In 1611, a now well-forgotten cleric, William Laud became the Vice-President of St. John’s College, Oxford. In the two decades that followed, Laud had ascended to various posts—as dean of Chapel Royal, member of the privy council, bishop of London, chancellor of Oxford and finally as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the zenith of the Anglican Church. On 10th January 1645, however, good fortune ran out on Laud, when he was beheaded after being condemned by the House of Lords. His ‘crime’ was ostensibly high treason brought about by the accumulation of the powers vested in the church and State. He had attempted to impose liturgical harmony on the Church of Scotland, with tacit support of the King Charles I who saw in Laud’s persecutory fervor the means to smuggle in greater church-sanctioned control over the British Isles. Predictably, the Scots resisted. A small scale agitation against Laud’s ‘reforms’ turned into a riot and before long, it became a full-fledged violent conflagration that is now called the Bishop’s Wars of 1639-40. By 1649, following Laud, King Charles I himself was executed. Modern historians who assessed Laud conclude that he was the “worst appointment” or, more colorfully, “the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England”. To make matters more personal, the historian S. R. Gardiner wrote: “Genius he [Laud] had none, no power of sympathy with characters opposed to his own, no attractive force whatever. Men were to obey for their own good and hold their tongues.” For generations who have read English history, particularly the era of the Stuart monarchies, this image of Laud as an overzealous ecclesiastical bungler has largely stuck. Thomas Macaulay, historian and a controversial figure himself, pithily summed up Laud as a “ridiculous old bigot…superstitious old driveller”.
Yet, the reality of his ‘bigotry’ is more complicated. Laud may have been many things, but he certainly wasn’t a bigot in the simple-minded way Macaulay sought to portray him. Laud had increased funding for the University Chair in Hebrew, set up a new chair for the Professor of Arabic and had demonstrated “life-long interest in Oriental culture”. In 1640, Laud donated 1300 manuscripts that were in his collection, to the Bodleian Library. It is in this donation that we come across an album containing Persian calligraphy, Mughal paintings and, most importantly, the first instance of a folio of Ragamala paintings outside India. It was the first such copy in the UK and most likely in Europe. It isn’t clear when the first Ragamala paintings arrived in North America, but the ongoing show of this unique set of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is unlikely to be the first or the last. The Met has, at least, on one occasion in 1996, displayed “page(s) from a dispersed Ragamala series”. While the present day exhibit is, ostensibly, an affair for aficionados of Indian art, students of paintings, or for curious wanderers through museums; the Ragamala paintings at the Met is also a wonderful opportunity for all to come face to face with a world and ideas far removed from the humdrum of our daily lives in 2014. But, much like Laud’s era, these paintings are pregnant with creative tensions, interpretative strategems, and conceits that are easy to overlook or, worse, dismiss.
***
In its simplest form, a Ragamala painting is a visual representation of Ragas, or what are loosely called musical modes or scales. The word ‘Ragamala’ – a garland of Ragas – is used to indicate a specific or a group of paintings. It is not entirely clear when the name stuck for these paintings; but the act of evoking the musical moods of Ragas through painting seems to have a millennia long history. There are various Ragamala sets available from various centuries, and one suspects, many more await their discovery. Different Ragamala series have different Ragas that are painted in a variety of motifs. So, a raga called ‘Sri’, could be painted in one Ragamala set in 15th century Rajasthan in one particular way, the same raga could be depicted differently in18th century Bengal. One way of thinking about these paintings is to imagine a visual representation of, say, Beethoven’s 5th Symphony or Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’; the critical difference however that these paintings don’t seek to capture a song or a libretto but the underlying Raga in which many musical compositions are set.
