A Reading of a Painting of the Ramayana from Chamba

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The genesis of this project lies in my attempt to ‘read’, in collaboration with Vijay Sharma, three 18^th century miniature paintings based on the Ramayana in the Bhuri Singh Museum at Chamba (cf. Vishwa Chander Ohri). As with the written and oral versions of the Ramayana, there is an ancient and boldly innovative tradition in India of painting and sculpting the story of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita where each set of drawings or sculpted wall not only creates its own Ramayana, but also offers a critical reading of Valmiki’s epic. The painting or the sculpture re-presenting the Ramayana is, thus, both an act of imagination and a hermeneutic exercise. What is surprising is that, while religiosity asserts that Rama is the incarnation of Being and therefore unique, in the visions of the painters and the sculptors, he assumes a multitude of forms (cf. Octavio Paz). Each of the visual representations, of course, presupposes the prior existence of the stories of Rama in their written and oral forms, but they are neither belated nor subservient responses to the verbal.

Perhaps, the most radical suggestion that the visual representations of the Rama story not only exist beside the textual versions and can sometimes even persuade the poet Valmiki to reconsider and change the story is in Bhavabhuti’s strongly imagined 8^th century play, Uttararamacharita. In the play, Valmiki neither controls the narrative sequence of the story nor does he decide how the life of the characters should end. In an extraordinary act of creative generosity, Bhavabhuti first permits a painter to imagine the right ethical end of the story. Then during the course of a theatrical performance about the last days of Rama’s kingship, pleads with Valmiki to take pity on Rama and Sita who have suffered more than any human fault demands and loved each other more profoundly than even the poets can imagine. They deserve, at last, he says, to be the natural, cultural, moral and magical examples of love on earth. Valmiki, whose original poem is suffused with the rasa of shok and pity, sees the justice of the appeal. With the clarity of a great poet who understands the “sacred mystery of language” (Act vii, line 143; p. 389) which can rewrite lives and its meaning, he obliges the painter, the dramatist and the audience. As the crafter of a myth about a sky-god and an earth-daughter, animals who proclaim their kinship to the elements, mountains which are blessed by the gods, monsters who are created to test the fortitude of heroes, and demons whose challenge to a moral order has to be collectively met, Valmiki has the right and the privilege to transform a potential tragedy into a festive play. The painters of the Chamba Ramayana claim the same privilege. (cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Peirre Vidal-Naqet, p. 412). Bhavabhuti’s play opens with Rama, Lakshmana and Sita in a picture gallery where they see murals representing their past life which they either remember with pleasure or try to repress. Strangely, the paintings also reveal events which are unfolding elsewhere and of which the characters are unaware but which are a consequence of the decisions they had made in the past. These events are about Luv and Kush, sons of Rama and Sita who will be born at some future time. Fascinatingly, the art gallery also becomes a place of prophesy and reveals a life which could come into being depending on what their conscience chooses to acknowledge or forget in the present. Thus, the ethical thrust of the characters in the play is closely woven into the critical reading of the paintings.

The three paintings that I want to read here, in keeping with the example already set by Bhavabhuti, are part of a folio of either eighty-four or eighty-seven miniature works which constitute a distinctive painterly narrative of the Ramayana by Pahari artists of the Chamba valley designed between 1760 and 1800 AD. The three paintings, only a fragment of a wonderfully rich archive of visual mythmaking, depict a palace in Ayodhya where Manthara and Kaikeyi plot against Rama, a meditative scene at the Panchavati hermitage during the forest-exile of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita, and the final return of the rightful heirs to the throne of Ayodhya after the defeat of evil along with their army of animals, birds, rakshsas and devas. It is worth noticing that the Chamba painters do not continue with the story after the end of Rama’s exile thereby keeping the attention focused on Rama’s heroism and divinity instead of shifting attention to Sita’s later sorrow. It assumes, like any folktale, that the period of anxiety and turmoil always has a just end. There are no shadows of tragedy threatening to seep through Rama’s kingdom once again and, as in any ironic modernist mythos, corroding his marriage, his kingship and his ethical ideals. Nor is there, throughout the series of paintings, even a hint of the salacious and vulgar delight contemporary illustrators of the Ramayana seem to take in depicting the bodies of women being disfigured or thrown in the fire so that jaded habits of quick moral judgments can feel appropriately self-righteous.

Further, while the painterly narrative follows Valmiki’s Ramayana, it seems to have absorbed in the rhetoric of its designs and its undemonstrative emotional tones, the simplicity and the clarity of Tulsidas’s rhythmic austerity and imagistic precision. The feeling that one is in the presence of painters who want to pay their own small homage to a life and a world in which they still have a devout faith becomes evident if one chances upon their painting after having spent a few excited hours glancing through the paintings in the Udaipur Ramayana. Commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar, and painted between 1649 and 1653, this set of Mewar paintings is burnished with primal colours and ornamental opulence. In every painting in this set the action has the passion of heroic action, the rituals have the extravagance of royal display, the women are luminous with jewels, the trees display an eternal splendour of colours, and the earth is either ocher in colour when the mood is holy or a deep scarlet when emotions suffused with pain seem to slide into hallucinations.

In contrast, the Chamba paintings are precise, restrained and elegant in their simplicity. Their action is so devoid of any gestural excess that even the demons seem to have ordinary human fears. The courts are not wild with ornamentation, and the main protagonists have the grace that the human body can give them without being overloaded with dazzling diamonds and polished gold. The paintings are so lyrically designed in natural colours of luminosity as to remind us continuously, even in scenes of carnage, that the earth was, is, and can always be a place of the kind of glory the finest of imaginations can dream of. In the paintings Rama, Lakshmana, Sita, and Hanuman are the personal, social, and moral emblems of that possibility. It is as if the painters self-consciously decide that after the long years of anguish in which the protagonists, whose actions in exile are sometimes ethically questionable but who did nothing which could be classified as radical and unredeemable evil, deserve a future of peace. It is clear that, while the unnamed painters know the versions of the Ramayana, they choose to think of Rama as one who is instinctively good. But they also understand that only when Rama stands beside Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman on a vibrant earth full of trees, flowers, birds, sinuous rivers, snakes in the underworld, and clouds in the sky where the gods abide, can they create images of an ideal marriage, a wise friendship, a good state and a resplendent earth. Rama’s divinity is not in isolation of the divinity of all the other forms and shapes that make up the entire shrishti.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the last painting in the series, with triumphant human beings in harmony with nature, animals and the gods, makes such gracefulness visible. Rama’s victoriousness is not an affirmation of his martial skills, but a restoration of the right relationship between the human kingdom, and the kingdoms of animals, plants, water, rakshsas and devas and others. The painters, of course, know that there is perhaps another Kanda of the Ramayana to follow and that the story of meanness, betrayal, exile and death the chapter has to tell has become deeply hooked in the troubled psyche of men and women from generation to generation. They know that in the afterlife of Rama’s return to Ayodhya, Hanuman and all that his strange presence had promised disappear from the story, and that Sita becomes the very symbol of sorrowing womanhood perpetually tested and always discarded. Yet, their refusal to paint incidents from the Uttara Khand is neither a naive assertion of divinity and faith nor a sentimental evasion of grief. It is rather a self-conscious example of the spiritual and secular being of the society to which the painters belong – part of society’s visionary history of hope without which the human instinct for the ‘good’ would wilt and die.

