Painting picture courtesy Christie's Auction House Sometimes, a painting begins to ask more questions than it answers. A late eighteenth-century painting, attributed to the Mandi school and catalogued as showing Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra with a courtier, has intrigued me for some time. At first glance, the identification appears straightforward enough. Two men sit opposite each other, smoking hookahs, while attendants stand behind them holding fly-whisks. One figure is dressed in red, the other in white. The scene is informal, almost intimate, and yet unmistakably courtly. But the more I looked at the painting, the less convinced I became that the red-clad figure was Sansar Chand. The reason came from looking at other portraits. Among the surviving paintings associated with the Mandi court are several portraits of Raja Surma Sen, who ruled Mandi from 1781 until his death in 1788. One such portrait shows him seated smoking a hookah, attended by a fly-whisk bearer. Another depicts ...
Padma Sambhava Padma Sambhava, the Vajra Guru in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, is a widely revered figure, and his imagery is seen in many monasteries, temples and on frescoes and thangkas alike. His contributions to the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet is well recorded in Tibetan Buddhist literature, where a mix of belief and history overlap to identify him as a very powerful mystical figure. It is interesting though that very few people realize and remember the link of Pamda Sambhava with India. Even fewer are aware of the link of Padma Sambhava with Himachal Pradesh. Among Tibetans, Mandi was always known as Zahor, from where the great Guru Padma Sambhava had come at the behest of the then Tibetan king Trisong Detsen somewhere between 750-800 A.D.. As noted by Hutchison and Vogel in their magnum opus on the Punjab Hill States, Padma Sambhava appeared in Tibet in the ancient dress of Mandi, which even today is known as Zahorma by the Tibetans. Zahor is the place from wh...