But Ragas are mysterious musical ‘beings’ that resist easy delineation. Many who watch these Ragamala painting fall into the trap of thinking, or implicitly assuming, that a Raga name mentioned in a 16th century painting (say a Raga called “Bhairav”) is precisely the same as the Raga called “Bhairav” that is performed at, say, Lincoln Center in New York City. Implicit in this misunderstanding is the notion that Ragas are immutable, in theory and in practice. The historical reality is however less assured. Ragas undergo evolution, change names, take on new notes, drop some, assume new embellishments, fade away and reemerge in new forms with old names. Confounding this problem is that Indian music has rarely been subject to notation ~ a la Western classical music ~ that different contemporaneous “schools” of music have different ways of playing the same Raga. In an interesting exercise, the Carnatic musician T.M.Krishna decided to sing some of the Ragas as prescribed in an early 20th century text called ‘Sangita Sampradaya Pradarshini’ (loosely, Disseminator of Musical Traditions) – one of the few efforts to notate Indian music. What was revealed was that many of the staple Ragas of today have undergone structural changes to such an extent that most of today’s musicians would be hard pressed to recognize its ancestral form. In a way, his findings comport with what the evolutionary biologist and author Armand Leroi argues: “We don't often think of music as evolving, but everybody knows it has a history and it has traditions. But if you think about it, it really has evolved, it is changing continuously. There are all the same forces of change, variation, selection and recombination as different musical traditions join together, transmute and fuse and divide again. This is all the stuff that is familiar from our understanding of the biological world, but we see it here in music as well." Indians, and Indian music aficionados, are often reluctant to see their musical and artistic traditions as subject to historical forces and as byproducts of human contingency. This reluctance to believe that a Raga’s musical interiority, its anatomic structure is subject to morphological changes is in some ways understandable. After all, we do not hear a Raga sung in its 17th century iteration much in the way we do not see an archaeopteryx flying around. The tyranny of the here-and-now empiricism is hard to overcome, particularly when cultural chauvinism needs its traditions to be unchanging.
Beyond this question of evolving Ragas, there is a question of nomenclature as well. That the term ‘Raga’ has meant different things over times and geographies of India is to be expected – but more subtly, at any given time, what distinguishes a Raga from a scale or melody depends on how one seeks to define it. Over the centuries, the taxonomy of Ragas has depended on various methods of classificatory schema that has a touch of Borgesian playfulness. Musicians have adjudicated scales to be Ragas depending on their the tonic note (called ‘amsa’), end notes (‘nyasa’), first note (‘graha’), the relative capaciousness of the Raga (‘uttama’, ‘madhyama’, ‘adhama’), the speed at which they are to be sung (‘ghana’), the intrinsic swirls and drifts (‘naya’), the geographic origins of the Raga (‘desi’), the presence or absence of ‘foreign’ notes (‘anya svara’), the relative positions of the seven notes (‘mela’), parentage (‘janya’) and even gender of the Ragas. In the Ragamala paintings, there are “male” Ragas and “female” Ragas that are called ‘Raginis’. To wit, in different classification systems, the same Ragini can be attached to different Ragas. The northern and southern Indian musical traditions, called Hindustani and Karnatik, further differ in their taxonomical treatments – depending on when we look at them in history. Most museums, including the Metropolitan, when referring to the Ragamala series rarely think or agonize over the music and its nuances that inform the Ragamala painting. The obvious lures of focusing on the ‘painting’ are to be expected in a visual culture such as ours; but these paintings were born in a society that was overwhelmingly aural. The Ragamala paintings, in a way, was a cultural pit stop, a hermaphrodite of the senses, as Indian societies turned away from the aural to the visual, particularly as paper, printing presses and book publishing began to take hold.
***
Each Ragamala painting is usually drawn in a horizontal layout, which allows the artist space above or below the scene to add Sanskrit verses (dhyaana) that evokes the deity who is considered to govern that particular Raga. In any given folio series, paintings that corresponds to a particular Raga can be drawn with varying degrees of sophistication. Why this variation is not entirely clear. What is common to each of them, however, is the transformation these paintings seem to undergo. The original verse, which is of a religious nature, is transformed into a ‘secular’ visual setting involving lovers, attendants, Nature and palaces. Each of this setting is underscored by a specific mood or flavors (called ‘rasa’) that - according to various classical Indian texts on dramaturgy, particularly a text called ‘Natya Sastra’ - govern human life. These nine flavors of human experience are be sringara (love, romance), vira (valor), karuna (compassion), adbhuta (wonder), hasyam (derision), bibhatsam (disgust), raudram (anger), shantam (tranquility). Majority of the Ragamala paintings, however, are variations on three principal flavors: love, compassion, and valor. Once, these paintings are made human, in some instances, they are then ‘resacralized’ with images from the Hindu religious canon - in the form of Krishna and his beloved Radha. Through this series of transfigurations, these paintings become of this world and beyond it too.
