Rajput Ragamala miniature of a woman with a bell and rattle.
c1890. Ink and gouache with gold heightening on fibrous, brown laid paper with a Jaipur Court Fee tax stamp in gray ink, and the 1889 Jaipur State Council stamp in black ink, 13 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches (335 x 222 mm). Toning, handling creases and minor scattered surface soiling throughout. There are scattered coeval Hindi inscriptions in ink on the recto.
"A ragamala, translated from Sanskrit as "garland of ragas," is a series of paintings depicting a range of musical melodies known as ragas. Its root word, raga, means color, mood, and delight, and the depiction of these moods was a favored subject in later Indian court paintings. The celebration of music in painting is a distinctly Indian preoccupation. Ragamalas were first identified as a specific painting genre in the second half of the fifteenth century, but their ancestry can be traced to the fifth- to seventh-century Brihaddeshi treatise, which states: "A raga is called by the learned that kind of composition which is adorned with musical notes . . . which have the effect of coloring the hearts of men." Often, the mood, or raga, is also written as poetry on the margins of the painting. These works thus evocatively express the intersections of painting, poetry, and music in Indian court art."
-The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Exhibition Overview, Ragamala: Picturing Sound, December 2014.
The first revenue stamps in India were issued in the mid-nineteenth century during the Raj, and they are still being issued to this day. Apart from issues for the whole of India, many princely states, provinces, and other states also had (or still have) their own revenue stamp issues. Before independence, Indian revenue stamps were closely modeled on similar designs from Great Britain, as is the case with this carriage motif stamp from Jaipur. The stamps were issued to denote various denominations, including rupees and annas. An anna (or ānna) was a currency unit formerly used in British India, equal to 1⁄16 of a rupee. It was subdivided into four (old) Paisa or twelve pies (thus there were 192 pies in a rupee). When the rupee was decimalized and subdivided into 100 (new) paise, one anna was therefore equivalent to 6.25 paise. This particular stamp was used as evidence of court taxes remitted for property dealings.
Item number: 1337
Price: $800.00
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