Add MS 21475

An album of 8 Maratha, Jaipur and Deccani paintings.

The album was briefly noticed in Blumhardt’s 1899 catalogue of Hindi manuscripts, no. 91. The album contains eight paintings mostly from the Deccan, including five large paintings illustrating verses from Keshav Das’s classic text on poetics, the Rasikapriya. Presented to the British Museum in 1856 by F.S. Haden Esq. This is possibly Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910), an eminent surgeon and one of the great 19th century authorities on etching, both on its practice and on the works of eminent etchers. The album was rebound in Europe and the paintings remounted on European paper so that any connection with its compiler in India has been lost. The first two paintings are of Maratha interest – portraits of Maharaja Sambhaji and the Peshwa Madhavrao Narayan II –followed by a Barahmasa painting from Jaipur.

The remaining five paintings in the album are all from a large Hyderabad-type series of the Rasikapriya, the classic text by Keshavdas on Hindi poetics that the author wrote at Orccha in 1594 for Kunwar Indrajit Singh, the brother of the ruler Raja Ram Shah of Orccha (1592-1605). A complete set of illustrations to this text involves several hundred paintings. Our album contains only five such paintings. If there were more, their whereabouts is not now known. Originally the Hindi verses were inscribed in nagari in a separate box above the paintings and text and paintings were contained within gilded and coloured ruled lines, but for some reason the original text panels were cut out and replaced with another panel pasted down from the reverse. The remains of the tops of the original aksaras are visible only on folio 7. The pictures are not particularly specific and their subjects could apply to many of the verses and situations in the text. On the reverse of each folio are inscribed brief Hindi labels for the subject of the painting taken from Keshavdas together with a number different from that associated with the relevant verse in its chapter, and a written out Persian numbering. All the paintings were at some time removed from their original album pages and let into European paper frames.