Raja Balwant Singh's Hunt, c. 1752, Nainsukh (c. 1710-1778). This is a dynamic yet tightly composed folio painted in opaque watercolour and gold on paper, the celebrated series of portraits of Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota, now in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (acc. 1957.98). In the center of the painting is a black elephant, wearing orange and green howdah cloth, from which all other compositional lines radiate outwards; it wears Balwant Singh on its back, dressed in dark green jama, brandishing a sword in an arc. The blade has just met with a rearing lion that grips the elephant's trunk in its fore paws; its mahout guides his iron goad down onto its forehead. The scene explodes outwards around this central collision of the beast and the hunter: fully charging horses bearing mounted archers gallop about and foot soldiers wielding spears and shields converge; horses stumble; retainers rush pell-mell in disarray. High in the palest sky, alone in its corner, is a soaring bird-the only element of stillness in the painting, and perhaps its most deliberate. This is an analysis of the ancient Indian practice of shikar (royal hunt) which in the culture of the Rajput hill-states was more than sport. Political theatre, it was also staged demonstration of dominion over the natural world and, implicitly, of princely dominion over men. For a minor prince like Balwant Singh-the ruler of Jasrota, a small state in the Pahari hills near the Tawi River-this was an image whose significance was entirely disproportionate to the king's power. Nainsukh, at this patron’s elbow, as it were, day and night from circa 1740 until Balwant Singh's death in 1763, grasped this entirely. While the Mughal imperial ateliers constructed ordered ceremonial processions around the emperor in the center, Nainsukh compressed everything together into what is close to chaos: the elephant is being defeated, not triumphing; its retainers are fleeing, not marching in orderly files. Only the king does not falter. The work falls into the genre of Guler-Pahari painting. This is an Indic style of Himalayan painting created for small, discriminating royal courts in the Pahari mountains: intimate works designed for study held in the hand, rather than for hanging on palace walls. The battle between lion and elephant, however, held in this Pahari context an enormous cosmological signification that a contemporary viewer would have understood immediately: the simha, or lion, symbolizing primal natural force, and gaja, or elephant, symbolizing the royal presence (with its power to hold in memory and its immensity in being) and dharmic weight. And, here as in so many Guler-Pahari paintings, as Balwant Singh raises his sword over the pair, the painting is not so much a record of a deed as a philosophic assertion of the king's status as the consciousness which stands between the chaos of nature and the established order, between the forces that seek to undo the world and the man that keeps the forces down. Even so, the lone hawk, untroubled by the melee, hovers as if to ratify the claim of the king's will to hold the world in its place.

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