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  Almost contemporary are three other sets which were certainly executed in north Gujarat and Kankroli, Rajasthan. Scholars have so far placed them in the last decade of the 16th century and the first decade of the 17th century. The first is the pocket Gita Govinda with fifty illustrations in the B.J. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad. The paintings are executed in what has been termed as a folk idiom.3 Although there is some element of truth in this, a comparison of the paintings of this set with those of the illustrations of the Gita Govinda in the Caurapancasika style makes it clear that these are not totally unrelated happenings in the different regions of India. The fundamental principle governing spatial composition is variations of a similar if not identical pictorial vision.

  More important are the other two sets with more than 150 paintings in each set. The first is a set of 150 paintings in the Kankroli Palace.4 Stylistically, these paintings recall the leaves from the Dashamaskanda paintings, and there are few similarities with the Caurapancasika-style Gita Govinda of the Prince of Wales Collections. The painter of this set divides the flat surfaces into different zones through trees and foliage and arranges groups of figures within the arches formed by the branches. The figurative drawing and the costuming, however, have strong affinities with the paintings of the Dashamaskanda of the Jodhpur Library.5 The figures of the asuras Madhu, Mura and Naraka are close to those which we see in the Laghu Samgrahani Sutra dated 1583 AD.6 The paintings were possibly executed in the last decade of the 16th century. The 150 illustrations of another set of Gita Govinda of the N.C. Mehta Collections7 are an important landmark. They follow the same format but there is evidence here of more than one artist executing the paintings. Some have close affinities with the Balagopala-Stuti paintings, others with the Kankroli Gita Govinda, and yet others are reminiscent of figures seen in the Gita Govinda in the Caurapancasika style. This is clear from the treatment of the Kama figure. Important is the use of a central tree as a divider and the appearance of large bees and cuckoos. The asura figures of Mura, Naraka, etc., disappear, although the stylization of some avatars, particularly the Narasimha, recalls similar delineation in the Jain schools. Despite the late N.C. Mehta’s detailed article in JISOA (Vol. 1945), a reappraisal of this set of illustrations is necessary.8

  To these three sets of the period (1590–1610), we have to add now the eighteen folios acquired by the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II City Palace Museum, Jaipur.9 The set must have had about 140 paintings and they were also executed somewhere in north Gujarat. The eighteen folios now extant bear testimony to the diligence with which the Gita Govinda was being painted. There is a verse-to-verse and line-to-line relationship between the verse and the pictorial transfiguration. The format is similar. A horizontal flat surface is spatially divided through trees, branches and foliage, and the figurative drawing is encased within them. However, the branches of the trees do not become an arch or a bower as in the Caurapancasika group. Stylistic affinities between this set and the Kankroli set are many, particularly in respect of figurative drawing. The figures of Mura, Madhu and Naraka are almost repeats of what we see in the Laghu Samgrahani in 1583 AD, and the Dashamaskanda paintings of the Jodhpur Library and the National Museum and the Jagdish Mittal Collections, all attributed to the first decade of the 17th century.10 A comparison of these illustrations with those of the Kankroli and N.C. Mehta Gita Govinda on the one hand and the Dashamaskanda paintings on the other would place these paintings somewhere between 1590 and 1600 AD and not later. A detailed analysis of the folios has been undertaken elsewhere.

  The most significant set of illustrations, however, comes from a manuscript dated 1594 AD from Jaur in Rajasthan, now called the Jaur Gita Govinda, in the collections of the National Museum.11 Stylistically, these illustrations have nothing in common with all the sets mentioned above. The illustrations support a Bagari text and are executed in a free style close to the Panchatantra paintings in the Bharat Kala Bhavan. In each folio, there are specific compartments and there is no attempt to provide continuity and overlapping areas through trees and foliage. The farther eye continues and there is a charming vivaciousness in the figurative drawing. The painter achieves a new sense of movement in these paintings although adhering to the stylistic features of the Palam Maha-Purana and other Jain illustrations. A detailed analysis of this set has been undertaken in a separate monograph.12

