This painting belongs to a well-known Pahari series of the Harivamsha (Genealogy of Hari [Vishnu]). Comprising 16,374 shlokas and traditionally credited to the ancient sage Vyasa, the text of the Harivamsha recounts the life of Krishna in a level of detail matched only by the Bhagavata Purana. This particular series, which consists of large number of paintings without a running text or even a brief synopsis on the reverse, is widely associated with the work of Purkhu, a leading artist of the Punjab Hills. Although Purkhu has no known paintings ascribed to him, his name is known from pilgrimage records in the area that establish his position within a family of professional painters (1). His major patron was Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra (r. 1775-1823), who maintained a large painting workshop. Upon Sansar Chand’s loss of Kangra fort and town to Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1809, Purkhu apparently accompanied his patron as he moved from Kangra to the village of Samloti (2).

If the early years of Purkhu’s long career were occupied primarily by portraits of his young patron and others at court, the years shortly after 1800 were spent illustrating or guiding the workshop production of several series, notably the Harivamsa, Gita Govinda, Rasikapriya, Shiva Purana, and Ramayana, most of which are large-scale in format and extensive in scope, regularly numbering more than a hundred paintings each (3).

A fine representative example of the artist’s work in the dispersed Harivamsha is the present painting, which illustrates the riveting Rasalila (literally, ‘play of passion’). On an autumnal night, the gopis (cowmaidens) of Vraja give in to their irresistible attraction to Krishna and gravitate towards him. Seeking him out and calling him by the name Damodara (literally, ‘rope round the belly’, a reference to a device by Yashoda used to keep the rambunctious infant Krishna close to her), they gather round him in rows and circles (4). To set the moment, Purkhu devotes half the composition to a vignette of Krishna’s family and the townspeople of Vraja slumbering in overlapping thatched huts that are arrayed at whimsically irregular angles. In most cases, the house is brightened by a single lit candle placed in a shallow ornamental niche. The upper three dwellings are occupied by members of Krishna’s own family, who are identified by labels written in white: (from left to right) his mother Yashoda (written Jasodha), his father Nanda, and his brother Balarama (or Balibhadra, as is written here). A second complementary vignette occurs in an unobtrusive dark strip along the river Yamuna where two gopas (cowherds) are shown frontally as they doze beside their kine, each tenderly resting a protective hand on the back of the closest cow.

With these sidelights covered, the artist turns to the main event, the magically transcendent rasalila, where Krishna dances with each devotee, seemingly simultaneously and exclusively, an apt metaphor for the union of the individual with the divine. The canonically blue-skinned Krishna appears twice in the scene. In the lower grouping, the adolescent Krishna, superfluously identified by a label overhead, stands with a golden conical hat on his head and a cowherd’s crook – not the customary flute – in hand, and gesticulates towards a compact bevy of infatuated gopis. This surely represents the gopis’ initial nocturnal encounter with the divine cowherd. In the upper grouping, the artist redirects attention back towards the centre of the composition by having Krishna face left. This leaves Krishna at the centre of a clutch of eight damsels, resting his hand on the shoulder of one woman whom he has pulled close. In most devotional literature, Krishna’s favourite is identified as Radha, though her name surprisingly appears nowhere in the Harivamsha text. Although a ringlike configuration predominates in most iterations of the rasalila, the arrangement here is more arc than circle, which suggests that this painting may depict a preliminary moment in the rasalila episode, and that the depiction of canonical circle of adoring devotees might possibly follow in a subsequent illustration. Much of the effervescence of the painting comes from certain passages in the lush landscape. The trees themselves typically have an irregular dark area around the trunk that penetrates a surrounding rim of bright pointillist foliage. This inspired convention, which evokes the fortuitous patterns on the inside of a geode, is one indication that painting is almost wholly by the hand of Purkhu himself.

Overlaid on these trees are a series of delicate creepers with double rows of white and pink blossoms. These bursts of colour and the graceful arcs of the creepers behind add obvious visual sparkle to the painting. The artist closes off the composition on the right somewhat abruptly with the insertion of a putting paste-coloured outcrop. He renders the sky in soft midtones of grey and forgoes the customary and textually prescribed bright moon.

(1) According to B.N. Goswamy and E. Fischer, Pahari Masters. Court Painters of Northern India (Zurich, 1992), p. 368, Purkhu is named as the son of Dhummun of Kiru, the brother of Buddhu and Rattu, and the father of Ramdayal, Ramkishan, Chandanu, and Ruldu.
(2) Goswamy, B.N., and E. Fischer, Pahari Masters, p. 368.
(3) Goswamy and Fischer, Pahari Masters, p. 3689-370.
(4) For a verbal account of this episode, see Chapter LXXV of the Harivamsha in M. Dutt, ed. and trans., A Prose English Translation of Harivamsha, Calcutta, 1897 (available online).

Provenance