The Dhira heroine speaks crooked words about Krishna

Illustration to a Rasikapriya series
By a Kangra artist, circa 1810

Opaque watercolour heightened with gold in an oval cartouche framed with blue in a pink album page; inscribed on the reverse in Hindustani in Nagari script, with verses III, 45-47 from Keshav Das's Rasikapriya

32.7 by 23.1 cm., 12 7/8 by 9 1/8 in. page; 26.6 by 18 cm., 10 ½ by 7 in. miniature, inside gilt band

In this painting the nayika [Radha] is telling her confidante (sakhi) of the vertiginous beauty of Krishna, on a terrace in front of her house by the river with a distant landscape beyond.

The verses on the back first distinguish three types of madhya or ‘youthful experienced’ heroines, dhira, adhira and dhiradhira. The poet then gives this verse to his dhira heroine:

Now for the middle one who is patient: she speaks to her sakhi:
The longer I saw with joy - oh Kesavadasa [i.e. the poet]- his breast, the seat of dalliance, bearing marks,
the more the palpitations in my heart increased, I had a kind of vertigo as if it was especially chilly
While I firmly closed my lotus-eyes there was truly imprinted in them
the face of Mohana[Krishna], which you had called a lotus, which I perceived however like the moon

Archer describes the series as originally having several hundred paintings, of which fourteen paintings are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; see Archer, W.G., Indian Painting from the Punjab Hills, London, 1973, Kangra, no.66, (i)-(vi). He further suggests that the distinctive oval format with yellow margins and floral surround is based on the Lambagraon Baramasa series, and he dates the series circa 1820-25, but modern scholarship has preferred a date a decade or so earlier.

Provenance

Collection of the artist, A.R. Chughtai (1899-1975)
Private collection, Germany