had tried his hand at naturalistic
figuration in a portrait of Emperor
Jehangir earlier (1605-27) besides
continuing with the comparatively
abbreviated Mewar mode of figuration
and the use of a bright palette in the
Rasikpriya folios (1620-25). What
emerges in the Ramayana project at
the Mewar studio seems to combine as
well as challenge the new naturalism.
A unique vision is evolved by
reconfiguring and expanding the
devices of the Chawand (c. 1605) and
Rasikpriya models. The typical code
of using architectural motifs to divide
spaces now gives way to continuous
and flowing spaces to open up a wider
panorama of action while linking the
folios in a continuum. The evocation
of ambience, referencing features of
various terrains and landscapes,
creates a panorama much grander
than the initial prototypes. It is
immaterial whether Sahibdin was
conversant with Sanskrit or not; he
must have shared the local Mewari
dialect with the scribe when reaching
out to the story in the original. So by
implication the visualisation too can
be described as being in a Mewari
dialect. Here too the basis of
visualisation in the absence of a
precedent is improvisatory but,
enclosed within a unified code of a
local model and with fewer hands, it
retains a linguistic unity. The
individual hands are visible in the
sections painted by Sahibdin,
Manohar and some other unnamed
associates but, unlike the individual
and often diverse perceptions of
various hands in the Mughal version,
there are fewer anomalies. But the
project, despite the reversion of the
text to the original Sanskrit and the
horizontal format, remains
undoubtedly multi-layered: inscribed
by a Jaina scribe with a Muslim
painter Sahibdin at the helm aided by
his associates, including Manohar.
The nature of the narrative takes a
different course in the Mewar
Ramayana. Here the question of
making the narrative believable does
not arise because the narrative is part
of an established belief. The
dispositions for employing naturalistic