The line, form, style, colouration, tone, figuration, dramatization and symbolization in the works of these painters suggest that the intention of the artists is not merely to offer imitations of the story. Of course, the painters are the inheritors of the verbal and visual tradition of the Ramayana and are deeply influenced by it. But they are not passive recipients of its pious interpretations. They make no attempt to translate verbal poetry of Valmiki or Tulsidas into an equivalent visual language as supplements to the process of learning the texts or a reinforcement of interpretations already known. Original in their thinking and confident of their craft, they want, instead, to add, not their historical name but their ‘visionary signature’ (in as much as Indian poetic and painterly traditions are ‘signed’ to indicate only the ‘presence’ of men and women who added some lines of music and colour to the original plenitude of the earth) beside the ‘signatures’ of Valmiki and Tulsidas.

Just as they choose their ‘significant’ moments from the Ramayana narratives for visual enactment, they reserve the right to refuse the pictorial codes representing Rama or Ravana from the older painterly traditions of the epic. They do so, not out of some agonal relation with the past, which some critics think is essential for forging a creative identity, but because they know that the past of the Ramayana tradition has brought them to the boundary from which their own pilgrimage of understanding has its beginning; the past is not a burden but a necessary initiation. The tradition of pictorial representations of the Ramayana, therefore, neither produces anxiety in them nor indifference. Instead the painters seem to look back at tradition with the gratitude of all seekers for having given them the Rama stories and also taught them about how colours can be ritually made from leaves, minerals and some living creatures. They know, as perhaps, all genuine creative artists know that “no mortal being can indefinitely tolerate facing the Creative naked and unprotected” (Richard Wilhelm). But having paid their homage, they seek their inspiration from their own understanding of pictorial composition; their own relation to the vibrancy of colour, the materiality of paint and the sinuousness of line, or the physical contiguity of human beings to rock, sun, rishi, water, wind, deva, fish, bird, flower, monkey, serpent or demon to convey meaning. Tradition is left behind; a new landscape of stories begins to take shape which has the same characters as of old but in spaces which are different. It is as if the artists know in the very sinews of their being that an incarnation, because it is always new, is neither historically restricted nor geographically bounded, and that it is made manifest only to those who seek and see without ethical presuppositions or aesthetic preconditions. Bhavabhuti is right when he exclaims that a poet-seer can make “facts conform with his words” (Act I, p. 77). But given his own use of paintings to change the course of the story of Valmiki’s Ramayana, it is not at all surprising that he also shows through his ‘art gallery’ that a visionary artist can paint a new world into existence.

These Chamba miniatures demand from the viewer a similar freshness of imagination as Bhavabhuti demands from the audience of his play and the readers of his text. Before recalling an incident from the Ramayana, those who turn to the Chamba miniatures should first see them as unique paintings; look at the harmony of colour, line and form as revelatory of sacred or moral truths which they as painters have discovered during the course of their artistic sadhana. Only then should the viewers turn back to the texts of the Ramayana and re-imagine them so as to recognize the ways in which the paintings offer new ways of reading, seeing and being in the world. The paintings neither want to teach us the same received and general truths about Rama’s divinity which the priestly moralists want us to acknowledge nor uncritically accept the idea that Sita is the archetype of all betrayed women which enraged social conscience wants us to assert. To read and see through the eyes of piety or politics we neither have to open the texts nor see the paintings. Nor do the painters want to adapt traditionally given painterly codes about the sacrality of the heroes and the adharma of the rakshsas. Instead, as a re-visionary challenge, what they want us to do is to see, with our own critical concerns, a new painted text called the Ramayana by inviting us to re-conceive its world as different from the one the protagonists of the epic may have seen at any particular dramatic instance of their lives.

Their intention as thinkers and painters engaged in the significant and serious task of re-conceptualising the Ramayana is, thus, to ignore the conventions of orthodoxy and create a distinctive visual language of the imagination along with a new understanding of the story of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita in all its mythic splendour. What is startling, given the context and the content of these paintings, is that like the finest of Bhakti poets they want to explore, as if for the first time and directly through their own experience in the world, the conditions of the ‘good’ in any common day of our human and natural existence without reliance on the grace of the Gods; to invite us to look at the sensuous habitat within which the heroes of the Ramayana live their lives with the usual human and social distractions of ambition, egotism, jealous love, ecstatic sexuality, sudden and casual brutality or the dharma that human beings and all things in nature must uphold; to envision a more felicitous and a fuller life on earth than seems ever possible within structures of power and city-states. Presenting their own and unique understanding of the story, these paintings exist, alongside the verse-texts about Rama as meditations on Valmiki, Kalidasa, Murari, Bhavabhuti, Tulsidas and others so as to conduct a profound conversation with the poets about the nature of kingship and citizenship, the fidelity of strangers and the betrayal of kinship, the faith of love and the threat of eroticism, the ‘strangeness’ within each of us, and the ‘uncanny other’ who is radically different from the human. Further, these paintings are not reverential acts of homage paid by artists who are gratified if they provoke the viewer into offering a sort of inattentive veneration to the human or divine figures depicted. They are, thus, quite different from the acts of religiosity displayed by the painter of stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals or the icon maker, or the artisan-carver of religious stories on temple walls.

