Exhibitions

Lot 9

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Vijay Sharma
Raga Saurath

- A ragamala - literally, a 'garland of ragas' - describes a gamut of ragas or musical forms. Ragas are a combination of notes with tonal variations. They trace their documentation to the 2nd century BC in Bharata's Natyashastra. "Music was considered to be of divine origin and capable of evoking a certain state of mind or mood (rasa) in the listener as well as in the musician." (Klaus Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, New Delhi: Ravi Kumar, 1973, p. 28) Each raga embodies a sentiment and is associated with a certain time in the day, or a particular season. In ragamala paintings, raginis - which are the derivatives of ragas - are referred to as the 'wives' or female aspects of the male raga. Subsequently, ragaputras were introduced to accommodate "additional melodies in systems which are composed of male and female ragas." (Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, p. 28)

"In courtly India, the period from the 16th to the 19th century, Ragas evolved into a complex, tripartite art form. While the musical Ragas themselves had ancient origins, they had been personified in poetry since the second century AD. At the time when Indian miniature painting was at its peak, these musical Ragas with poetic accompaniments came to be represented in paint." (Tessa Laird, "Ragas and Raginis," artnet.com, online). Just as the courtly artists referred to the music and written poetry to inspire their illustrations, musicians too studied both the poetry and paintings to help them interpret the ragas for the right moods and tones "...in a kind of artistic symbiosis." (Laird, online)

Mesakarna, a 16th century Brahmin, composed the treatise Ragamala with a set of verses describing individual ragas and raginis as "a personality of divine or aristocratic character. He also compared each mode as a voice of an animal or the sound of a human activity." (Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, p. 30) The six families of ragas are Bhairava, Malkosa, Hindola, Dipaka, Megha-mallara, and Shri raga. According to Mesakarna's classification, each of them consists of the main raga, five raginis and eight putras. Mesakarna's descriptions were visually difficult to portray, as he referred to a number of sounds. The miniaturists who created the first Pahari ragamalas turned these into visuals by bringing in the animals whose sounds and voices were mentioned.

In the contemporary revival of the Ragamala series in this exhibition, the artist has painted the personified raginis as beautiful women from the hills, with delicate features and gestures. The flora and fauna, depicting the terrain of the Kangra valley with smooth, flowing rivers, is captured with exactitude and refinement. The overall palette is soft but resilient. - A ragamala - literally, a 'garland of ragas' - describes a gamut of ragas or musical forms. Ragas are a combination of notes with tonal variations. They trace their documentation to the 2nd century BC in Bharata's Natyashastra. "Music was considered to be of divine origin and capable of evoking a certain state of mind or mood (rasa) in the listener as well as in the musician." (Klaus Ebeling,

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