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Brush drawing on paper.

Inscribed above in Pahari in Takri script: machha talaye vich na oyi. tam bade sarovare vich sati. 227 ('The fish was unable to fit within pond, so [it was] left into the sea') (read by Vijay Sharma) and with the number 227.

The story of King Satyavrata occurs in the last canto of Book 8 of the Bhagavata Purana, and tells how Vishnu was first incarnated to save the earth. The pious king of the Dravida country, Satyavrata, intent on performing penance by the sea shore and subsisting only on water, inadvertently caught a tiny fish. Unwilling to harm it, he kept it in a container, but day after day the fish grew bigger and bigger and the king ran out of containers that could hold it. Recognising that the fish must be a powerful god, he worshipped it as Vishnu, who then revealed to him that he was indeed Vishnu and that he had come to save him from the upcoming mighty flood that would cover the earth when Brahma was asleep. Satyavrata became Manu, the first man, and when the flood came he gathered up the seven sages and examples of all living things and took them into the boat that miraculously appeared. Vishnu appeared again as a great fish and using the snake Vasuki as a towing rope, towedthe boat through the night of Brahma until that god awoke again and resumed his creation duties.

The page comes from the large series known as the 'Small' Guler Bhagavata Purana series. Archer (1973, vol. 1, p. 51) thought the series came from Basohli and was later than the 'Large' Bhagavata Purana series of 1760-65, followed by Aijazuddin (1977, Basohli 7i-xi). Goswamy and Fischer believe it to be from Guler and attributable to Manaku about 1740 (1992, pp. 244-45, nos. 105-10; and 2011, p. 643, figs. 9-11 and 11a). Craven in his study of Manaku's work (1998, figs. 10-16), Seyller and Mittal (2013, nos. 11-14) and McInerney (2016, nos. 67-70) are of the same opinion. It is a very extensive series widely dispersed, with the later parts existing only as drawings such as this one. These drawings have the lines of the frame drawn around the subject and normally a brief indication above of the subject written in Takri script.

In our drawing the fish is treated on the largest possible scale, drawn in large sweeping strokes of the brush over faint traces of underdrawing. The elderly king bends forwards reverently, his hands expressing his wonder at this miraculous ever-enlarging fish. Many of the drawings of this series are more obviously workshop productions, but here the eloquent figure of King Satyavrata suggests it is attributable to Manaku himself. Manaku is one of the most controversial of Pahari artists, the varying viewpoints of themselves, W.G. Archer, Jagdish Mittal, Karl Khandalavala, Roy Craven and V.C. Ohri are summed up in Goswamy and Fischer 2011, pp. 654-66.

Literature:

Aijazuddin, F. S., Pahari Paintings and Sikh Portraits in the Lahore Museum, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1977Archer, W.G., Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London and New York, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1973Craven, Roy, 'Manaku: a Guler Painter', in Ohri, V.C., and Craven, R., ed., Painters of the Pahari Schools, Marg Publications, Bombay, 1998 pp. 46-67Goswamy, B.N., and Fischer, E., Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India, OxfordUniversity Press, Delhi, 1992Goswamy, B.N., and Fischer, E., 'Manaku' in Beach, M.C., Fischer, E., and Goswamy, B.N., Masters of Indian Painting, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2011, pp. 641-58McInerney, T., Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts - the Kronos Collections, Terence McInerney with Steven A. Kossak and Navina Najat Haidar, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016Seyller, John, and Mittal, Jagdish, Pahari Drawings in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad, 2013