This folio of an emaciated hookah smoker belongs to the late phase of Mandi painting, when the court of Raja Shamser Sen (1727-1781) began to absorb the Guler-Kangra idiom.
In Pahari portraiture the huqqa traditionally marks rank: the Cleveland Museum of Art’s portrait of Raja Chhatar Singh with his brother and son uses the shared pipe to suggest the passing of authority from father to heir. In the present folio, however, the object is removed from its conventional courtly setting and placed in the hands of an almost naked ascetic, stripped of carpet, bolster and attendant. The painter sets two ideals of the body against each other, the skeletal frame that signifies tapas (self-discipline) and the ease of a man engaged in smoking.
Cannabis, tobacco and opium were widely associated with ascetic orders, and the habit among Shaiva and some Vaishnava ascetics is documented in the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report of 1894 and in the scholarship on warrior and mendicant orders. Ascetics appear in Pahari painting as subjects, for example in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s painting of an ascetic and a princess.
The scene is spare. An ascetic with dark grey-brown skin sits in profile facing right, hunched forward with his knees drawn up and his eyes lowered. One long arm reaches forward to a globular red huqqa base, which he grips at the neck. A long pink stem runs from the base to his lips, while a second, shorter upright stem carries a flared black chillum with a glowing ember, from which a wisp of smoke rises. A pale tilak, the vertical mark of worship that identifies the wearer’s sect, rises from the bridge of the nose across the forehead to the hairline, and a short pale stroke on the side of the neck below the ear may be a further sectarian mark. A vertical tilak of this kind (urdhva pundra) is more often associated with Vaishnava than with Shaiva ascetics. He wears a mala of red beads strung with white ones, a white cloth draped over the back of his shoulders and a small white loincloth. His arms and legs are articulated by parallel black contour strokes, and the uniform dark skin, with the cords of the neck drawn as ridges, conveys extreme emaciation. At left, against the border, a large domed mound of pinkish-brown earth, streaked with white ash and orange flame at its base, sends a thick, wavering column of grey smoke up the picture; this is probably a dhuni, the ascetic’s sacred fire. At lower right a second red globular vessel, its mouth covered with white cloth, stands below the huqqa base, and a shallow red-brown dish lies at lower left.
The representation also raises questions about the relationship between bodily discipline and the consumption of intoxicating substances. The emaciated physique of the figure suggests physical austerity and the pursuit of tapas, while his engagement with the huqqa introduces an element of sensory gratification.
There is no landscape: the ground is a flat olive-green, framed by a narrow black rule, a thin salmon-red line, a white rule and a broad red margin, whose upper edge carries the faint traces of writing. The attribution to Mandi rests above all on the treatment of the face, in which the shape of the eye, the fine lines at its outer corner, the lashes and the nose are comparable to those in published portraits of Raja Shamsher Sen of Mandi and Raja Hari Sen of Mandi (c. 1760–80). The rendering of the smoke and the round base of the huqqa point the same way, and the attribution is supported by the cumulative evidence of the folio’s framing, palette, figural treatment and compositional approach. The date of c. 1760 is a connoisseurial bracket resting on the Guler-derived naturalism of the face and the restrained palette, plus an additional inscription on the reverse which appears to date the work to 1759.