| Ragamala paintings, which depict personifications of musical modes, were among the most popular courtly painting genres in northern India, but remain poorly understood. Because of their general conservatism over the course of some four hundred years, they are often studied only in terms of their styles, dates, provenances, classification systems, and relationships to Sanskrit musicological treatises. This dissertation is an attempt to contextualize some part of this vast pictorial tradition. I will suggest that present approaches to ragamala paintings continue to be informed by a nationalist discourse, itself constructed upon many of the same premises as the late eighteenth-century Orientalist scholarship on Indian music and culture. Ragamalas and the music to which they refer were seen largely in Hindu devotional terms and as a result the paintings are treated as a somewhat timeless and ahistorical tradition. All evidence, however, points to a rapidly changing musical culture in northern India, admitting significant Muslim influences and patronage.;In order to explore these interrelated issues and to suggest an alternative approach to the ragamala painting genre, one which considers it in relation to different musical environments, this dissertation is framed by the two above-mentioned discourses. Its particular focus is on the late eighteenth-century European encounter with both Indian music and ragamala paintings in the figures of Sir William Jones, Richard Johnson, and Antoine Polier. Through an examination of Orientalist scholarship, European collectors, and the Indian musical culture of the late eighteenth century, I show that ragamala paintings came to refer to very different musical environments over time. Perceptions of these paintings as fundamentally devotional in character and static in their references thus always require qualifications. |