Many mistakenly conclude that these paintings were a Hindu art, but the scholar Klaus Ebeling reports that the oldest extant effort to depict music into painting was found among the followers of the Jain religion in the western Indian state of Gujarat. In a text called ‘Kalpasutra’, a concatenation of biographies of the Tirthankaras (omniscient Jain seers) is leavened with “representations of ragas”. It is unclear how these paintings were seen or understood, but evidently the fact that many other versions were created tells us that these paintings did strike a cultural chord across the centuries. Similarly, there is no record of what were Archbishop Laud’s responses to these paintings; or for that matter if he or others at Bodlein Library noticed them as anything more than yet another series of ‘Oriental’ paintings.
Historically, the notation schema used in the West or the geometries of Arabic music as described in the 13th century text Kitaab al-adwaar by Safi al-Din al-Urmawi have had an instrumentalist approach. These devices are proxies for memorization. The Ragamala paintings, in contrast, seek to arouse emotional responses when musical and visual imagination comes together. Trying to convey this coalescing of senses is a curatorial challenge even today. The transformation of a highly contextual cultural product into a quotidian viewing experience in a temperature-controlled museum gallery reveals the difficulties of translating millennia old artistic conceits into something that is recognizable and yet extraordinary. In this effort to facilitate the commensurability of artistic forms, the Met faces difficulties at various levels.
The principal challenge is to suggest to the viewer that there is something interesting in these Ragamala paintings which are different from the tackily used ‘Indian’ paintings (usually knock offs from the Rajasthani or Kangra schools) that we see often - be it in restaurants, galleries, renderings of Kamasutra or even take-out menus from restaurants that seek to up their exotica quotient. To a casual viewer, the same motifs abound in the Ragamala paintings and the other standard fare works of ‘Indian’ art. They abound with women who are forlorn looking, aquiline faced, slim waisted, full breasted and half-veiled in the presence of mustachioed, colorfully turbaned, dopey-eyed men. These figures are often juxtaposed against monsoon clouds, geometrical motifs, pillared palaces, fluffy cushions, an odd deer grouping and grassy hills. These images are evocative and lovely and yet, in a way, they are as commonplace as Mona Lisa on an undergraduate beer mug. The meaningfulness of the Ragamala paintings, unlike the Mona Lisa, is born not out of the very art itself, but out of the embodied correlations between music, art and the presence of Gods in their luminous human forms.
There is an added difficulty imposed by the teleology of these paintings itself. On one hand, like all cultural products, the Ragamala paintings are consequences of their historic origins and context; yet, like unbroken traditions, they seem to have evolved all too imperceptibly and independently of history, as if standing outside the flow of great socio-political tumult in the Indian subcontinent for nearly millennia. The efforts to historicize these paintings that originated around 9th century CE and continued as a technique and a tradition, well into the 19th century over a wide swathe of northern India, a geographical expanse as large as western Europe, is fraught with the possibility of glib or even mendacious readings of convenience. These paintings were born in a world before Christianity and Islam arrived in India as major religious or political force. It was also a period when Hinduism itself was engaged in a set of debates with Buddhism on ideas and ontological claims that ultimately resulted in the end of Buddhism as major religion in India, while Hinduism co-opted many of Buddhism’s philosophical claims and methods. (Sankara, the great Hindu revivalist, who lived around 7-9th CE, was often accused of being a ‘prachchana Bauddha’, a crypto-Buddhist.) It is important to remember that the practiced Hinduism of today has itself undergone changes in its representation, critical self-expressions and relationship with the exterior world. Over a millennia, while Hinduism’s principal texts haven’t changed (albeit, arguably today they are better edited, annotated, accessible and translated today than ever before), the soteriological doctrines and sacerdotal hierarchies have evolved to make space for the lilt and lurch of historical forces. Museums, however tend to present the idea of the past as having no history of itself. This is particularly the case, when faced with complex cultural artefacts like Ragamala paintings that have not just a history, but many histories. The end result is a series of compromises and superficialities in presentation. Convenient reduction of the Ragamala into a simple exhibit of paintings – with a dash of exotica, a pinch of strangeness – is seem the only natural way to go about it.
