Page from a Ragamala Series: Kanada Ragini (Primary Title)
Unidentified (Artist)
Kanada Ragini is portrayed as a victorious prince who has returned to his palace from a successful elephant hunt. He appears in both of these paintings as the Hindu god Krishna. A sword and an elephant tusk in his hands, he receives accolades from nobles who laud his exploits. The example on the left is executed in the classic Central Indian mode, with extreme two-dimensionality and fields of intense color. A strutting peacock seems to step off the palace roof onto an abstracted white horizon line that separates a flat red backdrop from the solid black sky.
The Jaipur painting on the right’s sky is also black—for Kanada is meant to be performed at midnight—but its value is graduated, growing darker toward the top, where stars appear. As with the pavilion’s rudimentary perspective, the painter attempts to create spatial recession within the picture plane. In its newly discovered foreground is the slain elephant, his trunk brutally severed.
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