AN ILLUSTRATION TO A RAGAMALA SERIES: GUNAKARI RAGINI

The anxious nayika Gunakari - ragini of Malkaus Raga - seated on a terrace, delicately picking white blossoms from a slender planted tree. Her skin colored blue beneath her bodice.  The scene is set against a brilliant vermilion-red curving hillock defined by a white abstracted curve, enclosed with black lines. in the foreground is a white pavilion containing a blue chamber and empty bedroom - its curtain rolled up.  A darkened blue cloudy sky above.

"Blooming like a flower herself
she gathers flowers with her heart full of gladness.
For the coming of her lord Malkaus she duly prepares the bed".

(Trans. by Pratapaditya Pal from A. K. Coomaraswamy)

A related subject of a "heroine plucking a flower" also from Malwa and painted approximately a decade later, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no.1979.505), there described as a page from a "dispersed nayikabheda."

Refer to Pratapaditya Pal, Ragamala Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1967, pp. 41-42.