More interesting, beyond what meets the eye, is what we don’t know about the Ragamala paintings. These paintings are thought to be mnemogenic (to use a Nabokovian phrase): as originators of memory. The belief is that using the painting as a cartographical tool, the singer can traverse through the paintings’ landscape and provide corresponding emotional arousal in accordance with the presiding deity of the Raga. While there is some agreement on the heuristic value of these paintings, for all means and purposes, we have lost the exact method, the algorithm by which a particular evocative visual scene becomes a cartographic toolkit to revive musical phrases and their moods. But, it is conceivable that this method was analogous to the techniques that has come down to our times, thanks to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (35-100 CE)’s ‘Institutio Oratoria’ chronicled by Frances Yates in her classic “The Art of Memory”. Quintilian’s concern was with giving flawless speeches and remembering the many points that an orator wished to make. His method proposed that every point in a speech be transposed to a room in an imaginary large building. Then while making the speech, the orator would ‘walk’ through this fictive building - courtyard, living room, bedroom and so on -- and thus span all the points in his speech. While the Romans used these ‘mnemotechnics’ for oratory, the Indians have used similar ‘memory’ techniques for poetry, mathematics and memorizing portions or whole of religious texts such as Upanisads and Brahmanas. Klaus Ebeling, the scholar, writes that: “these garlands of ragas were devices of memorization and classification for the musician who associated the individual [musical] modes with deities to whom the Ragas were dedicated”. While not much research has been done on this aspect of the Ragamala painting as a mnemotechnic, most exhibits fail to register this open-ended question.
Perhaps, the greatest difficulty is to comprehend the philosophic vision that informed the world out of which the Ragamala paintings were born. It is a world view that we no longer know how to respond to. Since the rise of the Enlightenment, our narratives of self and the world around have been marked by a ‘subtraction thesis’ (to use the philosopher Charles Taylor’s phrase), which refers to the gradual stripping away of the non-material world-conceptions that our ancestors carried within. In Max Weber’s poignant description, our lives have gone through a progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’ (wissenschaft als beruf). The Ragamala paintings, meanwhile, emerge from a world, where Music is interchangeable with Paintings, where one art form not just annotates the other, but instead it is only by knowing one form can one can hope to master the other. This wasn’t a strange claim, but further evidence that an idea like Ragamala could only have emerged and sustained itself in a society where this view of the wholesomeness of the ‘surrounding-world’ (‘umwelt’ as Heidegger called it) was widespread and a given. In our times, thanks to our cultivated sense of skepticism, most of us tend to dismiss such ‘holistic’ worldviews as puffery, unthinking unitarianism or, worse yet, as charlatans peddling ‘Oriental’ psychobabble’. But, when face to face with artefacts like Ragamala, we are forced to recognize that lives were lived and civilizational ethos burbled to the fore from self-evident connectedness of the artistic, and lived, experience. As Mark Dyczkowski, the great Tantra scholar, writes, this underlying principle can be summed up in the saying: “all things are by nature everything” (sarvam sarvaatmakam). It is a perspective of the Arts that can’t be reconciled fully with our present perspectives. Especially in a culture-industry marked by atomistic analytical divisions, highly specialized reductionism and a culture of grant writing where inter-disciplinarian attitudes are a career risk and means to invite suspicion. From our philosophic world view and the practise of living, we no longer speak such a vocabulary of ‘whole-ness’ nor fully believe in its ideational claims of how the world is to be seen.
