Mewar and its Ramayan
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'The Mewar Ramayana'
'The Mewar Ramayana/ Dawn/Guardian News Service/ August 26, 2008
[In 2008] The British Library has brought the Ramayana to London, mounting a remarkable exhibition that showcases 120 breathtaking miniatures from what is probably the most beautiful version of the story ever painted the 17th-century Ramayana commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (1628-52). This found a home in Britain thanks to the Scottish scholar Colonel James Tod (1782-1835), author of the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, whose almost complete absorption into Rajasthani culture led one rival to complain that he was “too much of a Rajpoot himself to deal with Rajpoots”.
The Mewar Ramayana — a seven-volume work that was produced by at least three different scriptoria and once included more than 400 paintings — is arguably the masterpiece of Rajasthani painting, and is certainly one of the supreme monuments of 17th-century Indian art. This great manuscript, one of the most spectacular of the many unseen treasures in the British Library's Indian collections, forms the core of the exhibition; yet the lavish show includes a huge range of other representations of the epic, demonstrating the way that the Ramayana has spread not only across India, but through the whole of south-east Asia, where it has worked its way into Buddhist and Chinese scripture and adapted itself to almost every known form of traditional media, from miniature and scroll painting to dance, drama, opera, shadow puppetry and, most recently, film and television.
As the exhibition shows through sound archive recordings and looped videos of the TV series, film posters and contemporary live performances of the epic in towns, villages and forest clearings across the subcontinent, the Ramayana — unlike the ancient epics of Europe, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Ring saga, which are now the province mostly of academics and of literature classes — is very much a living epic. Bards still tour villages telling the story with the help of painted scrolls, while singers sing devotional hymns recalling the valour of Lord Rama or the faithfulness of his Sita. Even more remarkably, some castes of wandering storytellers still know the 24,000-verse epic in its entirety.
An anthropologist friend of mine once met one such storyteller in a little village in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Despite being illiterate, this particular bard knew the Mahabharata which, with its 100,000 slokas, is longer even than the seven-book Ramayana; it is said to be roughly eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, and four times the length of the Bible. My friend asked the bard how he could remember so huge a poem. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and “read” from one pebble after another. Astonishingly, he said this was not the only epic he knew.
Resilience of Rajasthan
It is no accident that the Mewar Ramayana was composed in response to a catastrophe. In the late 16th century, as the Mughal emperors extended their control over Rajasthan, only the Ranas of Mewar managed to resist submitting to the authority of the Muslim rulers of Delhi. In the course of this resistance, their ancestral library, kept in the great fort of Chittor, was burned at the fall of that last redoubt to the Mughal war machine. Years later, when the Ranas re-established their capital at Udaipur, the Mewar Ramayana was commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh as part of the effort to rebuild his family's library, and it may have been under his influence that the manuscript came to link the Mewar dynasty with Rama (from whom it claimed descent), while connecting the demon Ravana with the Mughals. So it is that we see Ravana taking a ceremonial bath in a Mughal imperial tent, and appearing at his palace window to give darshan of himself as Jahangir and Shah Jahan did from the balcony of their apartments in the Red Fort; below the massed demons of Lanka give a salute to their king just as Mughal courtiers do in Mughal manuscripts.
The boldly coloured, wonderfully lively miniatures of the Mewar Ramayana are the principal glory of this exhibition. Most have never before been illustrated or shown in public, and up to now have been known only to a handful of art historians. While they vary in quality, and few achieve the fineness of detail of high imperial Mughal art, the best of them — especially those by master miniaturist Sahib Din — are some of the most swirlingly energetic images ever produced by Indian artists.
Often the more urban or palace images are compartmentalised into two or three separate areas by architectural frames and blocks of primary colour. In contrast, the rural scenes tend to be whole-frame, with the artists showing a marked and very Indian love of the natural world dark-skinned elephants charge, trunks and tails curling with pleasure, over forested Rajasthani mountains; peacocks, white ibis and red-crowned hoopoes flit between mango orchards and banana plantations; deer nuzzle each other in the forest, as wild boar root around for nuts and berries. All Indian life is here haggling shopkeepers decorate their stalls for a festival; groups of meditating sages and wizened ascetics with their hair woven into beehive topknots and dreadlocks sit on the ghats of a sacred river performing their austerities; palace ladies lounge amid the fountains of their zenanas and sit gossiping in their quarters; boatmen row villagers over rivers swollen in full Monsoon-spate; dancers dance, drummers drum and lovers love.
Especially effective are the fabulous scenes of the advance of the monkey army on Lanka against a vivid red ground, the monkeys move forward in great waves like a succession of breakers on a Goan beach. A blue-skinned Rama, with garlands of jasmine around his shoulders sits, bow at the ready, on the back of Hanuman; Lakshman follows, sitting astride a saddle of mango leaves, a quiver of arrows at the ready, and sword and dagger flashing from his waistband. Yet the Mewar artists can do pathos and beauty as well as energy and movement Sita is invariably shown large-eyed and melancholic, as she sits mournful and pensive in her red Rajasthani gagra choli amid Ravana's pleasure gardens, awaiting her lost lover.
The finest image of all, however, is the wonderfully comic image of the demon army trying to wake Ravana's brother, the giant Kumbhakarna as the portly, moustachioed figure of the colossus lies horizontally across the length of the miniature in his red underpants, mouth open to emit loud snores, Lilliputian demons swarm around him, poking him with tridents and knocking him with hammers and clubs. A band of singing women is brought forward to try to rouse him; another demon brings a braying ass; two elephants are manoeuvred to trumpet into one ear, while a dog-headed demon barks into the other. To one side lie the great pitchers of wine and heaps of meat — dead humans and monkeys — intended for the giant's breakfast when he awakes. The composition is set against a yellow ochre ground that highlights the brown bulk of the giant.
Around the central exhibit of the Mewar Ramayana is an array of supporting material that shows the spread of the epic from oral narrative to painted text, as well as from local dynastic history to pan-Asian epic stone images of Hanuman from Vijayanagara, papier-mache masks of Sita from the Bengali Durga Puja, dance costumes and Kathakali headdresses from Kerala, Thanjavur ivories, Company prints, Malay shadow puppets, Kalighat woodcuts, Nayaka bronzes, Andhra textiles, Javanese paintings and Burmese embroidery.