  These sets thus constitute what we may term as the first phase of the illustrations of the Gita Govinda from north Gujarat and Rajasthan. Within the phase, there can be a further division of the paintings into (i) those which follow the western Indian idiom of the Balagopala-Stuti Panchatantra paintings, i.e. the Jaur Gita Govinda, (ii) those which have affinities with the Dashamaskanda, the Kankroli and the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II City Palace Museum, Jaipur, sets, and (iii) those which belong to the Caurapancasika school and a mixture, i.e. the Prince of Wales Gita Govinda and the N.C. Mehta Gita Govinda.

  The second phase begins sometime in 1640 AD, after the execution of the Bhandarkar Collection Bhagavata Purana by Sahibidin. This is the beginning of the Mewar School proper. Four sets of this period are known. Two are dated 1629 AD by Andrew Topsfield. Scattered folios are extant in the Jodhpur Collections.13 The text is in Rajasthani. Two others with a Sanskrit text are in the Kumar Sangram Singh Collection and thirty-seven illustrations from a manuscript in the Saraswati Bhandar, Rajasthan (Oriental Institute). These support a Sanskrit text and are in a different format. We would place these around 1640–60 AD. In the first two, there is a mechanical compartmentalization. In the next two, there is a development, both thematic and stylistic. The flat surface division is replaced by the use of different planes. Instead of repeating the same character through different figures in diverse spatial areas, a single emotive situation is sought to be depicted. At best there are two divisions and the narrators of the different sargas (section of a poem) (whether Jayadeva, sakhi, Krishna or Radha) are omitted. The painter focuses attention on the dominant mood of the entire prabandha (section) and composes his painting as a whole and not as a narrative of diverse emotions. This is a marked change from the first phase where the painter was trying to transform the sequential narrative depiction of relief sculpture into a lyrical dramatic situation by using trees as dividers or encasing figures in different geometrical compartments. In the second phase a single tree or a glade serves as the divider, and often even this is dispensed with. The Saraswati Bhandar manuscript is remarkable for its chiselled figurative drawing and its sophisticated draughtsmanship and tonalities of colours. In comparison, the paintings of the Kumar Sangram Singh Collection Gita Govinda are grosser. In the Jodhpur and Bharat Kala Bhavan Gita Govinda paintings, there are both compartments and bowers but they are not used significantly. The most important difference is in the Kama figure who appears in a female form.

  The third phase of the Rajasthani paintings based on the Gita Govinda belongs to the last quarter of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century. Although critics have dismissed this phase as decadent and lacking in refinement, these paintings in a larger format herald a new phase in Mewari painting which reflects a deep understanding of the text. Indeed, it is the logical culmination of what begins with the Caurapancasika Gita Govinda. The division of the pictorial surface into different areas and the attempt to portray variations of the mood of this group of paintings as also to delineate a single situation of the second phase coalesce into a distinctive late 17th-century school. The arches of the first phase become bowers representing consecrated celestial space and the trees represent terrestrial space. There is a rich and diverse play of planes, a sense of linear perspective and an intense preoccupation with the transfiguration of the poetic image into a pictorial one. The similes and metaphors of the poem are transformed into natural landscape—flora, fauna, birds and animals. On the surface, all this appears to be an aggregate of decorative conventional stock motifs. Underneath it is the pictorial transfiguration of the crucial similes and metaphors of the po
em. The portrayal is no longer limited to the theme and the action of the story; it is a pictorial recreation of the text. Evidently, although Kumbha and Mananka’s commentaries must have popularized the Gita Govinda by the end of the 15th and the early part of the 16th centuries, it took some more decades before the full erotic and mystical import of the poem was fully understood. This could well have been the result of the development of the several Vaishnava cults in Vrindavana and ultimately in Nathdwara. The Vallabha sampradaya and the Nimbarka school gave a fresh impetus to the Gita Govinda. From a poem of shringara, the nayaka and nayika-bheda, it was elevated to a doctrine of the madhura bhakti school. A perusal of the paintings of this third phase makes it clear that the literary lyrical beauty of the poem is superimposed by another level of deification of the characters of the poem. Many stylistic developments were inevitable. No longer could the painter restrict himself to aesthetical typology based on the nayaka and nayika-bheda of the alamkara shastra; nor could he be satisfied with the portrayal of single situations. A constant reminder of the poem to be sung before the Lord was necessary. It was also necessary to elevate the human drama of the two lovers to the divine agony of the godhood and the human soul (paramatma and jivatma). The refrains of the musical composition became logically the repetitive motifs of the specific sargas; they provide the thematic and pictorial unity to specific groups of paintings within a set. This is the outstanding feature of the Mewari set of this period, especially those in the collection of the Udaipur State Museum, Udaipur. Others follow the method even if they do not achieve the same level of excellence. The paintings of each prabandha are held together with a single repetitive pictorial motif in one part of the painting. The second part presents the actual emotive state described in verse after verse. The paintings are to be viewed sequentially together and not in isolation. Seen thus, poetry and music sing through them, although at first glance they appear repetitive. Alongside is the necessity to communicate the transcendental nature of this drama of human emotions. Pictorially, the artist develops the thin arches of the branches of the Caurapancasika group, and this leads to the emergence of an arched bower almost like a semicircular wreath: the divine pair singly and together appear either within or against the background of this arched bower. A set of Gita Govinda paintings with leaves dispersed in different parts of the world13a is a typical example.

