A probe into provenance

This series is of major importance in the history of Orchha painting: it is the first illustrated manuscript of the Rasikapriya, and it is the founding series of Orchha painting, which established the basic stylistic conventions of the school.

The manuscript consisted of three hundred pages, each featuring an image inserted between an upper and a lower text panel. Originally, two pages were glued together to form 150 double-sided folios that were bound into a book. In the late 1940s, when the manuscript came onto the Indian art market, dealers often separated the double-sided folios into their constituent front and back pages in order to sell the pages individually. Today, the series is dispersed throughout the world; most of the pages now in Western collections came from the Indian art dealer Nasli. M. Heeramaneck in New York City.

We have discussed the text of the Rasikapriya in the chapter on "The Illustrated Texts" ( see p. 157 ). Here we point out only what is needed to understand the images illustrating the text.

The Rasikapriya is a ritigranth: a poetics for writing erotic poems in the highly sophisticated riti style of vernacular Brajbhasha poetry. It consists of two types of verses:

— definition couplets in the doha meter, which classify the different lovers ( nayakas/nayikas) and categorize their different erotic emotions and sentiments ( bhavas/rasas ); and

— example or archetypal poems in the form of eight-line stanzas, which teach how to evoke in a poem the defined erotic bhavas/rasas in their two modes: love-in-union and love-in-separation.

The poems mostly take the form of a conversation between Krishna and Radha or a speech by the sakhi, the maid and confidante of Radha. The sakhi speaks either as a matchmaker or as a mediator. In the first role, she seeks to bring Radha and Krishna together and arranges meetings. In the second role, she attempts to reconcile the two lovers when they are in the emotional state of mana: pique (wounded pride).

Often Keshavdas provides two example poems. In this case, the first stanza evokes a scene of open ( prakasa ) love, a love that may be known to all because the love heroine is a svakiya, i.e. the hero's own wife. The second stanza, in contrast, reveals a scene of hidden ( prachanna ) love, knowledge of which is restricted to the sakhi, for the heroine is a parakiya, the wife of another man or an unmarried daughter under her father's authority.

Unlike in the Sanskrit kavya, the lovers in Keshavdas's example poems are not the generic nayaka and nayika, but Krishna and Radha. In the scenes of open love Radha plays the role of a svakiya, while in the scenes of hidden love she plays the role of a parakiya as the daughter of the weaver Vrishabhanu. Through this identification of the nayaka with Krishna and the nayika with Radha, the poems of the Rasikapriya have a dual character: they are both secular love poems and devotional bhakti poems. Keshavdas's contemporary readers at the court of Orchha, who were both aesthetes ( rasikas ) and devotees ( bhaktas ), will have enjoyed them in two different ways, or in both ways simultaneously: as courtly poems evoking the aesthetic erotic delight of shringara rasa and as bhakti poems arousing the mystical erotic-devotional rapture of madhurya bhaktirasa.

There exist two translations of the Rasikapriya by K. P. Bahadur and by Harsha V. Dehejia. Most of the translations given in the following are taken from Dehejia, in a few cases I used translations by Vishaka N. Desai and by G. H. Schokker, and where there was no understandable translation available I could resort to translations made for me by Professor Monika Horstmann, the noted expert on bhakti and the literary Brajbhasha. Translations of the example poems can provide little more than the bare content. The riti style with its alliterative and assonantal textures, ellipses, wordplay, and famously inscrutable imagery, which elicited the awe of the contemporary rasikas, is essentially untranslatable.

The Basic Pictorial Compositions of the Series

When assigned the task of illustrating the Rasikapriya verses, the Orchha painters faced an unprecedented challenge. They had to invent no fewer than three hundred illustrations for a text whose content was entirely unfamiliar to them and, written in the sophisticated riti style, could be understood by them only when a pandit translated and explained it. And above all, most of the example poems take the form of a speech of the sakhi to Krishna or Radha, of a conversation between the lovers, or of a soliloquy of the lonely Krishna or Radha; few describe a concrete action or situation that would readily lend itself to visualization. How, for instance, should the painter visualize the archetypal stanzas V.16 and V.17 ( cats. 1.13 & 1.14 ), which render conversations in which Krishna tries to persuade Radha to go with him into the forest? Or how should he translate into a picture a speech by the sakhi ( XIII.7 = cat. 1.11 ) in which she admonishes the shy young Radha to confess her love for Krishna at long last?

Facing this challenge, patron and master artist contented themselves with illustrating the larger part of the manuscript with repetitive generalized images, which show the three protagonists of the love drama – Radha, Krishna, and the sakhi – on two standard stages in a few standard figural scenes. All together, these standard illustrations comprise approximately two-thirds of the three hundred pictures of the series, and also the verse-specific illustrations use, with few exceptions, one of the two standard settings.