***
In a 2nd century encyclopedic compilation called ‘Vishnudharmottara’ that dealt with subjects as diverse as cosmology to painting to cuisine, there is a story of a king called Vajra who goes to meet a sage called Markandeya. Despite the texts’ eclecticism and the possibility to exist on its own, the Vishnudharmottara is generally acknowledged to be merely the endnotes to the even more monumental collection of foundational myths and sagas called the ‘Vishnupurana’. The great scholar of Indian art, the late Stella Kramrisch of UPenn, had argued that the chapters on painting in the Vishnudharmottara were compiled around the 7th century C.E., even if “its recipes and prescriptions go back to a remote past”[1]. It is from this unknowable antiquity that King Vajra arrives in the 3rd volume of Vishnudharmottara to conduct a quasi-Socratic dialogue with Markandeya. Vajra asks Markandeya to teach him the art of making images or icons. The answers to this question - on icons and paintings, their religious significances, on how to employ the same techniques in secular circumstances, the unknowability of God and man’s quest to represent the ineffable - is what fills much of the text of Vishnudharmottara. If Kramrisch’s dating of the text is correct, then Vishnudharmottara followed other treatises on dance and dramaturgy (the Natya Shastra, circa 200 CE) and an assortment of explorations in music, poetry & grammar in the Tamil canon (in texts called Tolkappiam, Silappadikaram and Kallidam and their commentaries, which were composed from 100BCE to 400 CE). The first millennium in India was marked by theorization, new taxonomies and an explosion in texts on performing and non-performing art.
Right around this time, in the seventh-eighth century, just as Indians formalized texts on how to paint, sculpt and dance – the Eastern Church and the Byzantine courts of Emperor Leo III had begun a formal ban on images and icons, a period that we now call ‘the First Iconoclasm’. Islam too, which was born in the Arabian peninsula, around the same period and eventually would arrive in India had a similar iconoclastic zeal no different than the short lived efforts of the Byzantinian churches to tamp down on icons, popular saints and appropriation of Roman folklore into the Christian canon. In contrast to these movements in the Semitic world, the Vishnudharmottarpurana bursts at its literary seams with details on how to build images, draw, paint, build temples, dancing stages, architecture, costume and sculpture. What follows between Vajra and Markandeya is a question and answer in methods, modes, techniques on how the Gods, the demi-Gods, the Serpents from the netherworlds and other imaginary beings are to be painted. Markandeya goes onto instruct Vajra about colors to be used for the people of our worlds. The foreigners, he says, are to be painted in golden colors, while his instructions for the residents of Bharata (Sanskritic name for India) are more subtle. The northern Indians (those living in the Uttarapatha) are to be predominantly shown white in color, while those of Eastern, Southern and Western Indian are to be shown in darker shades. He explicates a social theory of colors too - the Brahmins (priests) are to be the “color of moon” (yellowish with spots?), the kings in colors of a white lotus; the working class, the sickly and the evil doers in dark. Lest one thinks, Markandeya is proposing a theory of castes or some form racial determinism; he makes clear that a painter is merely a chronicler of social mores, one who seeks verisimilitude.
Returning to his original question of making icons Markandeya says one must learn the art of painting. But a good painter, Markandeya goes on, must know the art of dancing – for both arts involve the knowledge of “three worlds” (in modern translations as ‘three dimensions’). Yet again, before Vajra gets his hopes too high, Markandeya instructs him that to be a good dancer, one must have a sense of music. By the end of this pedagogic concatenation, Vajra learns that to master one art form is to cultivate awareness regarding another art form, which in turn leads to another and so on. At its limit, says Markandeya, to master painting is in effect indistinguishable from cultivating aptitude and talent for “sculpture, dance, instrumental and vocal music, song composition, prose, poetry, literature, language, grammar, logic, aesthetics, theatrical arts and even theater-architecture”[2]. The conversation in this text, now largely forgotten, reflects a philosophical perspective that was focused less on the essence of art forms but instead on the inter-connectedness of creative expressions. What Markandeya sought to say was that it isn’t that there is a unique essence of dance, or music, or sculpture - but that when one looks beyond techniques in each field, one arrives at a subterranean aquifer from which these creative exercises flow and manifest differently. Any work of art, from this perspective, then contains not just itself, but also subsumes, hides and reveals- in its final form - the expressive possibilities contained in other artistic expressions. At a certain level of abstraction, it is this idea what informs Ragamala paintings. A Ragamala painting then becomes a site, a locus, where significance is granted to not just to itself (that which is produced) but also to all other allied forms contained in it. Painting then can be understood to contain musicality, music can reflect the preciseness of a logical argument, while sculpture can be as pregnant with as much meaning as poetry.