  All these sets depict this arched bower with dangling garlands. The image of the wild-flower-garlanded Krishna, the image of Radha and Krishna separated and united, undoubtedly provided the stimulus for this pictorial motif. Understandably, it is freely used thereafter in the paintings of the Rasikapriya and Rasamanjari and many others. The reference to the doe-eyed Radha also gives rise to the pictorial motif of the doe so frequently mentioned in the Gita Govinda. Cuckoos, bees and peacocks sing, hum and dance throughout the Gita Govinda. The Mewari artist provides the pictorial counterpart by painting them along with the chakora and the khanjan (wagtails) in most paintings of this phase of Mewari paintings. Nowhere are these purely decorative, as remarked by some critics. Equally significant is the emergence, during the second and third phases of Mewari painting, of the pictorial motif of overcast clouds and a row of cranes. On the surface, this is pretty and decorative, symbolic of clouds and rain. The description of birds flying in the clouds carrying messages of love has great antiquity in Indian poetry. However, it was only Jayadeva who compared the white garland on Krishna’s dark body to the white cranes on the dark clouds. The renewed popularity of the poetic motif in Indian paintings is once again inspired by the imagery of the eleventh prabandha of the Gita Govinda beginning with ‘Rati sukha sare’ and the line ‘urasi murare . . .’, ‘balaka . . .’, etc. (V.11, 6).

  One could go on adding to this list of pictorial motifs inspired by the Gita Govinda in Mewari painting, but perhaps one last reference to Kama and Ratipati will suffice. The Gita Govinda in the Caurapancasika style and the N.C. Mehta Gita Govinda, the Kankroli Gita Govinda and City Palace, Jaipur, all portray Kama. He is seen in pyjamas and kurta (chakadara jama) holding a bow and arrow. In some the turban is typical of the Caurapancasika group and in others he wears a tiara. In the paintings of the second phase, he is seen as a woman. Only in the paintings of the third phase of Mewari painting does the Kama figure undergo a radical transformation. He is no longer sketched as large; he is diminutive, almost symbolic, and is seldom at the same level as that of Krishna and Radha. He now hides in trees and bushes, appears from nowhere and disappears into lush foliage. Wherever the text refers to him as Ratipati, he is accompanied by Rati, his consort. The development of this motif is a further refinement of what is witnessed in the first two phases. The detailed folio-to-folio analysis of four sets belonging to this phase has been attempted elsewhere.14 From that analysis it was evident that the sets must have been executed possibly by three artists extending over a period of at least fifty years. This is also borne out by the quality of refinement and sophistication, and the lack of it. Also, by the middle of the 18th century, the superscription text is often a Rajasthani version and not the original Sanskrit. This also accounts for pictorial variations within the same style.

