The marriage of Bharata and Mandavi

‘The Marriage of Bharata and Mandavi’ is a Ramayana folio of about 1760 attributed to the workshop of Laharu of Chamba and held in the San Diego Museum of Art under accession number 1990.1194. It is painted in opaque water based pigments on paper and measures roughly ten and a half by fourteen and a half inches within a broad red border that frames the scene like a lacquered window. A line of Devanagari script runs along the upper margin and confirms that this was never a picture meant to stand alone but one leaf in a longer narrative that was turned slowly in the hand. It entered the museum in 1990 with the collection of Edwin Binney 3rd which is counted among the finest gatherings of South Asian painting outside India. Laharu belonged to the Gujarati Manikanth family of painters who settled at Chamba and he worked there during the reign of Raja Umed Singh between 1748 and 1764. His family is believed to have carried the habits of the Mughal studios from Lahore into the hills and those habits remain legible here in the white walled courtyard, the little domed pavilions along the roof and the drawing of a building so that several of its faces meet the eye at once. Yet the manner is wholly a hill manner. Figures of bright flat colour stand against a grey unmodelled ground that refuses depth and the space is cut into compartments so that one sheet can hold more than one moment. Here the great chamber receives the sacrament while two smaller rooms on the right keep the world of elders and musicians alive beside it as though the wedding were meant to be heard as well as seen. At the centre of the chamber a canopy of green parrots rises in tiers on a slender frame above a small sacred fire and its ritual vessels. The officiating priest sits on a low seat in a green robe with a manuscript open before him and pours the offering with a long ladle while a second priest in white repeats the gesture below. The bridegroom in a red coat and a plumed turban stands to receive the rite and beside the fire the veiled bride sits in red with an older man in white close at her side. Two groups of women in layered skirts and fine veils crowd the edges of the scene with small offerings in their raised hands. All are dressed as the people of an eighteenth century hill court and not of the age of the epic which shows that the painter understood the story as a living custom. In the upper right room three men converse with a lifted palm while below it long curved horns a pipe and a great drum fill the pink room with the noise of celebration. The subject comes from the opening book of the Ramayana where King Dasharatha arrives at Mithila and the four sons of Ayodhya are married together into the house of Janaka. Mandavi the daughter of Janaka’s brother Kushadhvaja is given to Bharata who is the second son and the brother who will later rule only as regent holding Rama’s place in trust. The text describes the princes circling the sacred fire while wind instruments sound and the painter has turned that single sentence into sight and noise. At Chamba such an image carried more than narrative value because the royal house kept a strong devotion to Rama and so the wedding of his brothers was also a rehearsal of the ideal court. The deeper meaning of the picture lies in what it chooses to place at its centre. It is the fire and not the bride or groom that holds the middle of the composition and every figure bends toward it. In the Hindu understanding of marriage the flame is the witness and the vows made before it bind two families and their ancestors into a single duty that is called dharma. The strict symmetry of the women on either side and the almost architectural order of the parrot canopy turn the ceremony into a diagram of social harmony in which each person has a place and nothing is hurried. The parrots which repeat what they hear may stand for the faithful repetition of sacred words while their green is also the colour of renewal. Mandavi is among the least spoken of women in the epic and the painting honours her without needing to speak for her. Her marriage is a threshold into long years of waiting while her husband governs in another’s name and so the festive hall already contains a quiet preview of renunciation. The sacrament that looks like pure joy is tuned from the start to the ethic of duty over desire which gives the Ramayana its moral weight.