Johnson 37,1-36

J.37,1-36

Thirty-six paintings comprising a ‘ragamala’ series, arranged according to a Special system.

Hyderabad, c.1760.

Richard Johnson Collection. Purchased 1807.

Gouache with gold; set within borders of pink paper with the edges ruled in gold (now enclosed within modern card guards).

240 by 150 mm; page 315 by 208 mm.

Published: Randle (1946), 169-70; Ebeling (1975), 195, no.72; Waldschmidt (1975), 538, no.14.

Exhibited: British Empire Exhibition, 1924; Heath (1924), no.69.

Note: This is perhaps the most sophisticated of a group of Hyderabad-style ‘ragamala’ series. Closely related are those in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay (22.287-322 and 22.323-358) and the Indian Museum, Calcutta. Many other such series exist, the most significant of which are treated in tabular form in Ebeling ((1973), 102), where the conformities of iconography are shown. There was apparently no rigid tradition of ‘ragamala’ classification in eighteenth-century Hyderabad, and the artists seem to have supplemented their series with subjects of uncertain iconography (eg nos.7 and 9 here). As the present set has no inscriptions of identification, apart from two cases where labels have been attached to the wrong pictures, the titles of subjects which do not approximate to the normal tradition have been taken from those titles given to the equivalent pictures in the Bombay series.