Part 1: An Introduction to

Ragamala
Tradition

Needless to add, while his eyes would invariably hear, his ears in turn would ever enhance visualizing process of the inward eye. The depiction of musical melodies on the single-sheet album folios forming a complete ragamala set as also those on the extended friezes of wall painting (namely, those in the palace complexes at Datia-Orcha and Rajasthan) beautifying the palace interiors, reserved for musical performances, followed the raga-ragini iconography laid down in the elaborate musical theory and canonical literature (sastra).

It is not surprising to find in a few surviving examples of courtly embroidery the continuity of the same ragamala iconography for the simple reason that such artefacts were also master-minded invariably by the same hereditary painter-ornamentalists, proficient in imaging musical melodies. Closely related to the cardinal concept of sringara (the erotic sentiment) that originated in Sanskrit poetics and eventually popularized in late-medieval Hindi devotional poetry, the music-inspired themes were generously fed with variegated sentiments of love, in states of enraptured union or ceaseless lament. Eventually, the poetry, painting and music were brought into an altogether new relationship.