Ragamala Paintings Have A Special Significance In The World Of Art, Which Has Not So Far Been Fully Realised. They Not Only Display Their Own Technique And Art Of Colour And Line But Also Express, Interpret And Exhibit The Soul/Spirit And Beauty Of Another Art, The Art Of Music, The Art Of Svara-Laya And Cultivated/Cultured Voice. Music Was Considered To Be Of Divine Origin And Was Supposed To Possess The Property Of Evoking An Ecstatic State Of Mind Or Mood, Called Rasa-Anubhuti, In The Musician As Well As The Listerner. This Conception Of Rasa Is The Basis Of All Art In India. The Sadhakas (Practitioners) Devised Some Formulas In Order To Capture And Comprehend The Divine Quality Of Music And To Evoke Rasa Or Brahmananda. These Were Formulated In The Form Of Prayers In Which The Conceptual Form, Dhyana-Murti, Of The Raga Was Described. Thus The Ragas Were Personified Or Deified. This Fact Provided A Rich And Expressive Theme To Indian Painters And It Has Considerably Enriched The Art Treasure Of India. Whether The Dhyana-Theory Of Ragas Is Scientific Or Otherwise It Certainly Furnished A Rich Source Of Theme For The Indian Artists Who Painted Some Of The Most Charming And Inspiring Pictures Representing The Ragas (Melodies). The Two Ragamala Mss Discovered In A Manuscripts Collection At Jammu Are A Part Of The Extensive Art Treasure Created All Over India During The Period From 16Th To 19Th Centuries. The Jammu Ragamala Paintings Were Done Expressly With The Usual Object Of Depicting Their Dhyana-Murtis Or Icons In Order To Create The Relevant Rasa Situation In Those Looking At Them.

The place of Krishna in Indian Art has remained obscured for many years until a parallelism was made by J. Kennedy in the years 1913-17 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, in which the similarly of Krishna and Christ was suggested. However, this book explodes that theory and expounds the myth of the legendary Krishna and establishes the origin and development of the most important God of the Hindu Pantheon. Thus the iconography and stylistic development of Krishna explodes all the prevalent theories and categorically proves the importance of Krishna in Indian art. The subject of the book is explicity the representation of Krishna in Indian sculpture and painting. However, such an art-historical study has necessitated a good deal of discussion of the legend itself for the sake of understanding the iconography.

With many illustrations and diagrams, Images of Thought provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world’s major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. Images of Thought is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.

Cross-cultural encounters in Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the potential for bafflement, hostility, and admiration. The court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and were forced to make sense of one another. By looking at these interactions, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere. Both individual agents and objects such as texts and paintings helped mediate encounters between courts, which possessed rules and conventions that required decipherment and translation, whether in words or in pictures. Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives special attention to the depiction of South Asian empires in European visual representations, finding a complex history of cultural exchange: the Mughal paintings that influenced Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters had themselves been earlier influenced by Dutch naturalism. Courtly Encounters provides a rich array of images from Europe, the Islamic world, India, and Southeast Asia as aids for understanding the reciprocal nature of cross-cultural exchanges. It also looks closely at how insults and strategic use of martyrdom figured in courtly encounters. As he sifts through the historical record, Subrahmanyam finds little evidence for the cultural incommensurability many ethnohistorians have insisted on. Most often, he discovers negotiated ways of understanding one another that led to mutual improvisation, borrowing, and eventually change.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012.

The rulers of the Mughal Empire of India, who reigned from 1526 to 1858, spared no expense as patrons of the arts, particularly painting and music. They left as their legacy an extraordinarily rich body of commissioned artistic projects including illustrated manuscripts and miniature paintings that represent musical instruments, portraits of musicians, and the compositions of ensembles. These images form the basis of Bonnie C. Wade's study of how musicians of Hindustan encountered and Indianized music from the Persian cultural sphere. Imaging Sound is a contribution to many fields in its unique combination of sources and methods: it is the study of musical change; of image-making in the past and the methodological use of images as "texts" in the present; of the role of patronage in the Mughal Empire; and of the development of South Asian culture.