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Reading Visuals: Timeless Voyages on the Epic Ocean Gulammohammed Sheikh All photographs courtesy the author. Rama sends the Monkey leader Angada to Ravana with an ultimatum from the Siege of Lanka series, Guler, c. 1725, attributed to Pandit Seu, courtesy Howard Hodgkin collection, London.
6 ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1 Few narratives have continued to fire Indian or Asian imagination over the centuries as have the stories of the Ramayana. They have been painted scores of times in every possible medium and form with an amazing range of interpretations. Among the huge corpus of illustrated manuscripts, three sets from the Mughal, Mewar and Pahadi qalams stand out to provide me enough ground for inquiring into various aspects of the Ramayana’s visualisation, but I have added some images from other schools to expand the scope of reading the visuals. Significantly, the oldest of these sets is a translated (most likely) prose version in Persian made at the Mughal atelier of Akbar (1588). In the absence of existing examples of earlier prototypes (possibly destroyed in the Mughal campaigns of Gwalior and Chittaur in 1558) it is safe to assume that the attempt was to visualise the epic quite afresh, barring some iconographic details. In other words, improvisation served as a basis for conceptualising and executing the image through the use of some available prototypes. The eclectic internationalist visual language that evolved at the Mughal workshop combined aspects of Persian picturemaking with a variety of regional Indian modes and elements of illusionism drawn from European prints, and the complexity of the project was compounded by the task of having to visualise a multi-layered text. Added to such unprecedented challenges was the question of illustrating a sacred text although its sanctity was somewhat diluted because it was a Persian translation, which was not necessarily painted by or meant for believers alone. Nonetheless the illustrated text had a special appeal for the target audience. We are told that the second imperial version of the Ramayana (1594) was “owned by Akbar’s mother Hamida Banu Begum, who had the manuscript brought to her on her deathbed. It has been plausibly suggested that she felt a particular affinity with the suffering of Sita, for she and her husband Humayun were driven into exile by rebellions in 1540 and endured great hardship…”. 1 At another level it served the political purpose of appropriating a mythical legacy—if the overlap between the characters of Dasharatha and Akbar, in a sub-imperial Ramayana with a blue-skinned prince Rama in front of his three brothers seated before an ageing king, is any indication. The principal change from preceding practices that the Mughal visualisation King Dasharatha with his sons and wives, Mughal, c. 1600, courtesy the National Museum, New Delhi.
Page 2 and 3: Contents EDITORIAL 3 READING VISUAL
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Page 31 and 32: Myth Retold: Variants of the Story
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Wayang Kulit: Where Ravana Dances i
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Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo the Javan
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I could explain what Malaysia is, c
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when a member of your family is suf
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Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo 77 Hanuma
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Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo Ravana or
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closest to the audience is the most
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Wayang Kulit during the 1970s, 1980
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Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo Winged in
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the aim was to ‘museumise’ this
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