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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.