Bhairavi Ragini: Folio from a Ragamala Series

This is a single page from a ragamala, a kind of Indian picture album that gives visual form to music. A raga is a melodic framework in Indian classical music, and each raga carries its own mood, season and time of day. Ragamala painters turned those moods into scenes, so that a set of pictures could stand for a set of melodies. Bhairavi is a morning raga, and the verse written on this page ties it to bhakti — religious devotion, the passionate love of a worshipper for their god. The painting is attributed to an unnamed artist known as the Early Master at the Court of Mandi, who worked for the rajas of Mandi in the Himalayan foothills of what is now Himachal Pradesh, roughly between 1635 and 1660. Scholars have only recently gathered his paintings into a single body of work and linked them securely to that court. His style is unusual among the small hill kingdoms because it absorbed methods from the Mughal emperor's workshops, which local rulers encountered on visits to the imperial court. That blend makes his work useful evidence of how Hindu Rajput courts adapted to Mughal culture as they were drawn into the empire.