Friends of the Fogg Art Museum Fund, Asian and Mediterranean Art, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums
Location History:
c. 1752 — Creation
Painted at Jasrota, for Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota
Post-1763 — After Balwant Singh's death
Remains with the Jasrota royal family or workshop descendants
c. 1763 – pre-1957 — Intermediate ownership
Chain of custody not publicly documented
1957 — Acquisition by Harvard
Purchased via Friends of the Fogg Art Museum Fund
1965 — First major public catalogue appearance
Published in Gods, Thrones, and Peacocks (Welch & Beach)
1984 – 2021 — Three Harvard exhibitions
Continuous institutional custody at the Sackler Museum
It remains in the permanent collection of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.
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.
Nainsukh’s Raja Balwant Singh’s Hunt feels less like a simple record of a royal hunt and more like a story about courage in the face of chaos. The scene is full of movement and confusion: horses rear, soldiers stumble, and the lion fiercely attacks the elephant, yet Balwant Singh remains steady and determined at the centre. This contrast makes him appear not just as a ruler, but as someone willing to face danger when others hesitate. The painting reflects the idea that leadership is tested in moments of uncertainty. At the same time, the lone bird soaring peacefully above the turmoil reminds us that while human struggles are intense and dramatic, nature continues calmly beyond them.