These artists from the hills use the available pictorial traditions and particular ethical concerns to retell the story so that their visual narrative is recognized as another Ramayana which exists in dialogical relation with the textual and oral ones with which they are familiar. They demand that as viewers we bring to them an educated responsiveness to their particular mode of graphic storytelling which either enhances or modifies or challenges our predictable understanding of the story. One should, of course, add that their responses are the opposite of the skepticism of modern reader of the Ramayanas which discounts the divinity of Rama and condemns as inhuman folly his rejection of Sita. Like the strong poets of the Ramayanas, the Chamba painters bring to their work a passionate engagement with the ethics of governance, the sacrifices life demands even from the most caring of human beings, and the ideal relationship human beings should establish with animals, birds, fish, snakes, rakshsas and devas for the redemption of an earth which is frequently threatened with annihilation by arrogant usurpers of power. That is, unlike the poets of the Ramayana whose primary respect is for the divinity of Rama as the model of a responsible human being he has come to represent, the painters devote equally reverential attention to all that abides on the earth on which the heroes of the Ramayana walk.

Indeed, in the attention these artists pay to what is strange or uncanny, they are radically at odds with the attitude to strangers in much of European and American texts. If one can make a risky generalization, one can assert that in much of the European and American tradition, extending from the Book of Ruth and Dante, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, through to diverse science-fictional texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Andre Tarkovsky’s Solaris, stories mixing metaphysics and crime ranging from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Hitchock’s Strangers on a Train, the spy novels of John le Carre’s about George Smiley and Robert Ludlam’s Bourne Conspiracy trilogy where every lover is a potential enemy, the stranger or the foreigner or all that is ‘uncanny’ does not have a place in any utopic planning. In neither of them is there any desire to seek solidarity with that which is different from either what is within the self or outside the nation state. The uncanny strangeness of the ‘Other’ is rarely the source of or access to the sacred, but is a threat or a hindrance and must be negated, destroyed, emptied of all qualities, rendered so fearful and impossible that if it is ever encountered by anyone it is annihilated. Such an attitude not only results in imaginative impoverishment, it also makes paranoia and murder possible (cf. countless works like Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Notes from the Underground or An Indian Wants the Bronx). It is only a rare William Blake who can, as a warning, proclaim, “Then cherish pity/ Lest you drive an Angel from your door,” where ‘the angel’ stands for ‘stranger/ strangeness’ and all that lies beyond the borders of the familiar and has in it the qualities defined by words like xenos (“foreign”) and unheimlich (“uncanny”) (cf. Julia Kristeva).

The attitude towards the ‘strange/stranger’ and the ‘uncanny’ in the paintings of the Ramayana from Chamba is not only radically distinct, but is also without a moment of self-consciousness or rationalizing hesitation, transformed into lived experience. One should, of course, at once make a distinction between the ‘strange/stranger’ and the invocation of the ‘irrational’ or the ‘incomprehensible’ in the Ramayana for they become the necessary source of evil disruption in the story and show why the rasa of radical innocence of the Bal Khand, as Bhavabhuti terms it, cannot survive the historical realm of human ambitions, desires and ethical choices. While they are defeated by the ‘irrational’ and the ‘incomprehensible’, Rama, Lakshmana and Sita do not encounter the ‘strange’ in thought or the ‘stranger’ in person with fearfulness, and hence, do not instinctively seek its destruction or its ‘conversion’ into something familiar. In their world there are no heretics or heresies and hence there is no call for erasure; there are no non-human living beings or objects that cannot be called upon to help heal the wounded or complete a story. Instead, they are willing to acknowledge the power and resplendence of the ‘strange other/stranger’, accept that it may have wisdom or purpose which may not be available to them. It is precisely such a capacity which, in the tradition, makes them ideals worthy of emulation. And the painters reserve their special homage to their sense of place as human beings in an earthly habitat.

Thus, in one of the paintings, the fabled and wise bird/vulture, Jatayu/ Sampathi/ Garuda (or is it Kagamuni as some have suggested, thus adding to the excitement of reading), is so fore-grounded as to have a greater majesty than the rishis. Larger than life, more ancient than human beings, Garuda is more learned a seer than any of the acolytes meditating in the forests. The painters gladly show Rama, Lakshmana and Sita, who are exemplary figures, paying unhesitating homage to a bird who knows the skies of the gods as well as it is familiar with the desolations of death. Similarly, the monkeys have more reverence for Rama’s divinity than most human beings and are majestic, the fauns display more faithfulness in their love for one another than some queens who are seduced by the ‘irrational’, and some of the rakshsas understand, like inspired social critics, the stringency of justice. In the paintings, it is clear that the fish in the rivers, the monsters of the seas, and the snakes under the earth are more reliable guides and helpers than many soldiers and disciplined ascetics. The painters know, better than those listeners of the sacred texts who are often only moved by the divine attributes of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita, that the earth has responsibilities which go beyond those of sustaining only human beings. But, even more importantly, their painterly responses to the energic abundance of the earth’s beauty cannot but force us to pay attention to the uncommon idea that human beings must extend sympathy to all that they may consider ‘strange’ on earth — to all those who may be looked upon as ‘strangers’ in human habitats but have lived in them from generation to generation – because it is more than possible that the confrontation between human beings and the ‘uncanny’ may result in the regeneration of the earth and the rediscovery of all those who abide there or have a place in its natural economy.

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The process of reading the sequence of paintings in the Chamba portfolio with sensitivity and intelligence demands three perceptual moves from the viewer. Since every framed incident in the painted narrative is unique in its choice and place in the traditional narrative of the epic, the first attempt of the painters, if they are to convince one of their the singular understanding of the story, is to make one feel a sense of disenchantment with and distant from known and orthodox interpretations. The paintings must convince us that their meaning does not lie in the Ramayana texts, but in the line, colour, tone, and the organization of the human and the non-human in the pictorial space. Only then can the artists persuade us that the second step in the act of reading the paintings of re-visioning and re-cognition of the scenes, the characters and their particular place in the social, earthly and divine realms, is worth taking. And, finally, given the fact that the painters are not modern and secular artists but believers in Rama, Lakshmana and Sita as ideal presences on earth, the aesthetic beauty of each painting must engage us in the re-enchantment and re-sacralisation of their story. Since it is apparent from the folkloric and historical accounts of Chamba that these artists draw as much upon the canonical texts of the Ramayana by Valmiki, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti and Tulsidas which they may have known intimately as they do upon the Loka Ramayana (also referred to as the anchali of Rama), I would like to suggest that the three-fold process of visually imagining the story demanded by these painters replicates similar impulses that define the structure of folk-narratives and tales of wonder anywhere.

