Ragini Vasanti

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Rendered using a stylist blend of the elements of Rajasthani art with Pahari art style, this miniature portrays a young beautiful maiden plucking flowers from a Madhavi creeper hung over her marble-clad terrace and collecting them in her basket-like folded odhani – a textile length worn as an upper wear. Though a variant, this iconographic diction represents Ragini Vasanti, the third consort of Raga Hindola, one of the six principal Ragas in the tradition of Indian classical music. Ragini Vasanti represents same lyricism and aesthetic beauty as does Raga Hindola riding on a swing adorned with flowers, and hung on the branch of a mango tree under a clouds’ laden sky, and is thus closer to her spouse than any of its other consorts. Another popular variant of the imagery of Ragini Vasanti comprises two maidens, not one, plucking flowers from a row of flowering Madhavi plants, usually three, and collecting them in roundish baskets of cane. The venue of the act is more often a forest or an open space, not a terrace or a palace-part as here in this miniature.

The beautifully floored terrace, overlaid with alternating white and grayish marble-tiles, has on its northern side a flower-bed with symmetrically laid rows of flowers of golden yellow looking like double marigold. This exotic flower-bed looks like a parapet adorned with ceramic tiles printed with beautiful floral motifs dividing the terrace from the forest beyond. Beyond the terrace on its left there is a pair of trees with identical leaves but variously coloured trunks, one, smoke-grey, and other, light maroon. Clinging to both trees there rise two Madhavi creepers the branches of which reach the terrace affording the maiden its flowers. On the terrace’s right is Madhavi in plant form, not creeper, and is in full bloom. Beyond them is a green patch of land with leafy shrubs strewn all over, and above it the space defining sky covered golden dust.

A single figure, not two as in a Kangra miniature of around 1790-1800, one of best known medieval style of Indian painting from Himalayan hill region, this manifestation of Ragini Vasanti seeks its form, ivory-like body complexion, the same as it has been defined in texts as the body colour of Raga Hindola’s entire family – all Raginis and Ragaputras, and anatomical dimensions in its Kangra proto-model, though her iconographical features, style of costume and ornaments and her overall regalia are suggestive of Rajasthani links. The texts perceive Ragini Vasanti as emitting from the chirping of woodhen : ‘Vasanti vana-kukkuti kala-rave’, though strangely and unlike many other raginis, the imagery of Ragini Vasanti does not include, even symbolically, any form reflecting the form of ‘vana-kukkuti’ – woodhen.

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.