Indian Ragamala Painting (Illustrated Summary Catalogue)

Ragamala art is an important theme in Indian painting of the 16th – 19th centuries. Ragas and Ragini, followed by their respective names, designate heroes and heroines of paintings and parallel, set genre scenes, each of which was meant to evoke a specific emotion in the minds of perceptive addresses, in a similar manner as the eponymous motifs on Indian music. Paintings created mostly in the courtly milieu were bound into albums (Ragamala – garlands of Ragas). The NGP houses a remarkable Ragamala album totalling 33 sheets, created in Awadh in North India between 1760-1775 in the late, cosmopolitan Mughal style. The book will present the findings of a comprehensive examination of the materials used in all of the album’s paintings. The complex, non-invasive analysis, never before conducted on such a scale in art institutions, yields an extensive corpus of data, which will present a significant contribution to the research of art techniques used in Indian painting.