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 ...
Former Royal Priest of Nepal Keshari Raj Pandey performing Katto (credit: Outlook India) When the monarch of Nepal Sri Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev had passed away intragic circumstances back in 2001, a wave of shock went across the world for the goriness and the strangeness of the incident. Subsequently the funeral rites were conducted. What followed thereafter had sent murmurs across several groups, wondering what was going on. An interesting ritual post funeral that took place over time was taken up by the Brahmin Head Priest of the royal family. To quote the Independent story from the United Kingdom of the time. "A Brahmin priest put on the robes of Nepal's murdered King Birendra, mounted an elephant and went into symbolic exile to rid the country of the curse of his death as the official period of mourning ended yesterday." Further explaining the 'bizarre' ritual, the Independent wrote: "The Hindu ceremony, known as katto , ...