At the heart of the Ramayana, as in any epic or folktale, lie forests of exile, Dandaka, Chitrakuta and Panchavati. For Rama, Lakshmana and Sita, these forests are simultaneously a reminder of the evil which has now usurped Ayodhya as well as regions of enchantment where all the guilt, anxiety and paralysis of imagination and will of the previous structure are spontaneously and intuitively cast aside. The painters understand this dual and ambiguous sense of the radical otherness of things in the forests that opens before them once they leave the cosmopolitan boundaries of Ayodhya. It is fascinating to note that at the end in Bhavabhuti’s Uttararamacharita when Rama returns to the Dandaka forest years after having exiled Sita, his first impulse is of joy tinged, not with fear, but with sorrow. While Shambuka, whose spirit is accompanying Rama, thinks that the forests are “dreadful” and “gruesome,” Rama associates each rocky cave and tree there with Sita’s affection and loyalty. Rama weeps because she who had shared his delight at the first sight of the Dandaka forest is lost to him forever. However, it is in the forest again that Bhavabhuti imagines the possibility of re-enchantment of Rama’s life.

During their first exile in these forests Rama, Lakshmana and Sita begin a process of education which is different from the one they had been through as children in the ashrams of their gurus. Paradoxically, at first their exile enables them, however temporarily, to evade the harsh ambitions of the political world. Unlike the city streets of Ayodhya, which were happy under Dasharatha, but made of human routines performed from day to day with a kind of mechanical predictability which was comforting but did not invite imaginative exploration, their forest exile renews in them a capacity of wonder. Indeed, it is worth remarking how easily and quickly they cease to mourn for the comforts of the palaces they have left behind and how joyously they become investigators of the new world the forest wilderness unfolds before them. In fact, rarely do they think nostalgically about Ayodhya during their fourteen years away from it.

The painters respond with joy to the beauty of the forests in which their protagonists find themselves. Rama, Lakshmana and Sita cease to be victims of a palace coup, but seem to resemble any of the light-footed, sprightly young people that so frequently give visual form to miniature paintings about the delights of the seasons and mystical entrancements of musical ragas. The three wanderers are surrounded by an abundance of trees, flowers, birds, animals, clouds which seem to carry within them the sources of their own beauty and their own renewal. But, of course, the experience of exile also forces them to confront another of life’s realities in which sorrow is as inevitable as the failure of dreams, aspirations and desires. It is in these forests that they begin their journey into adulthood and understand that, while nature invariably renews itself with all its energic abundance and so be once again the place it must have been at the beginning of time, human time is a continuous erosion and an endless fall; the wise must be reconciled, as best as they can, to life’s endless mistakes and their tragic consequences. Sooner or later the bonds with the gods must snap and human beings must turn away from their naïve assumption that immortality and goodness are inalienable properties of human life. The ‘irrational’ and ‘incomprehensible’ world of historical experience where deceit and folly, cruelty and betrayal invariably intrude and continuously test, over a long duration of time, human capacity for endurance, reasoned decisions, courage and willingness to trust the ‘strange/strangers’ for help. Interestingly enough, in the Ramayana, as in most mature myths, the gods rarely enter to extend help, but those who are ‘strangers’ to human experience often do.

The forest of exile, which is also a place of enchantment is a liminal space, and hence, ambiguous, undefined, and potentially either holy or demonic. It is unmarked by time’s regulated measures. Further, like all liminal sites, it lies between two radically distinctive temporal orders and two sites of action where human organization and social structures are well-defined. In the case of the Ramayana, the Ayodhya of Dasharatha, which is seemingly a timeless place, lies before the forest of exile. While Rama’s Ayodhya, where time has become a burden, lies on the other side of the forest and comes into being after the period of banishment is over. Because the forest, with all its uncanny enchantment, is liminal, its boundaries are porous, shifting and unmapped. And the passage of time is either suspended so that one does not realize how quickly the fourteen years of exile of the royal trio end, or is recorded as a succession of instances during which Rama, Lakshmana and Sita explore the natural world as if for the first time. To convey the liminality of space and time in the forest, the painters create different places in the forest as the same site, with the same river, flowers, trees and animals. Or, paint the same forest space with its hut-dwelling built by the princes with slight variations of colour, shade and perspective to indicate a repetitive cycle of seasons and not the chronology of their lives at every discrete moment of time.

Dasharatha rules over Ayodhya for hundreds of years with fair justice and good economic sense. Dasharatha’s Ayodhya is a place protected from the wilderness of the forest where the rishis and the demons live. Both are a threat to the peace of any ordinary cosmopolis. Ayodhya is suddenly transformed into a site of sorrow over the question of succession to the throne. In Tulsidas’s Ramayana, only Rama understands that Dasharatha’s decision to abdicate the throne and install him as the regent could unleash potentially dangerous emotions and desires. Indeed, while all others, include the wisest of sages, Vashistha, rejoice at the announcement and read everywhere “omens of good fortune,” (Tulsidas, p. 164), in Rama’s heart there is “nothing but dismay.” Full of apprehension, he says to himself: “All we brothers…were born together, we have eaten together, slept together and together played our boyish games; together we had our ears pierced, were invested with the sacred thread and married – all these ceremonies we have enjoyed at one and the same time. This is one blot on a spotless race that only the eldest should be installed, and not his brothers too” (Tulsidas, p. 166). Rama’s apprehensions come true as Bharata’s mother, Kaikeyi, demands that Dasharatha’s give her the boon he had once promised her, install her son as King and exile Rama. Ayodhya suddenly turns into a site of sorrow and all that was good in the common day of its people is suspended as if by a curse. Jubilation in the city gives way to fear. The Chamba painters now create a bhava of shok as Rama, Lakshmana and Sita exchange their resplendent clothes for garments of leaves and tree-barks and walk into exile.

The other spatial structure and temporal order of the Ramayana, which frames the forest of exile, is represented by the painters is marked once again by Ayodhya but after fourteen years of the forest-exile of its protagonists. Ayodhya now is both the same city as at the beginning and a radically different one. Rama returns to Ayodhya but it is now so transformed that it seems as if it has been touched by the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘sacred’. And the painters’ response to the joy of Rama’s return is to create a city of jubilation where the citizens have come out to receive an army in which the familiar and the human are intermingled with the strange, the demonic and the sacred. It is as if the painters intuitively understand that if Ayodhya is to be a site of renewal of energies then new resources for the imagination will have to be incorporated in the social and moral structures of the city which had survived in its state of melancholic reflection without the presence of Rama to grace it and transform it into a place of creatively useful activities.

