A crowded Mewar miniature, painted in flat panels of red, yellow, green and blue, with a gold-and-orange border. Reading it panel by panel:
- Bottom left, on a green field: a battlefield after the fighting. Two blue-skinned princes in gold crowns lie stretched on the ground, wound about with pale coils; long arrows lie across them. Around them dozens of monkeys and bears, some grey, some brown, lie fallen or sit slumped with their heads in their hands. A few crowned warriors stand among them looking down.
- Top left, in the blue sky: small figures ride through the air in gilded canopied carriages and in a chariot drawn by a white horse, watching the field below.
- Centre, in a yellow palace: rows of soldiers in helmets, some on horseback, crowd the courtyards and stairways; one rides a dark brown horse and another raises a bow.
- Top right, on a red ground: a court scene. A large seated figure with many heads stacked in a crown-like tier and many arms holding weapons receives courtiers and warriors who stand before him with folded hands and drawn bows.
- Middle right, on a pink and yellow ground: the same many-headed, many-armed figure again, now on a throne inside a chamber, with an attendant beside him.
- Bottom right, in a garden: a woman in red sits under flowering trees with two women companions attending her, apart from all the fighting.
First, read the caption. It tells you almost everything you need: Yuddha Kanda of Ramayana, Sahibdin, Mewar, 1652, India Office Library, London. So the folio belongs to the Yuddha Kāṇḍa — the ‘Book of War’, the sixth book of the Rāmāyaṇa — was painted by the artist Sāhibdīn in Mewar (Rajasthan) in 1652, and is now in London.
Then read the picture. A Mewar folio shows several moments of the story at once, in separate coloured compartments, to be read like panels.
| Where to look | What is drawn there | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| The large green field on the left | Warriors and a whole army of vānaras (monkeys) and bears lying on the ground, wound about with long white coils; two blue-skinned princes among them; the surviving monkeys sit around them in grief | A battlefield after a defeat. The white coils are serpents — arrows that turned into snakes and tied down the whole army |
| The blue sky at the top | Figures riding in golden aerial chariots, and a warrior shooting arrows from a chariot drawn by white horses | The battle is being fought in the air as well as on the ground — a mark of the demon warriors' magical powers |
| The red chamber, upper right | A crowned figure with ten heads and many arms seated in a palace, receiving warriors and messengers | Rāvaṇa, king of Laṅkā, in his court, hearing what has happened on the battlefield |
| The pink panel, lower right | The ten-headed figure again, seated on a throne, with a warrior standing before him with folded hands | A second moment in the same court — the painter shows time passing by repeating the figure |
| The yellow garden, bottom right | Two women seated among flowering trees inside a walled enclosure | Sītā in the Aśhoka grove, guarded but attended by a companion |
Putting it together. The most likely identification, and the one a class usually reaches, is the famous nāgapāśa episode of the Yuddha Kāṇḍa: Rāvaṇa's son Indrajit, fighting invisibly from the sky, strikes Rāma, Lakṣhmaṇa and the vānara army with arrows that turn into serpents and bind them fast; news of it is carried to Rāvaṇa in his court, while Sītā waits in the Aśhoka grove. In the story the brothers are later freed and the war goes on.
The important details to bring into the discussion:
- The characters you can pick out by convention — Rāma and Lakṣhmaṇa are painted blue; Rāvaṇa has ten heads; Hanuman and the vānara army are the monkeys; Jāmbavān's people are the bears.
- The technique — one page, many scenes, divided by bands of colour, with the same character repeated in different compartments. You do not read it left to right like a photograph; you read it compartment by compartment, like a story.
- The date and the place — 1652, Mewar. This is a Rajasthani painting of a Sanskrit epic composed far earlier and far away, now kept in London. The single picture is itself an example of the chapter's theme: one story, retold in one more language — the language of painting.