#ragamala

Todi Ragini Ragamala series: Todi Ragini. 18th century. Mughal

Standing beneath the pink blossoms of a small sapling, a lone nayika wanders an open glade. The vast empty landscape emphasizes the woman’s loneliness, the only audience for her longing tune being a blackbuck deer—horns delicately embellished with gold and a jeweled necklace around its outstretched neck—who serves as a stand-in for her absent lover. A cool white sun peeks through the morning haze, bringing a tinge of gold into the slowly brightening sky—the flat layers of metallic and cool colors evoking the feeling of a spring morning. The iconography is immediately recognizable as that of Todi Ragini, which recalls the wistful mood of love in separation.

See another folio of Todi Ragini at the Royal Collection Trust (acc. RCIN 1005127), which while stylistically quite different, shares a similar composition to the present painting, characterized by a scarce background and the trifecta of nayika, deer, and tree.

Bihas ragini of Magha Malar

Ragamala paintings are images which depict, in physical form, the ‘modes’ or scales used in Indian Classical Music, known as ragas. Usually accompanied by an inscription or poem, they elucidate the season and time of day in which a raga was meant to be performed, as well as its mood, and often portray the Hindu deities with which they are individually associated. The concept may have originally come about through the use of personification as an aide memoire for musicians, which then developed into physical imagery. This collection dates to the mid-late eighteenth century, and originates from Hyderabad on the Deccan Plateau in Southern India. 

Gauri Ragini, First Wife of Malkos Raga, Folio from a Ragamala (Garland of Melodies), India, ca. 1625-1650

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Provenance: Gift of Paul F. Walter

M.87.278.14

Ragamala paintings are a series of illustrative paintings from medieval India based on Ragamala or the "Garland of Ragas", depicting various Indian musical modes called Ragas. 

A raga or raag ( literally "coloring, tingeing, dyeing") is a melodic framework for improvisation akin to a melodic mode. Rāginī (Devanagari: रागिनी) is a term for the "feminine" counterpart of a "masculine" rāga.

[text source: @wikipedia]