From this perspective, an instance of artistic expression – say, painting, sculpture or musical composition - is thus a means make commensurable those worlds of expression and technique that are otherwise separated. This ‘Hindu’ view of the permeability and permissibility of art to represent all that the world contains seems to stand in direct contrast with the Semitic views that led to the periods of Iconoclasm. Yet they, in a way, exhaust the very same phenomena they both seek to capture - the manifest presence of God. One view believes in possibility of describing life in all its variations, thus exhausting itself through forms in search of the Infinite; the other acknowledges the impossibility of such exercise and seeks to submit and sublimate oneself to God. These two views - the profusion and the stillness of human search for God - came face to face in the Indian landscape when Islam arrived from the middle east and established kingdoms across India.
Within three centuries after Vishnudharmottara was compiled in 7-9th CE, by which time Ragamala paintings were beginning to emerge widely, elaborate court structures of Turkic, Mongol and Persian origins with an Islamic world views introduced into India, their austere shapes, geometries and forms. From around 1100 to 1857, various Islamic dynasties ruled much of India – with its zenith during the era of the three great Mughal emperors – Akbar, Jehangir and ShahJehan (father, son and grandson). To say, this new Islamic elite brought along with them sensibilities and perspectives that were different from India’s Hindu-Buddhist view of interconnectedness of arts is banal, but what is more interesting is how the non-Islamic traditional views of the arts imbricated themselves with the taste of the new Islamic elite and arbiters of taste to create new aesthetics. Ragamala paintings - as an art form - began to undergo a dramatic change of social conditions under which it was produced, sustained and reimagined. In this new world, these paintings began to travel. Not just between India and possibly Persia, but into Europe with the advent of trade and eventually colonialism.
***
How exactly did Laud come in possession of the Ragamala by 1740 is unclear. The scholar Herbert Stooke presents a claim that the pictures belonged to the Orientalist Edward Pococke who lived in Aleppo, Syria, who incidentally took over the first Arabic chair that Laud had instituted at St. John’s College, Oxford. Another theory claims that the painting were brought over by Sir Thomas Roe in 1615, when he served as ambassador in the court of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir. The historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam conjectures that it could have been brought over by either the newly formed East India Company’s factories in the western Indian city of Surat or the Company’s rival firm called ‘Courteen Association’. With regards to their origins of these so called ‘Laud Ragamala’ the independent scholar Karl Khandalavala surmises that these Ragamala paintings were made around 1625 in the Deccan regions of India. It is also possible that the paintings were part of the gifts sent in 1638 by Shah Jehan, Jehangir’s son and the new emperor to Charles I [badshah-e mamlik-e inglistan] that included calligraphies and paintings. Laud, in a way, was the ur-representative of certain kind of English ruling class that was to emerge in the centuries thereafter – one who was fanatically assured of the sanctity and superiority of the religious world view in which he had been raised while simultaneously saw the world beyond as worth exploring, documenting and cataloguing.