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These paintings, even when produced by different artists over more than forty years, seem to follow the unique three-fold narrative sequence I have outlined above. The first movement creates an enchanted space inhabited by Dasharatha’s peaceful kingdom which suddenly and unexpectedly crumbles. Through darkening tones of colour, subtle changes in postures and a deliberate shift away from an intimate glimpse of Ayodhya to a more distanced, more disenchanted recording of events, the artists reveal the process of transformation from unselfconscious joyousness of a people under the kingship of Dasharatha, to a society bewildered by demands of passion, ambition and greed which reason cannot satisfy and goodwill cannot appease.

The second narrative movement, which begins with Rama’s long years of exile in the forest and ends with the final defeat of Ravana, consists of paintings which are remarkable for their freedom from geometric restraints, realistic visualization and temporal logic. It is as if once the constraining walls of Ayodhya with their social conventions and political demands have been dissolved, all the beings of earth, heaven and hell can come pouring into the world once again and seek to reestablish their place in the universe they originally had at the beginning of time (in illo tempore) through cooperation or struggle. Unlike the depiction of Ayodhya with its socially assigned spaces, here there are no borders and no hierarchies; no ineradicable lines between human and divine, or divine and demonic; no proportionate representation of human beings, animals, trees or rocks; no hesitation to paint creatures that can neither be imagined nor seen.

The third and final section of this particular visual representation of the Ramayana is the establishment of a kingdom and the sacralisation of the lives of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. Here Rama is presented, without any disturbing shadows, as ‘the Lord of grace.’ There is no ‘afterward’ to the story of the victory of good over evil as in Valmiki – no historical tragedy of another banwas, another painful separation and the unredeemable fall into the sadness of our tragic historical existence and its demands of sacrifice and pain. Instead, in this sequence it is assumed that when Rama regains his throne order, harmony, and creative confidence will return – Sita will be Rama’s rightful consort, the gods will shower blessings on the earth from beyond the clouds, the demons will retreat to places beyond and outside human boundaries, forests will blossom again, and animals will return to their proper habitat on earth.

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Thus, the first painting I want to consider, depicting a moment of change and crisis in King Dasharatha’s family, is so structured as to convey the feeling that the Ayodhya, which once derived its energy and legitimacy from its primal relationship with nature and its sympathetic bonding with people, is now a beautifully crafted but adamantine place. Valmiki imagines Ayodhya, prior to Rama’s exile and all the historical troubles, as a blessed city of gardens and groves, culture and work on the banks of the river Sarayu. Neither the ‘uncanny’ nor the ‘irrational’ intrude in its order. When the contingencies of history make it possible for the irrational and the uncanny to crash through the old order, it requires the skills of the poets and the painters to help us understand them, and the courage of the hero to enable us to understand their place in an ethical structure, in dharma. It is worth noting here that, while the poets and the painters of the Ramayana understand that dharma’s enigma, with all its strangeness and incomprehensibility, can only be confronted in the course of lived experience, a modern philosopher like Bimal Krishna Matilal claims that the epic merely works out a formal ethic which has little to do with human actuality (pp. 85-90).

The Chamba painters depict Ayodhya’s origins in all its imaginative plenitude in the first twenty-two miniature works of the folio. This beautiful series frames the particular painting of Kaikeyi, who becomes the reason why the kingdom crumbles dramatically into sorrow. The paintings which immediately precede this one show that Dasharatha, aware of his old age and the encroaching shadows of death, wants a ritual transition of kingship to Rama. Ayodhya is now in need of a stronger and fresher leadership so that its decaying authority can be renewed. People of Ayodhya had lived for so long without any historical change that they had begun to assume that the harmony of their society was ‘natural’ requiring no rational restraints. They had not only forgotten that the ugly, the incomprehensible and the irrational reside within each psyche, but also that separation, sorrow and death must be consciously acknowledged as part of the human condition. Every concern with ethics, all questions of dharma are merely dogmatic assertions if they are only formal exercises of rule, promises, and judgments unless they are rubbed and roughened by the uncanny, the strange, the irrational and the mortal in human life. In this painting, as perhaps in all the versions of the Ramayana, the fictiveness of Dasharatha’s Ayodhya is tragically revealed. So is the claim that all his actions are based on truth sanctified and endorsed by the wisdom of the sages. It is worth recalling that the main burden of the epic is Rama’s effort to lay, through an historical struggle with evil with the help of the forces of the earth (animals, birds, mountains, rivers and seas and all the other strange creatures who abide below the earth and in the sky) the foundation of a just kingdom, a ramaraja.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in this painting Dasharatha’s palace is not the glittering and enticing city established at the beginning of time by Manu, ‘the lord of all men,’ described in chapter 10 of Valmiki’s Ramayana. In the poet’s version, Kaikeyi lives in luxury. Her inner courtyards, whose walls are embedded with diamonds, gold and silver, glow like the moon. They are surrounded by flowering trees which provide shade to peacocks, parrots and singing birds. Crowded with people, music wafts through its recesses. It dominant colour, as the writer and artists, Manjula Padmanabhan, points out, is an angry and agitated red which is unredeemed by the cool shades of green trees, white flowers and blue skies as is often the case in Indian miniature paintings.

In the Ramayana narrative, the incident with Kaikeyi is the first significant break in the seeming timelessness of Ayodhya and Dasharatha’s kingship – a necessary turning point without which the story cannot proceed. It suddenly reveals the chaos of contingent events in an unorganized space which had earlier appeared to be merely aspects of a changeless sacred time and an immutable sacred space The moment Kaikeyi shatters a mythological lived life, knowledge of change, suffering, uncertainty and mortality crash into human consciousness. (cf. Mircea Eliade and Ariel Glucklich). The construction of a dharma to live by becomes the responsibility of each individual who has to search for it with the uncertain light of his own understanding through Dandaka, the ‘forest of experience’ — like a half-blind man looking at things in the flickering glow of a lamp, says Rama (cf. David Shulman, p. 92). That is why what Kaikeyi demands appears to be ‘irrational’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Her intervention makes the world an ambiguous and a dangerous place.

