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 ...
Raja Ajmer Chand of Kahlur (Potrait at Brookings Museum) The more one reads about the nature of the ruling dynasties of the Hill states of the Western Himalayas, the more fascinating it gets. The realization that the Hill states indeed became a repository for a culture that literally vanished from the North and Centre of India starts to weigh in on the mind, and makes you wonder whether there can be any recreation as part of a cultural project, though it may be a near impossibility. I have talked about the nature of origins of Kullu, Suket and Mandi, particularly their links to Bengal’s old Gaudiya and Pala dynasties. However, another important state of the region came up from the central Indian heartland, which does not seem to get highlighted enough. The state of Bilaspur (of Himachal, not to be confused with Chhattisgarh), or Kahlur as it was also known, was set up by an offshoot from the ruling family of Chandela Rajputs of Bundelkhand. This has been interestingly captured by Hutc...