Mandi, India
c. 1770
This horizontal folio belongs to a Mandi Ramayana series of the Shamsher Sen period (r. 1727–81), when Mandi painting was marked by saturated flat colour, heavily patterned foliage and a lively, sometimes exaggerated figurative style.
The scene illustrates an episode from the Bala Kanda, the first book of the Ramayana. The sage Vishwamitra asks King Dasharatha to send the young Rama to protect a sacrifice from the rakshasas and Lakshmana goes with his brother. After Rama has killed the ogress Taraka, they reach Vishwamitra’s hermitage where the sage begins a rite lasting six days, and the princes stay awake and guard it. On the last day the demons attack; Rama kills Subahu and hurls Maricha far into the sea assisted by his divine weapons.
The painter chooses the tense moment before the assault. At left, the blue-skinned Rama, raises a hand to the bowstring while Lakshmana stands in front of him. They stand on a grassy rise in the forest, crowned, garlanded and armed with bows and full quivers, and they face the rite they have come to protect. At the centre, within a white-ground enclosure, four rishis with rudraksha malas sit around a homa kunda from which flames rise; a great golden kalasha stands at the top of the enclosure, and golden bowls, ladles and a small vessel lie about the fire. One bearded rishi, in a purple dhoti, feeds the fire with a ladle, while another, white-bearded, reads from a pothi. A column of further sages, several bearded and holding pothis and malas, stand along the right edge of the enclosure, and three more sit in a group at its foot. Eight pots, alternately white and gold, are lined up along the top of the enclosure. At right, in separate coloured panels, two ascetics tend cauldrons in preparation of the sacrificial food: one holds a ball of rice over a bowl, the other stirs a large golden pot. Across the top, against a slate-blue band, six demons including a donkey headed demon look over the edge.
Vishwamitra, who presides over the rite, is best identified with the white-bearded sage reading from a pothi at the upper right of the enclosure. The demons form a generic rakshasa host, in which animal heads, fangs and bulging eyes mark their monstrous nature in the Pahari manner.
The folio is organised as a set of separate zones rather than one continuous landscape: a forest strip at left, a pink-mauve field behind the princes, a white ritual enclosure at the centre, olive and blue panels for the cooks and a narrow band for the demons. Each zone has its own ground colour, and the enclosure is shown flat and in plan, with vessels tilted towards the viewer. This helps the viewer to read several actions at once and keeps the demons outside the sacred space. The palette is built from flat, saturated fields, with yellow and red used for the figures’ clothing. The princes’ yellow jamas stand out sharply from the pink ground. This strong chromatic contrast is characteristic of Mandi painting of the period.