The Chamba painters unselfconsciously understand that with Kaikeyi’s demand Ayodhya has become a liminal place, a place which will have to redraw its boundaries as a civilization. That is why the scene I am trying to read in the painting is an ill-defined, uncomfortable place. Kaikeyi’s palace lies between Ayodhya somewhere beyond the left of the palace and a forest grove on the northern edges. It lies on the border separating the city from the forest darkness. The cold calculus of the huge battlement walls and the surrounding moat defines most of the space of the painting and imposes itself upon our eyes, blocks all sights of nature’s glory and social grace. The world of natural abundance and the arching sky with a fading moon is pushed close to the upper edge of the painted space and is barely visible in the penumbral light of the fading moon. There is only a sliver of green in the right and left corners — as part of Ayodhya’s receding compact with a natural and social order which had once existed without any threat of intrusion by a skeptical intelligence or of irrational expectations. Yet, strangely enough, and contrary to realist expectations, the central space is lit as if in the full glare of the sun. That is where the crucial action determining Rama’s fate and the future of Ayodhya is to being enacted.

Given the open spaces filled with the vibrancy of colour and action of the previous paintings, the moat and the soaring wall in the foreground come as a rude shock. In a painterly world whose aesthetic of non-egotistic selfhood is guided by surrender to a dharma which is never marked by intrusive self-assertion, the threatening wall and the blank, barren and sand coloured earth — perhaps a moat — surrounding it, give us premonitions of an evil time governed by selfish desire. The palace wall, of course, is not a realistic representation. It is there, rather, to convey an emotion of apprehension and the psychology of irresponsible power which is always threatening and unpredictable. The austere, high and brooding walls of Kaikeyi’s palace surrounded by blank space or a moat alert us to the threat it holds to the peace of Ayodhya. Both Valmiki and Tulsidas, we remember, describe Dasharatha’s palace as a spectacular building glittering with gold and diamonds to remind people that it belongs to the dynasty of the sun-god. Further, given the celebrations in Ayodhya, the silence of the walls brings to the new day an unanticipated sense of incoherence, an obduracy of spirit which is incomprehensible. Like any fortress, its walls with turrets, devoid of all but the most rudimentary of decorations, are so impervious as to cut off the interior spaces from any intrusion of nature’s soothing charms and ensure that those who live within cannot even catch a glimpse of the social world outside. Its looming presence also prevents us from paying any sympathetic attention to the protagonists, Manthara and Kaikeyi, enclosed within.

Action, however, is pushed far within the palace walls, as if the artist wants to delay showing it to us and be faced with its consequences. This strategy which seems, at first, hesitant to acknowledge that Kaikeyi and Manthara are capable of adharama is also followed by Bhavabhuti and Murari by using sadly amusing evasions. In the picture gallery in Uttararamacharita, when Lakshmana points to the mural painting of Manthara, Rama ignores him and quickly moves on leaving Lakshmana bewildered (Uttararamacharita p. 89). There is psychological truth in the fact that Rama in Bhavabhuti’s play, who has completed his years of exile and is now happily living with Sita, still has not come to terms with his ghosts. Walking through the picture gallery depicting his own life’s journey, it is not surprising that Rama, reflecting on himself going through the processes of transformation which have finally confirmed him as the king of Ayodhya, should find the incident which opened an abyss before him, deeply disturbing. In the play, he seems to know that traumatic scars never fade; they can only be ignored. That is, perhaps, why Bhavabhuti does not mention Kaikeyi.

Murari, on the other hand, in Anargharaghava, takes recourse to an ingenious ploy to save Kaikeyi from the kind of abomination heaped upon her by Valmiki and Tulsidas. Kaikeyi sends her blessings to Rama on the occasion of his marriage through Manthara. Unfortunately, Manthara is waylaid by a demon-huntress who steals her soul for a while and changes Kaikeyi’s message. In the wonderfully complicated and ironic world of shape-changing demons and shifting alliances, while the huntress walks away with Manthara’s identity, Hanuman stands guard over the supine form of Manthara (p. 247-251). The ‘irrational’ or the ‘incomprehensible’, that in a tragedy points to the inscrutable in human life and often leads to sorrow, cease to be part of the inner being of Kaikeyi and Manthara and become instead the technologies of evil manipulated by external forces in melodramas of power.

The understanding of the Chamba painters of Manthara, Kaikeyi and her manipulated selfhood is more complex. The first thing we notice is that unlike most works by Pahari artists where the natural and the supernatural are deeply interfused with the human, in this painting the undecorated outer walls and the inner courtyards are so extensive as to push the grove of trees far into the top corners where they are no more than green blurs with hints of white flowers and roosting birds. The sky above is a dark, blank space and not the abode of the gods glittering with stars. Further, Dasharatha’s kingdom lies beyond the boundaries of the painting. Perfect in its measured form, hexagonal in its shape, and relieved at regular intervals by turrets for keeping a watch over the world outside, the remoteness and the asceticism of these palace walls signals the presence of the geometry of power, but not the humanity of good governance. Its imposing form suggests a kingdom where the appearances of duty must be maintained, but not the essential shape the upholders of dharma must give to a social order (In an interesting note about the painting, Manjula Padmanabhan, says that the palace walls with their high door and the division of the inner courtyard into imprisoning units, reminds her of a screaming face).

Surrounded by the upward soaring walls, Manthara and Kaikeyi seem diminutive within the pictorial space. They are cut-off from nature and the distractions of the city and have lost sight of the visionary narrative of the first part of Ayodhya Khand. Their psychological fragmentation is indicated by first locating them on two disjunctive levels within the palace and then scattering the moment of their debate about kingship or dharma in different framed spaces. An additional symbolic intension of the walls and blank space around it is to suggest that Dasharatha, who was once a good king, has failed in his old age to transform his earthly existence into spiritual grace; his vision has narrowed, and his legitimacy has eroded.

The narrative begins with the sight of a lone woman on the terrace silhouetted against the morning sky. There is no indication in the painting, of course, that the story should start from there. None of the figures have name tags as is sometimes the case in Pahari paintings. There is also no quotation from the text running across the top of the painting identifying the narrative. But, the woman’s singular presence, separate from the world of words and actions below has a mystery which suggests that the meaning of the bustle in the framed rooms and the balcony a level below may reside with who this woman is. The artist makes no attempt to balance the terraced-division and leaves space on the right empty. Nor is there a sharply drawn, clearly marked, single coloured parapet or balustrade separating the terrace from the rooms below. The broken red line, however, separating the two sections creates a feeling of discomfort. This deliberate lack of geometrical regularity makes one suspect that one should look at the image, not for its realism, but for it psychological exploration. The two rooms below on the left and the right, connected by a veranda, are not different sections of the inner-courtyard with different characters, but the same room representing the changing states of Kaikeyi’s feelings. This realization makes one look more intensely at the symbolic change of colours, objects and postures of the women in the two rooms. It is clear that the painter is inviting us to investigate Kaikeyi as she first welcomes the news of Rama’s investiture as the crown prince, resists Manthara’s instigation and then decides not only to ask for the boons but also use all her sexual, youthful charm to obtain them.

