Lyrical Visions Paintings from North India

Lyrical Visions
Paintings from North India
Metropolitan Museum, New York
December 3, 2011 – May 28, 2012

Paintings produced in the north Indian regional courts of Malwa, Mewar, Bundi, Sirohi, Marwar, Agra, and Gujarat from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century are often visual representations of poetic verse, attempts to give form to moods engendered by music, and interpretations of the great religious epics. The style and metaphorical presentation of this "lyrical" painting tradition has its roots in illustrated manuscripts made for Jain and Hindu patrons. In the fifteenth century, Jain patrons from Gujarat commissioned illustrated texts recounting the miracles of Mahavira. As the audience already knew the content, artists organized the segmented narrative to visually map complex ideological relationships. In the early sixteenth century, Rajput texts illustrating Hindu epics such as the Bhagavata Purana expanded upon the visual strategies of the Jain manuscripts by introducing a vibrant palette. Both the Jain and the Hindu paintings freely juxtapose events occurring at different times and places and employ an iconography of gesture to articulate the narrative. In the seventeenth century, a new interest in representing the emotional essence of poetic texts emerged. A popular source of imagery was Keshav Das's 1591 Rasikapriya, which examines the divine love of Krishna and Radha. The paintings inspired by this text give form to a range of moods and categories of love. Also popular was Jayadeva's erotically charged Gita Govinda, which gave rise to pictures that emphasize longing and rejection as a way to articulate Krishna and Radha's passion. In depictions related to Ragamala literature, the focus is on representing musical modes and allegorically expressing the moods they engender. Contact with artists from the Mughal workshops influenced Rajput artistic production beginning in the early seventeenth century. However, the isolation of some Rajput courts, especially those in Malwa, allowed for a continuation of older painting styles. Mughal pictures emphasize the realistic portrayal of people and events and the accurate rendering of minute details. In contrast, the Rajputs rejected the depiction of everyday life and focused instead on boldly presenting archetypal forms, divine manifestations, and abstract ideals.

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The lost temples of India

The Mysteries of Asia six-part video series was originally produced for the Learning Channel. During this segment, historians and others examine temples built in India more than 1,000 years ago. They remain quite intriguing, though today's tourists rarely visit them. Records reveal that trained elephants had to drag millions of stone blocks to help erect these structures. The program notes that due to the temples' size, the U.S. Senate, Versailles, the Houses of Parliament, and St. Paul's Basilica in Rome could all fit within a single one of them. Michael Bell narrates as footage and animated maps are used to help viewers learn more about what these ancient structures look like and why they were built. Asia is a continent steeped in ancient cultures, religions, and buildings. In this intriguing program, we are transported to this exotic land and examine the mysteries behind some of the most fascinating structures found there. Southern India has the largest temple complexes ever built. In "Lost Temples of India", we examine these 1,000-year-old temples adorned with intricate and beautiful sculptures. We learn how the kings used large herds of trained elephants to drag the millions of stone blocks into place and how these temples are virtually unknown and unvisited by Western tourists. Truth or fiction, the stories of Mysteries of Asia will amaze and delight.

Powerful words

From Cambridge University Library

10 november 2011

A major exercise in ‘linguistic archaeology’ has set out to complete a comprehensive survey of Cambridge University Library’s South Asian manuscript collection, which includes the oldest dated and illustrated Sanskrit manuscript known worldwide.

Written on now-fragile birch bark, palm leaf and paper, the 2,000 manuscripts in the collection express centuries-old South Asian thinking on religion, philosophy, astronomy, grammar, law and poetry.

The project, which is led by Sanskrit-specialists Dr Vincenzo Vergiani and Dr Eivind Kahrs and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will study and catalogue each of the manuscripts, placing them in their broader historical context. Most of the holdings will also be digitised by the Library and made available through the Library’s new online digital library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/).

“In a world that seems increasingly small, every artefact documenting the history of ancient civilisations has become part of a global heritage to be carefully preserved and studied,” explained Dr Vergiani, who is in the University’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. “Among such artefacts, manuscripts occupy a distinctive place – they speak to us with the actual words of long-gone men and women, bringing their beliefs, ideas and sensibilities to life.”

He added: “One reason this collection is so important is because of the age of many of the manuscripts. In the heat and humidity of India, materials deteriorate quickly and manuscripts needed to be copied again and again. As a result, many of the early Indian texts no longer exist.”

In fact, some of the oldest holdings of the Library’s South Asian collection were discovered not in India but in Nepal, where the climate is more temperate. In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance.

An early catalogue of part of the collection in 1883 found among its treasures a 10th-century Buddhist Sanskrit manuscript from India – the oldest dated and illustrated Sanskrit manuscript known worldwide.

More than half of the collection is in Sanskrit, a language that has dominated the literary culture of pre-modern South Asia for almost three millennia. Its earliest attestations are found in the Vedic hymns (texts that are still central to Hinduism), dating from the end of the second millennium BC.

“The word Sanskrit means refined or perfected. From a very early stage, its speakers were obsessed with handing down their sacred texts intact,” said Dr Vergiani. “Out of this developed an attention to how the language works. A grammatical tradition arose that produced, around the 4th century BC, the work of Pāṇini, an amazing intellectual achievement and arguably the beginning of linguistics worldwide, which made the language constant, stable and transmissible.”

It is this robustness that Dr Vergiani believes explains how the language became so prevalent across South Asia – a situation that has been likened to the spread of Latin across Europe: “It was used by religious figures and royalty, scholars and scientists, administrators and artists. Well into modern times, Sanskritic culture was very much alive throughout India, and the language is still used by a number of intellectuals and religious figures today.”

The widespread use of Sanskrit as the language of power and communication across South Asia makes the collection at the Library so significant. The manuscripts, written in centuries that spanned momentous political and economic change, are an invaluable and untapped source for understanding the pre-colonial past of South Asia, and therefore its present.

By combining traditional philological methods with advanced information technology, the project will make these extraordinary documents available in new ways, helping to further research on the intellectual traditions, religious cults, literature and political ideas of South Asia.