Raga Megha: A Ragamala Folio Lot n° 30

Specifications: Water Color Painting On Paper Artist: Kailash Raj 6.8 inch X 11.4 inch This Ragamala folio, seeking to personify or visually represent an abstraction or concept of mind into a form, a unique feature of Indian miniature painting, represents Raga Megh. A Raga is a mode of Indian classical music seeking to regulate not merely the time period of the day or the year when it should be sung but also the body of notes, their ascents and descents and paces and moves. This miniature, a rare work of art, pursues the art idiom as it prevailed at Uniara, a small principality of Rajasthan usually known as ‘thikana’, around the later half of the 18th century. Uniara shared the stylistic elements with Jaipur, Bundi and Kota art schools. This miniature is however closer to Jaipur art style. In the tradition of Ragas, as it evolved over a period of time with their early innovations found in the Sam-Veda and Atharva-Veda, Megh is one of the six principal Ragas, the other five being Bhairava, Malkaunsa, Shri-raga, Hindola and Deepak. The wider concept of Ragamala includes the feminine aspects of these six Ragas, known as Raginis, and their offshoots, known as Ragaputras. The aggregate number of the Ragas, Raginis and Ragaputras vary from 84 under one system to 108, under another. Each of the Ragas, Raginis and Ragaputras has the capacity of invoking one emotion or the other and very often attune with one hour of the day or other, as also with one season or period in the seasonal cycle of the year or the other. In its power to inspire one emotion or the other a Raga is an instrument capable of analyzing man’s total inner being with scientific as well as aesthetic accuracy. The Baramasa illustrations are the epitome of the Indian perception of music which perceives in it the visuality or visual forms as well as its abstractness, and eroticism as well as transcendence. As suggests its very name, Megh is the Raga related to