There are four distinct centres of action within the palace walls which are neither chronologically arranged nor have a spatially realistic sequence of action (cf. D. Venkat Rao). They are not calligraphed from left to right and to be read as a script; they are also not, if one likes, theologically scripted but are open to different readings. All one can say is that while the artist depends upon a singular instance of crisis within the popular story of Rama and his banishment, he does not follow any one of the known narrations. However, while the painted sequence defies a singular interpretation, it does possess a narrative movement and a psychological truth which demands two intermingled interpretations. The first depends upon the viewer reconstructing the life of Kaikeyi which leads up to the moment when she makes her demands upon Dasharatha based upon his or her prior acquaintance with the story. The other is a more imaginative and symbolic viewing, still calling upon a previous knowledge of the narrative but creating possibilities for revising the inherited understanding of Manthara as a hunchback who leads Kaikeyi morally astray. Since the painting is inspired by what is already known about the two boons, or more ethically intricate ‘vachanas’, given as in any folk-romance, by an injured and grateful king to a beautiful young woman who saves, heals and marries him, one can assume that the artist is interpreting the sequence of incidents leading to the moment when she decides to make her demands which may be formally correct but are morally wrong. Later on when Rama is given a ‘boon’ by Indra, instead of asking for some thing which would meet his own selfish interests, he asks that the monkeys who had died fighting for against Ravana be brought back to life. Because Kaikeyi’s demand produces existential revulsion not judicially acceptable approval, the pictorial mode of narration is deliberately disjointed. It is as if the Chamba artist wants us to understand that Dasharatha’s household is no longer the ahistorical paradise it may have been, but is now troubled by the more mundane and febrile human concerns of families, mistaken promises, violent sexual passions, and self-love which is often akin to suspicion and hatred of others. Upon hearing that Dasharatha has exiled Rama because he is he is hypnotized by Kaikeyi’s erotic charms, Lakshmana angrily says what everyone obviously knows already: “The king is perverse, old, and addicted to sex, driven by lust” (cf. Wendy Doniger, p. 225). Even Rama, who accepts the banishment with quiet fortitude and refuses to utter a word in condemnation of Kaikeyi or Manthara, later on criticizes his father bitterly as a “besotted” old man who, like “an idiot,” has given up the good of the family and the state for a pretty woman: “The king has lost his mind. I think sex (kama) is much more potent than either arth or dharma” (cf. Doniger, p. 225). Kaikeyi or Manthara make the faultlines, the “incoherences and abysses” (Julia Kristeva’s phrase) of the society so visible that one suddenly understands why the courtiers and the public were jubilant the moment Dasharatha had announced his intention of anointing Rama as his heir.

One can, if one chooses to read the painting realistically, assume that the isolated figure on the terrace is Manthara. Unlike the noxious figure of Valmiki or Tulsidas, however, she is not an ugly hunchback, but a colourfully dressed young woman of considerable sexual charm and personal vanity. The yellow, red, and blue bands of her flowing skirt are the colours of sky, earth and green leaves otherwise missing from the painting. Contrary to expectations, she is an erotically alluring figure. Her ears are heavily bejeweled, her forehead sparkles with a diamond embedded in gold, her arms are covered with bangles and the tips of her fingers dyed with henna. The cloth covering her head is flecked with gold. She is a fine young woman and not a clichéd old crone, and as critics have pointed out, in the Ramayana the wearing of jewelry is often a mark of sexual availability (cf. Sally Sutherland-Goldman). Yet, her body is full of tension, excitement, and desperation. The long drawn eyebrows are arched with disbelief and anger. One can feel her initial bewilderment in her right arm extended towards the west and the hand gesturing helplessly in the direction of where one presumes Ayodhya lies. The left hand clutching one end of her covering, adds to her growing fear of betrayal and loss. Her face turned towards the market place registers the frenzy of listening to the sounds of celebrative music filling the streets of Ayodhya, while the impatient movement of her feet captures the urgent desire to run down below, wake up Kaikeyi and persuade her to act in her own self interest. The posture of the body conveys a vast amount of narrative information. What is interesting is that the artist separates Manthara and gives her a distinctive and empty space where the process of her changing reactions to Dasharatha’s decision can be dramatically studied. Her visual isolation from the social and natural world is rare in Pahari paintings in which every human and non-human figure is almost always imagined in relationship with a vast shristi. Manthara, thus, not only dramatizes the idea that she is the only one to register her instinctive dissent against a decision which has won the accolades of all the citizens, the wise men and the gods, but that the angry and incomprehensible insistence with which she ruptures the old concord will have to be acknowledged henceforth as part of life in earthly and human temporality.

The sense of the dramatic, at the moment when Manthara understands what is at stake, is visually enhanced by the fact that she has to descend to the rooms below to wake up Kaikeyi. It is worth noticing that while the sequence is theatrical, of course, it is also symbolically acute. It alerts us to the idea that Ayodhya is about to ‘fall’ into sorrow – descend into the contingencies of time and the fatal deception of words (cf. Octavio Paz, p. 22). Dasharatha’s verbal carelessness will soon wound him to death, and Ayodhya, hoping to enter into another millennium of prosperity, will instead find itself lost in a state of melancholia without any guiding moral authority. A word given or a promise made must, after all, only be kept if it does not involve the sacrifice of others. It ceases to be morally just, as the sage Vashistha recognizes, if it becomes the cause of suffering for some one else. Surely, on one level, the Ramayana is a radical critique of an ethic which is maintained by words whose surfaces are seemingly sanctified by tradition, but which hide a reality which is deeply corroded by selfish interests, sniggering rumours and a meanness of thought which degrades and humiliates others.

