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 ...
 |
| 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 him in the company of women. These paintings, although differing in subject and composition, appear to preserve a fairly recognizable portrait type.
And it is here that things become interesting.
The face of Surma Sen in these paintings has certain striking characteristics: a sharply projecting nose, a narrow and somewhat angular profile, a distinctive treatment of the beard and, perhaps most noticeably, a vertical forehead mark extending towards the bridge of the nose. Taken individually, they don't say much; Pahari painters were hardly producing photographs, and portraiture in the hills was shaped by artistic conventions as much as by strict physical realism.
When one places the red-clad figure in the disputed painting beside these portraits of Surma Sen, the resemblance becomes difficult to ignore. The face cut appears remarkably close. The nose, beard and general profile all seem to belong to the same visual vocabulary. More interestingly, the distinctive tilak-like mark visible on Surma Sen's forehead also appears on the red-clad figure. This naturally raises a rather uncomfortable question for the existing identification: what if the man in red is Surma Sen, and not Sansar Chand at all?
If so, the identity of the man sitting opposite him becomes equally interesting.
Could it be then that the white-clad figure is the young Sansar Chand of Kangra?
The composition certainly allows for the possibility. The two men are treated with considerable parity. They are both wearing kalgis; they have similar Rajput earrings, and one is also carrying the kataar or dagger. Both are seated on cushions, smoking hookahs, and both have attendants carrying fly-whisks (chaur) behind them. This is hardly the obvious visual arrangement of a ruler and an ordinary courtier; instead, it seems to represent a king in conversation with an extremely important noble, of course. But if the red-clad figure is Surma Sen, then the scene suddenly acquires a more obvious political meaning: it may depict an encounter between the rulers of Mandi and Kangra.
The chronology, too, becomes important for that reason. The painting has generally been placed around 1790. Yet Surma Sen was dead by 1788. If he is indeed one of the two figures, the painting must either be a posthumous representation or, more likely, belong to the closing years of his reign. The dating of an unsigned eighteenth-century miniature to “circa 1790” should not necessarily be understood as a precise date. Stylistic dating is often approximate, and a work painted in 1786, 1787 or 1788 could easily find itself described as belonging to the period around 1790.
This possible re-dating also makes historical sense. Sansar Chand was a young ruler during Surma Sen's final years. However, despite his youth, he was already emerging as an important political figure in the Punjab Hills. In contrast, the old political order of the region was undergoing considerable change, as different princely states were engaged in a battle for supremacy. The two rulers belonged to the same small and interconnected world of hill politics, diplomacy and conflict. A meeting between them would hardly be surprising.
None of this conclusively settles the matter. Also, as the painting carries no inscription identifying the two figures, and facial resemblance can sometimes be deceptive, the exercise can be frustrating. Yet the existing identification too should perhaps be treated as an attribution rather than an established fact.
For now, the evidence seems to point towards an intriguing alternative: the red-clad ruler may well be Raja Surma Sen of Mandi, while the man in white could be the young Sansar Chand of Kangra. If that reading is correct, the painting is not merely a portrait of Sansar Chand with an unnamed courtier. It may instead preserve a moment—perhaps real, perhaps idealized—when two rulers of the Punjab Hills sat together, smoked, conversed, and conducted the quieter business of politics.
And that possibility alone makes the painting worth looking at again.
Comments
Post a Comment