The Ramayana
In Bengali Folk Paintings
Paper Type: Art Paper (Matt) | Size: 230 x 150mm
All colour; 93 illustrations; 140 pages; Hardback
ISBN-10: 9385285556 | ISBN-13: 978-93-85285-55-4
795 | 20 | 12.99
The images presented in this book take us into
the heart of the rich folk tradition of India. Of that heritage, the display of
paintings accompanied by comments recited or sung has been a part since very
early times, as attested by references and legends in Sanskrit sources,
including the Har?acarita, a 7th-century work by Ba?abha??a. Known as
pa?acitras or pa?as in short, these illustrated narratives on rectangular
fabric or paper as well as on scrolls are a type of performed art that reaches
out to audiences, mostly rural, conveying the artists’ responses to legends and
social themes of common knowledge across a wide range of audiences from varied
social and cultural bases. A particularly powerful classes of such paintings
that come from the Bengali-speaking region of eastern India comprise the
depiction of events from the Ramaya?a in the form of scrolls that are unrolled
as the painter displays and explicates them. The vividly colourful images
presented in this book occupy a special niche in the history of Indian art,
remarkable because they are not only visual objects but narrative expositions
of a text that has been part of the lives of vast numbers of the Indian people
and often their source of moral guidance. Especially remarkable is that these
pa?as by Bengali folk painters diverge so often from the magisterial Ramaya?as
of adikavi (“First Poet”) Valmiki, leaving out important parts of it and
importing into the Rama saga episodes from local narrative caches. Following
conventions of both art and storytelling as they do, these portrayals
constitute what is now recognised as the tradition of counter-Ramaya?as that
embodies alternative alignments of ethical judgment.
Mandakranta Bose
Author
Mandakranta
Bose is Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre
for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver. A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and also of
the Royal Society of Canada, Dr Bose holds a BA and MA in Sanskrit from
Calcutta University, a second MA in Comparative Literature from the University
of British Columbia, and the MLitt and DPhil degrees in Oriental Studies from
Oxford. Her research over the past fifty plus years covers four main areas:
Sanskrit treatises on the performing arts, the Ramayana, Hindu dharmasastras and religious culture, and
gender representation in the arts and literatures of India.