Vipralabdha Nayika

Illustration to a Asta Nayika series
By a Kangra artist, circa 1820

Opaque watercolour heightened with gold, in a pink album page

28.9 by 22.5 cm., 11 3/8 by 8 ¾ in. page; 20.8 by 14.2 cm., 8 ¼ by 5 5/8 in. miniature

In this series of romantic heroines, the Vipralabdha nayika or 'abandoned heroine' has been disappointed by the nayaka or lover, and throws away her ornaments in disgust. To her, according to Keshava Dasa in his Rasikapriya:

Flowers are like arrows, fragrance becomes ill-odour, pleasant bowers like fiery furnaces,
Gardens are like the wild woods, o Kesava, the moon rays burn her body as though with fever,
Love like a tiger holds her heart, no watch of the night brings any gladness,
Songs have the sound of abuse, pan has the taste of poison, every jewel burns like a firebrand

She is the jilted heroine, in the throes of disappointed love, dejected and inconsolable. Her mood is matched by the starkness of her surroundings as Randhawa suggests (Kangra Paintings on Love, New Delhi, 1962, p. 77, fig. 44). On a bare hill, under a full moon in a starlit sky, our heroine has risen from the bed of leaves she has prepared for her tryst and with a look of rueful regret casts her necklace on to the ground, a downward movement echoed by the sloping hillside and the double-pronged arrows of blossoms from the tree pointing directly at her.

At a time of increasing complexity and pointless decoration in Pahari painting, here the artist adopts a much starker and more elemental approach appropriate to the theme depicted. Comparably stark paintings are illustrated in Goswamy, B.N., and Fischer, E., Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India, New Delhi, 1997: a Todi ragini (no. 157) and an Abhisarika nayika (no. 170), attributed to Purkhu of Kangra. In the present painting the artist has observed carefully the slightly disheveled locks of the heroine, and the elegant folds of her veil as it changes colour falling from hair to shoulders.

Provenance

The Hon. Robert Erskine, London, 1970s
Private collection, France, 1970s-2010