Provenance:
Moti Chandra, Mumbai
Pramod Chandra, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964-2014
American Private Collection
A dark-skinned young woman clad in a diaphanous red sari decorated with white rosettes is dancing on the terrace in front of a pavilion. Six female musicians play the music to her dance, three playing on trumpet, drum, and cymbals to the left, and another three playing on vina, sarod, and cymbals to the right. The figures are placed on a brilliant-patterned carpet, in front of which are a garden and fountain. The pavilion itself is painted in various floral, arabesque, and geometric designs representing painted walls, tilework, and possibly even textile coverings, save for the space round the blank doorway serving to highlight the dancer. This is in white with delicately-painted niches containing glassware and fish. Behind, a green ground with large stylized flowers yields to the sky above with tangled clouds.
There is no text or inscription to identify this raga, but a boy, Krishna sometimes, dancing to the accompaniment of girl musicians is one of the iconographies of Megha raga. Megha, meaning ‘clouds,’ naturally was taken to signify the onset of the rainy season, celebrated with dancing and music while the clouds roll in from the Indian Ocean. This subject is found in the Hyderabad ragamalas from the second half of the 18th century and also in Murshidabad at the same time. However in ragamalas from the Deccan we also find a dancing girl as the principal, as in two examples in the Asiatische Museum, Berlin. All of these examples have stormy skies, but the tangle of white and blue in the sky surely signifies something similar. Another painting from this series, also without text, is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
The paintings of the various ragamala sets in this style are brilliantly colorful, consisting of flat planes of color each highly decorated with intricate floral or geometric patterns representing the main elements of the composition in architecture, carpets, and clothes. This style shows a distinct indebtedness to the late 16th-century style of the northern Deccan exemplified by its famous dispersed ragamalas. This style, still current in a descendant albeit in a somewhat modified form, would certainly have appealed to the Rajput nobles serving in the Mughal armies based in Burhanpur and Aurangabad.
J.P. Losty, December 2019
