'Hanuman jumps across the ocean'

Hanuman leaps across the ocean, folio from the Guler Small Ramayana series, c. 1720, ascribed to Pandit Seu of Guler (active c. 1680–c. 1740). Opaque pigment and gold on paper; Twenty-two by thirty centimetres; The page’s worked and saturated ground resists the hesitant, pale hues of earlier hill painting in favour of a single, uncompromising field of ultramarine which has been worked into the ground as if the paper had been dyed rather than painted. In places there is the bloom and crackle that result from three centuries of handling. Alone against the almost undiluted sky of blue, for the upper two-thirds of the page Hanuman is launched on the diagonal across the full width of the space, hands extended and low towards the lower-left, fingers gently splayed; his legs bent at the knees,trailing upwards and to the right where his long, darkly coiled tail sweeps through the sky, as if he has just projected himself off the bristling, tawny rise at the bottom-right and is now committed, in mid-flight, to the empty distance at the left. He runs, but at the least stable and most outstretched of points, undoubtedly in the tradition of Mughal figures mid-stride in a chase. Pandit Seu was not a pupil of the hills who employed him. He would have travelled to the plains, it is said by later historians of the workshop, and emerged from the fading ateliers of Delhi in the later years of Aurangzeb's reign equipped with an armoury of modeling, posture and gesture that few artists in Guler had inherited. This assured and imported expertise is obvious here – the rendering of musculature and form under the golden ochre flesh reserved for gods and demigods; the crisp definition of the ribs or the knee in elevation; the shadow under the raised brow. Not yet does he adopt hill-art ornament but rather displays hill-kingly regalia – the studded tall crown, the trailing yellow scarf, the tiger- striped dhoti tied at the waist, although his tail is the sole unequivocal signal that it is a monkey’s tail and not a hero's to the scene. Below him, a pale curving band of white pigment defines the horizon with an abruptness which reflects a decision rather than a natural feature, and under this the ground becomes the mottled grey-brown that here represents the sea. It does not appear to be water but rather a field onto which the sea-creatures are set as if pinned to a board at intervals determined not by scale but by visibility - a crocodile-like makara with a crest of red Indian paint and gilded eyes appears most prominently near the bottom and a smaller green relative can be seen beside it; several flat, black manta-shapes dot the grey surface; two eyeballs with bodies are placed in opposition to one another, one red-bodied, the other a mere fin and eye; on the right the rock outcrop can be seen like a drawn breath held just at the water line. None of this ground is read as a living aquatic environment, and rather serves as an inventory of sea monsters probably copied, with considerable individual adjustment and embellishment, from an established workshop repertoire, the flat spatial values dictated not by illusionist ambition but by the Pahari painters’ commitment to a legible presentation of his material that places every figure just where an eye is going to be able to spot him. This folio is no. 38 of the enormous Sundarakanda sequence that Seu’s workshop executed for Raja Dalip Singh of Guler, a work of unmatched scale among the hill schools that also carries the Valmiki text, inscribed in bold lettering in the red borders of the verso of each leaf; that series has since been dispersed between Lahore, Chandigarh, and the present leaf (in Zurich since 1976 via the Kabul art market) among the surviving residues. His leap is enacted just before that of the entire sequence, that most celebrated act of faith – the crossing of the strait between India and Lanka, so vital to all that follows – an act that could only be begun as a result of Jambavan’s prompt, which will remind him, the following kanda closes, of his own dormant powers. The picture deliberately omits all that the philosophy insists should be omitted – no bridge, no visible far shore, no attendants or allies to inspire courage or provide help, only a body in transit between conviction and destination, suspended over a sea populated by a threatening array of monsters. The worship is represented not by arrival but by a moment mid-stride, between the moment doubt is overcome and that when the consequences unfold; the monotonous populated flatness below are not a barrier but a contrast to the man elevated by his faith who, for this one action, is a being apart from them.