Durga’s Warning given to Kamsa, Page from the ‘Large’ Bhagavata Purana series

Despite the wicked Kamsa, king of Mathura, vowing to kill all the children born to his imprisoned sister Devaki since it had been foretold that one would kill him, the baby Krishna has already been born to her and was unharmed.  Through divine intervention casting a profound sleep over everyone, her husband, Vasudeva, had already taken the child to a foster mother Yashoda across the River Jumna in Gokul and exchanged him for the child who had been born to her. This was in fact not an ordinary baby but the goddess Yogamaya, ‘Illusion,’ whom he placed beside his sleeping wife and then replaced his own shackles.

Alerted by the watchmen that his sister Devaki had given birth again, Kamsa hastens to her side to wrest the child from her and to destroy it.  We see the watchmen waking the king on the left, alerting him to the birth, and then Kamsa wresting the child from the imprisoned Devaki’s arms while her husband, Vasudeva, looks on.  Devaki’s protective gesture for her daughter is most moving, as Kamsa roughly grasps the baby’s arm.  Vasudeva is clearly perplexed as to what to tell his wife.  Once outside, however, as Kamsa tries to dash the child’s head against a large rock she slips from his hands and assumes a form in the sky as the goddess Durga in the center of a fiery conflagration.  Complete with her eight arms and all her accoutrements, and with an admiring cast of heavenly divinities, she warns him that the child who would destroy him has already been born.

This large series, generally called the ‘Large’ Guler-Basohli Bhagavata Purana, shows an early vigorous Pahari style succumbing to the charms of a softer, Mughal-influenced type of painting style from Guler.  Both Archer (1973, vol. I, pp. 49-51) and Goswamy and Fischer (1992, p. 314) speculate that the basic idiom of the Bhagavata Purana is that of a pupil of Manaku, perhaps his son Fattu.  The influence of Manaku’s younger brother Nainsukh is also apparent.  Given the close links between Guler and Basohli it could have been prepared in either court studio.  After the death of his great patron Balwant Singh in Guler in 1763, Nainsukh took service with Raja Amrit Pal of Basohli and seems to have remained there for the rest of his life.  Fattu was charged with taking Nainsukh’s ashes to the Ganges at Kuruksetra in 1778, presumably because he lived at Basohli also and worked with his uncle.

Clearly several different hands were involved in this extensive series.  Some of the paintings are bordered in red, others blue.  The grouping and the naturalistic interaction of the figures are impossible to conceive of without the influence of Nainsukh.  We note the bearded watchman’s concern, Kamsa’s grasping of the child’s arm to wrest her from her mother, and Devaki’s sorrowful countenance as she hugs her daughter close, the child’s calm gaze at her would-be murderer, and Vasudeva’s inner turmoil as Kamsa gazes at him, perhaps surprised by his inaction—all this suggests Nainsukh’s influence on the next generation of artists at Guler and Basohli.  Nainsukh was influenced directly by the Mughal style of the Muhammad Shah period and softened the jagged outlines and harsh colors of the earlier Pahari styles towards a softer and more naturalistic style reflective of this Mughal influence.  This is felt in this series in the naturalistic groupings of the figures and their interaction, although the artists have not yet learned how to unify their compositions across large pages such as these but instead still compartmentalize the different groups.

This dispersed series of the Bhagavata Purana is one of the most important achievements of Pahari artists and the most influential in determining the development of Pahari painting at Guler, Basohli, and Kangra in the illustration of poetical Vaishnava texts.  Thirteen pages are published in Archer 1973 (Basohli 22i-xiii), but the series is widely dispersed among many public and private collections. 

J.P. Losty