Parvati Chiding Shiva (A Folio illustrating one of the Episodes from Rasa-manjari, a poem by Bhanudatta)

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A painting seeking to illustrate a verse from the known Sanskrit poem Rasa-manjari, by Bhanudatta, one of the best known treatises on Nayika-bheda – classification of heroines in love, represents Parvati as Praudha Adhira Nayika – impatient or angry heroine in her advanced age, chiding Shiva believing that he had spent his night with someone else. An open door, a bed laid in full and her well adorned person with glittering bracelets, necklaces, ear-rings, brooches among others, indicate that impatient in love she has waited for him the whole night. The gesture of her hands trembling in anger suggest that she is rebuking Shiva and is asking him to go back to her he had spent the night with, and Shiva, not knowing how to pacify her, stands dismayed.

A study of psychological nature, Nayika-bheda is one of the earliest conventions in Indian classical literature adopted subsequently in visual mediums. It classifies love-involved women of various age groups and social background under different categories. Praudha Nayika is one of them, and Praudha Adhira is its finer division. Bhanudatta has used the model of Parvati, the daughter of Himavana, for illustrating the state of the mind of the Praudha Adhira Nayika who doubts her lover and gets impatient and annoyed not because she knows anything of his infidelity but because with advancing age she loses her confidence in herself. When Shiva returns to Parvati – Praudha Adhira Nayika, after nightlong wandering, a usual thing with Shiva, she perceives her own reflection in the moon that Shiva wore on his coiffure. She instantly concludes that enamoured by some other woman who enshrines his coiffure he had been with her the whole night, and without giving it a second thought her anger bursts.

This miniature reproduces in its exactness a folio of the known Rasa-manjari set of around 1660-70 A. D. from Basohli, the pioneer painting school and the earliest centre of Pahari art. The set was painted by one Kirpal, the father of the known Basohli master painter Devidas whose Rasa-manjari set of 1695 is one of the most precious treasures of the world art. In Kirpal’s illustrations the hero has been alternated by a divine figure, usually Krishna, though in some folios, as here, also Shiva. It has treated iconography, figures’ anatomy, tree-type, kind of hills, architecture, facial demeanour, gesture of hands, colour-scheme and everything exactly as the same were treated in the folios of 1660-70.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr. Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of literature and is the author of numerous books on Indian art and culture. Dr. Daljeet is the curator of the Miniature Painting Gallery, National Museum, New Delhi. They have both collaborated together on a number of books.

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