In due course, by late 18th century (the prodigiously fecund era of Sir William Jones et al in 1780s-1820s), these exercises of knowledge production would be intimately tied to the actual governance of colonial possessions. To an extent the intercontinental exchanges during Laud’s era – over a century before the formal Orientalist projects – were due to the solitary forays of men of extraordinary zeal in search of personal fortunes or glory. The byproduct of such proto-Orientalist interactions, over and beyond the obvious exchanges of artifacts, was the percolation into popular consciousness of the idea that a different world lay beyond their immediate environs. From the European perspective, the lures of possible proselyization was also writ large. A Portuguese traveler and contemporary of Humayun, the second ruler of the Mughal Empire, reports, quite improbably and perhaps self-servingly, that the founder of the Mughal empire Zahiruddin Babur had instructed his son Humayun to convert to Christianity if the “law of Mohammed” were to decline. Irrespective of the accuracy of such statements – what it reveals is that the European experience of India was mediated through the extant rulers, who happened to be the Mughals, who had emerged out of a Persian-Turkic-Mongol culture. That the Europeans and the Mughal elite were ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitab) allowed for a degree of familiarity and congruencies in world views which facilitated and furthered interactions. Humayun’s son, the great Emperor Akbar, had “ordered his artists to paint hundreds of iconic portraits of Jesus, Mary, and a panoply of Christian saints in the styles of the late Renaissance to adorn books, albums, jewelry, and even treaties.” The reasons for this eager embrace are obscured by time but some conjectures claim that the neo-Platonist philosophic unity between counter-Reformation in Europe and the Sunni Islam of Mughal India helped this syncretistic mood. In such an environs, the ‘native’ Hindu arts such as the Ragamala paintings had to evolve and find its own place. New musical scales arrived with the Turko-Persian conquests so much so that well into the 18th century many such Ragas were called the ‘Turuksuya Raga’ (Turkish Raga). Ragamala paintings found new patrons, who in turn had lesser use for Hindu icons of Krishna and other Gods. The scholar of Catholicism Gauvin Bailey notes, astutely, that Christian iconography used by Akbar et al could have been a potent tool that the Islamic rulers employed in response to the efflorescent pantheon of Hindu deities and demigods that abound all over the land the Mughals ruled. Whatever be the reason, the end result was a peculiar social reality where, in the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s words, “Christian-oriented imagery in 16th century India was far more of a success than Christianity itself”.
The Ragamala paintings, in this context, of burgeoning interactions between Christian Europe and Mughal India, which was dominantly Muslim, offered up a third axis of imagination that was neither Semitic in origins nor complicit with the political order of the day. This condition of being a peripheral but sufficiently “strange” art form persisted as the colonial era began. Ragamala paintings, even had a strange later life where Indians (who willfully considered themselves as subjects of the British Empire) began to dedicate new Ragamala lithographs unto Queen Victoria, thus bringing this pre-medieval art form into the political economy of the colonial world. That the Ragamala paintings would become a cultural artefact in the era of globalization, and eventually make it to global mega-museums like the Met, ought to be no surprise. Neither, unfortunately, is it a surprise that with each passing century, these paintings have become a decontextualized artefacts despite the efforts of museum curators. No different, in a way, than totem poles in shopping malls of the Pacific North West or Latinate biblical verses in the hit musical album Enigma. The illogic of cultural exchange of our times can, perhaps, only be understood by the logic of decontextualization that renders all phenomena into things. Life-less, fossilized things that can then be understood without any sacrifice or effort on part of the viewer. Like much else, it seems, the Ragamala paintings too are subject to this iron law of cultured desiccation.
***
Since June 2014, the Metropolitan Museum in NYC has exhibited a series of Ragamala paintings in its South Asian wing and by all measures it is an earnest effort. It is a warmly lit space, with the requisite sitar sound streaming (when I was there, there was an empanelled video of Ustad Shujaat Khan, a regular to New York’s hallowed performing halls). Men and women stream in and out, often with bemused looks at what they behold. Despite the obligatory and presumably talismanic mention of Ragas, Indian princes and princess – attention spans drifted. A security guard stands there and hectors with polite sternness: “no photographs”. He returns to check on his iPhone and murmurs in anger as the mobile network connectivity is weak in this part of the museum. An old couple stands and watches a single Ragamala painting for the time I was there. A boy tries to slip in his hands into his girlfriends‘trousers as she giggles and with faux exasperation warns him that others are watching. On the wall, a similar scene of eros is enacted between a prince and a princess surrounded by Northern Indian countryside. It is all a rather usual museum going experience. What struck me later is that while we may not know the exact nature of the Raga that the painting mentions, who the painter was, what hands have changed these panels or for that matter what occasioned these very paintings. What we do know is that there remains something profoundly strange about the idea of evoking music’s sensuousness onto paper. Even we, who live through assorted modes of finely calibrated disembodied existence, are somehow intrigued by the strange conceits within the Ragamala paintings that are a wolf-whistle to a different world, to a nebulous but meshed-in consciousness that insists that even music has its own color. We just need to learn to see it. []
— from 2014 or 2015