Ragamala paintings are a form of Indian miniature painting, a set of illustrative paintings of the Ragamala or "Garland of Ragas", depicting various of the Indian musical modes called ragas. They stand as a classical example of the amalgamation of art, poetry and classical music in medieval India. Ragamala paintings were created in most schools of Indian painting, starting in the 16th and 17th centuries, and are today named accordingly as Pahari Ragamala, Rajasthan or Rajput Ragamala, Deccan Ragamala, and Mughal Ragamala. In these painting each raga is personified by a colour, mood, a verse describing a story of a hero and heroine, it also elucidates the season and the time of day and night in which a particular raga is to be sung; and finally most paintings also demarcate the specific Hindu deities attached with the raga, like Bhairava or Bhairavi to Shiva, Sri to Devi etc. The paintings depict not just the Ragas, but also their wives,, their numerous sons and daughters. The six principal ragas present in the Ragamala are Bhairava, Dipika, Sri, Malkaunsa, Megha and Hindola and these are meant to be sung during the six seasons of the year – summer, monsoon, autumn, early winter, winter and spring.
History
Sangita Ratnakara is an important 12th century CE treatise on the classification of Indian Ragas, which for the first time mentions the presiding deity of each raga. From the 14th century onwards, they were described in short verses in Sanskrit, for, 'contemplation', and later depicted in a series of paintings, called the Ragamala paintings. Some of the best available works of Ragamala are from the 16th and 17th centuries, when the form flourished under royal patronage, though by the 19th century, it gradually faded.
Extant works
In 1570, Kshemakarna, a priest of Rewa in Central India, compiled a poetic text on the Ragamala in Sanskrit, which describes six principal Ragas—Bhairava, Malakoshika, Hindola, Deepak, Shri, and Megha—each having five Raginis and eight Ragaputras, except Raga Shri, which has six Raginis and nine Ragaputras, thus making a Ragamala family of 86 members Most of the extant works of Ragamala are from Deccan style, where Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, was himself also a fine painter and illustrator, though some Rajput style also exist of which the work of an artist of the 'Chawand' school of painting, Sahibdin, whose Ragamala series dated 1628, are now in National Museum of India
The Ragas in Ragamala
Six are male ragas; the thirty raginis are their wives and the remaining forty-eight are their sons. These are listed is as follows:
