HYDERABAD, DECCAN, INDIA, CIRCA 1760-80

With their arresting compositions of a lone woman wandering in a lush yet curiously stark landscape, these paintings may be the work of the same hand. Stylistically, many of the details – the boldly-patterned trees, the inclusion of birds in the sky, the gently curving and slightly undulating horizon – resemble those of a Ragamala in Berlin, produced in the Deccan around the mid-eighteenth century (published in Ernst Waldschmidt and Rose Leonore, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration, Berlin, 1975). The Dakhani Urdu inscriptions at the top and on the reverse strengthen this attribution.

Though the inscriptions identify these paintings as depicting the Gauri and Jetsri Raginis respectively, the iconography of the latter more closely resembles the standard iconography of the Gujari Ragini, which Klaus Eberling defines as ‘a woman with a vina and a raised hand, seated on a pad of leaves in the forest’. Such a mismatch is, however, not unusual: Eberling notes that Deccani series often have scenes which are incorrectly identified by their contemporary inscriptions (Klaus Eberling, Ragamala Paintings, New York, 1972, p.194). Both paintings encourage reflection on natural as well as artistic beauty: in the one, the subject’s attention is captured by a sapling in bloom; in the other, she points at a bird perched in a tree, whose form pleasingly mirrors the carved gilt handle of her vina.