THE TWO SETTINGS

The first setting is the pavilion+courtyard ( cats. 1.1–1.6 & 1.8–1.23 ). This is the main stage for both the generalized and the specific figural scenes, used in about 80 percent of the three hundred images. The pavilion consists of an open-sided chamber rendered, in strict two-dimensionality and with minimal detail, as a framed square; a rooftop kiosk ( chattri ) depicted as a triangular cupola supported by two pillars; and a plinth embellished by a row of purple chevrons representing lotus petals. The courtyard is represented by an empty color field on the left-hand side of the picture. If the color field of the chamber is red then that of the courtyard is green, and vice versa. The hot red and cool green are complementary colors that symbolize the two complementary modes of the erotic shringara rasa, the passion of love-in-union and sorrow of love-in-separation. Into the complementary red-green composition is penetrating from above the contrasting blue of a rain cloud, symbolizing the erotic power of attraction of Ghanashyama, "the Dark One like a Cloud."

The pavilion chamber is always furnished with the same accessories. In the middle there is a bed with four yellow legs. The bedcover is plain red or blue and adorned with a rosette pattern. Lying lengthwise on the bed is a striped bolster, from whose ends black tassels hang. Set beneath the bed is a yellow ( = golden ) vessel with two handles. The white strip extending along the upper end of the chamber represents a rolled up bamboo blind. Mounted on the side walls are hooks for hanging clothing, the kind that are still seen in old palaces today. The hook on the left-hand side is often unused; if used, a white cloth hangs from it. Hanging from the hook opposite is a buttermilk jar in a sling, which alludes to little Krishna, the butter and love thief.

The scene is enlivened by a peacock or a monkey. The peacock is perched on the projecting ridgepole, either with its head turned backward to watch the love scene below in the courtyard, or with its neck outstretched to look up into the sky. The monkey is about to climb up onto the dome of the chattri and looks either forward toward the apex of the dome, or else downward at the scene in the courtyard, its paw raised to its mouth in astonishment.

The second setting is the forest glade ( cats. 1.7 & 1.24 ), which corresponds to the forest thicket ( bower ) in the Gitagovinda and conjures up the pastoral world of Vrindavana. It is used in about 20 percent of the three hundred images. Like the pavilion+courtyard setting, it is rendered in a flat, minimalist style. The representation of the glade is abstracted into an arrangement of five different color blocks:

— the red square at the center, whose upper side is arched into a horizon line, represents the glade;

— the flanking rectangles – one green, the other yellow – house the trees representing the forest: the pair of trees to the left has oval crowns, one green, the other pink, while the single tree to the right has a round green crown. The leaves of the crowns are arranged in ornamental patterns. Entwined around the trunks are slender lianas whose red blossoms sprout up out from the treetops and glow in the black of the night;

— over these three color blocks extends a horizontal two-color block which is divided into the black of the night and the blue of the sky by an undulating white cloud band.

Gazelles and monkeys animate the forest glade stage, just as peacocks and monkeys enliven the pavilion+courtyard stage. ( See also the interpretation of cat. 1.7 on p. 184. )

THE THREE STANDARD FIGURAL SCENES

In the standard scene with one figure ( cats. 1.1–1.3 ), Radha or Krishna soliloquizes while sitting alone beside the pavilion or within the forest glade.

In the standard dialogue scene with two figures ( Krishna or Radha with the sakhi, cats. 1.4–1.6 & 1.8–1.11 ), Krishna or Radha is seated in front of the pavilion or in the forest glade, while the sakhi stands before them, emphatically talking and gesturing. This is by far the most common figural scene of the series. The depiction does not indicate the content of the dialogue, but merely illustrates the dialogue situation and suggests the emotions of the two characters by means of a few standard body postures and hand gestures. Often, however, the characters' emotional states suggested in the text do not correspond to their emotional states shown in the image, or even the characters conversing in the image are not conversing in the verses. In these cases the painters had no knowledge of the content of the verses and put a standard sakhi-Krishna or sakhi-Radha dialogue scene into the empty field reserved for the image between the two text panels.

In the standard scene with three figures ( Krishna, Radha, and the sakhi, cats. 1.13–1.16 ), the setting is always the pavilion+courtyard: Krishna stands in front of Radha's pavilion, holding a lotus flower in his hand; Radha is seated inside the pavilion on the bed, drawing her odhni ( veil ) over her face in the gesture of modesty and reserve, or laying a hand on her aching heart in the pose of sorrow and dejection, or resting her chin in her hand in the pose of mana ( pique ); the sakhi either talks to Radha inside the pavilion or stands outside and talks to Krishna.

THE VERSE-SPECIFIC FIGURAL SCENES

In about one-third of the three hundred images the painters designed figural scenes that are specifically related to what is described in the example poems ( compare cats. 1.17–1.25 ). Even then, however, the figures are placed in one of the two standard settings; a rare exception is catalog 1.25, for which the painter designed a verse-specific setting as well. Furthermore, the specific figural scenes are also repeated several times within the series, and thus are not equally well adapted to each of the poems they illustrate.

(Excerpted with permission from Konrad Seitz's Origins of 'Orchha Painting'; published by Niyogi Books)