The two rooms below the terrace, linked by a verandah, at first glance seem to be the private chambers of Kaikeyi. They are well-proportioned, separate, brooding, inward-looking, cell-like rooms with marbled parapets where fantasies of controlling a kingdom, unregulated jealousy, hatred, self-regard, sterile sexuality and betrayal are to be played out. There is nothing in these rooms and nothing in the surroundings to distract attention of its inhabitants away from the immediate ambitions of grabbing the throne. These rooms fit well in the architecture of kingship but do not convey any confidence in a morally vital rajya. Their pathos lies in the fact that while they convey the feeling of organized gracefulness, they are cut off from the sources of intuitively apprehended natural energies and rationally defined social actions and hence dharma. The women who live in there have forgotten that time erodes and life’s forces can always be infected by corruption and betrayal. In other words, these rooms surrounded by blank yellow-stone battlements, turrets and cupolas, are the signs of moral and political sclerosis that will soon reduce Ayodhya into a kingdom of sorrow. They remind the viewer, that the old king, who is no longer a figure of enlightened authority and one of his queens, in her neurotic rage, is about to destroy the kingdom. The poetic narrators have already informed us that Dasharatha is haunted by nightmares and feels baffled by inauspicious stars (cf. Valmiki’s Ramayana, chapter 4, Ayodhya Khand). As if to deepen the irony of Dasharatha’s failure even more and to tell us why and how his moral world has ossified, the painter has shown human beings as diminished and insignificant within the structures of power.

One soon realizes that instead of realistically illustrating rooms befitting a queen, the Chamba painters, have created a theatrical space which reveals the sensually powerful and self-absorbed but isolated world of Kaikeyi. In a move that is remarkable in its psychological astuteness, each of the framed spaces are the same space, but are pictorially separated in order to tell the narrative of sexual temptation, turmoil and slow fall into “convulsions of ambition” (Nietzsche’s phrase). It is as if the painting is illuminating the idea that evil is not some grotesque ‘other’ tempting us at our moment of vulnerability, but a recognizable part of our most ordinary being. Kaikeyi and Manthara are like us and like each other – poor players that ‘strut and fret’ about the stage for a few moments and then are heard no more. It is indeed remarkable that both almost disappear from the epic after becoming the instruments of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita’s entry into a time of suffering, change, and a hopeless search for earthly happiness.

The two boxed spaces on the left and the right with Kaikeyi and Manthara are actually the same room seen at different times of the psychological drama being enacted. The visual differences between them are merely indicators of a succession of emotional changes before the final instant when Kaikeyi is transformed from being a loyal wife and a good mother into a sexually alluring and politically dangerous woman. The painter is not inviting one to peep into realistically designed rooms of Kaikeyi. Instead, he is urging one to investigate Kaikeyi’s inner turmoil and imagine Manthara, not as an external agent of deformity, but as an extension of Kaikeyi’s own inner corruption, thereby suggesting that the mistakes human beings make are not instigated by the gods as part of some fated plan, but caused often by the seductions of power, the allure of egotism or fear. Kaikeyi then becomes all too human and familiar.

In the framed room on the left, Kaikeyi is all poise and elegance. Her red skirt has the sparkle and fire of a woman who is confident of her sensual control and knows that elegance can charm. Her arms and hands move with the unselfconscious rhythm of one who has internalized the mudras of dance. It is clear from the economy of her gestures that her first reaction to Manthara’s news is of genuine delight. That her world still retains the old order is indicated by the simplicity of the curtained red awning above her couch. In fact the entire section on the left is made up of horizontal or perpendicular lines which together create a sense of balance and organization. The only discordance is in the rage that seems to glow in Manthara’s eyes and the gestures of her two hands which seem to speak the language of irritated restlessness.

Then, as the eye moves across the four maids to the room on the right, one is surprised that while one is still in Kaikeyi’s room, there is a strange sense of dislocation and a whiff of moral corruption. The red curtain over the couch now flares into wild and dramatic folds on both sides. Kaikeyi is lying supine on her couch obviously in Manthara’s thrall who leans over her in a sort of cruel delight simmering in her dark eyes. She hovers over Kaikeyi like a bird of prey while her right hand extending toward Kaikeyi’s face carries a threat and an admonition. Kaikeyi’s clothes are in disarray; her gestures are defensive, nervous and confused; her limbs are tense with the theatricality of passion and selfhood. Her left arm, arched above her head, imitates the classic gesture of a courtesan and a temptress. Manthara is now obviously in command. What is significant is the change in the colour of Kaikeyi’s skirt from the auspicious red of marriage to white with all its premonitions of coming widowhood. Here it also indicates to Dasharatha that she will not be sexually available to him if he does not meet her demands (cf. Sally Suderland-Goldman). An unsheathed sword on the floor next to Kaikeyi’s couch, apart from being a sign of violent sexuality and a reminder of the ancient war between the gods and the demons during which Dasharatha had been wounded, is also a sign of faithlessness. Demons, we know, can be pushed into the nether world but can never be defeated. They wait for the moment when the social guards are down, and reason, however momentarily, sleeps.

In a brilliant move, the shifting responses of Kaikeyi to the announcement that Rama is to be anointed as the heir apparent from initial ecstasy, to anger at Manthara, to apprehension for her own survival and Bharata’s fate, and finally to the knowledge that she has the power to debase the king and win power, are captured through the emotionally charged gestures of the four female figures in the framed central space. Here chitra and natya are fused with katha. If one watches the women carefully, one can follow the emotional drama in the two rooms on either side. The first woman on the left seems to convey a sense of relief at the initial response of Kaikeyi. Dressed in red, statuesque, calm and listening with intent, her right hand is close to her lips in a gesture of surprise at the words being heard, but of confidence that all will be well. But then, as other sentiments and temptations seem to collide with Kaikeyi’s better self, the two women in the middle record the difficulties of moral debate and the agony of possible betrayal. Their agitated bodies lean toward each other as they seem to whisper apprehensively to each other. Their hands are tense. The contortions of the body of the woman on the right mark the fear that erases the first woman’s sigh of relief as she conveys to the others Kekaiyi’s resolve to demand that Rama be exiled. There is a frenzy of transition and agony that ripples across the four women. What is fascinating is that the viewer’s eye is not allowed to rest on a single figure or concentrate on any of them individually, but is caught up in the flow of the social, moral and religious debate between Kaikeyi and Manthara on the one hand and the four maids on the other. Henceforth, time, mortality and evil will consume the energies of Rama, Lakshmana and Sita.

References

Wilhelm, Richard. Lectures on the I Ching: Constancy and Change, trans. by Irene Eber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).