  Contemporary but distinct is the emergence of the refined Bundi style. The Gita Govinda inspires a remarkable set of 150 drawings now in the Bharat Kala Bhavan collection. The creative genius of the artist makes full use of the poetic and pictorial motifs and creates a stunning series of drawings to match the poetry. These paintings provide the wide range of interpretative possibilities based on the same text and within the framework of the pictorial vocabulary of a specific style. This set should be attributed to the end of the 17th century. It is a close parallel to the set of Bundi drawings in the National Museum collection. A fuller analysis of each of these drawings is contained in an independent monograph.15

  To this phase of Rajasthani painting also belongs the set of Gita Govinda paintings executed in the Malwa idiom, now in the private collections of Maharaja Bhawani Singh. They represent yet another example of illustrating the Gita Govinda through a distinctive pictorial style.

  Finally, there is the last phase belonging to the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Again, within the period, many sub-schools and styles develop. The Gita Govinda sets of this period can also be viewed as the last phase of Mewari painting: today they are termed as the paintings of the Jaipur Amber School. Similar sets appear in Jodhpur, Darbhanga and Mithila. Nearly seven such sets of illustrated manuscripts have come to light. The City Palace Museum, Jaipur, has three illustrated sets (Nos. 2163, 2165 and 2172). The Darbhanga Sanskrit University library has another three and the Jodhpur State Archives has one such set. While it is difficult to establish an exact chronology of these sets of paintings, a study of the 150 paintings of these sets would lead to the conclusion that the set of illustrations (presently in Darbhanga) is perhaps the earliest amongst this group. Twenty-seven paintings accompany a text written on sixty-six folios (122 pages). In most cases one painting illustrates prabandha: only one prabandha (No. 22) has two. There is an introductory and a concluding painting. The City Palace Museum set of paintings (No. 2165) evidently belongs to a slightly later period (early 19th century) and the second set is perhaps still later (No. 2163), around 1830–35. Two other sets in Darbhanga are in pocket-size, with diminutive paintings. These belong to the late 19th century along with a few folios acquired by the National Museum recently. Contemporary is a set in the City Palace Museum (No. 2172) in a larger format and another in Darbhanga. Both these sets, although accompanying the Gita Govinda text, are, in fact, raga and ragini paintings attributed to each of the prabandhas of the Gita Govinda. The illustrations in the Jodhpur Archives also illustrate only the avatars. Amongst the Rajasthani paintings of Ragas and Raginis of diverse sub-schools, few are related to the text of the Gita Govinda.

  It was necessary to introduce the Darbhanga set against the background of the Gita Govinda paintings in north Gujarat and Rajasthan from
the 16th century onwards, particularly Mewar, because only then can the nature of the developments which take place in this last phase of Rajasthani paintings be traced. While the text of the Gita Govinda remains constant, the interpretations are directly governed by earlier pictorial styles. While the sets of the first, second and third phases manifest the artists’ desire to interpret the theme, the emotion or the phraseology creatively and imaginatively, the artists of the fourth phase are overpowered by the pictorial interpretations of their predecessors. The motifs which transfigured the verbal imagery into the pictorial become stereotyped conventions and lose some of their freshness and vitality. Many pictorial devices which were necessitated by the artists’ desire to comprehend the poem in all its multiple symbolic nuances are now rules of pictorial composition. Space is still divided into planes and zones, but the delicate juxtaposition of proportions, enlarging and dwarfing, lose some of their subtlety and charm. The sense of balance and harmony in nature and the vibrant response of birds, animals and the natural flora and fauna to human emotion becomes a decorative design. And yet the links with 200 years of painting preceding these are clear and unequivocal. Occasionally there is a slight introduction of the linear perspective of a clear foreground and background but by and large the principles of pictorial composition are the same as in the 17th and early 18th centuries.