Bagta and Chokha: Master artists at Devgarh.

Bagta and Chokha: Master artists at Devgarh, by Milo Cleveland Beach and Rawat Nahar Singh II. Artibus Asiae Supplementum XLVI, Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2005. 136 pages, 134 colour plates, many monochrome figures.

Kingdom of the Sun: Indian court and village art from the princely state of Mewar, by Joanna Williams. San Francisco. Asian Art Museum, 2007. 240 pages, many colour plates.

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It is well known that during the half-century from c. 1770 to 1820 many of the most inventive and expressive paintings produced in the Mewar kingdom--or in Rajasthan as a whole--were the work of a family of artists based principally at Devgarh (or Deogarh), a small thikana about 130 kilometres north of Udaipur. The leading members of this gifted family were Bagta (or Bakhta) and his son Chokha (or Kavala). Both, at different stages of their careers, worked not only for the Rawats of Deogarh but for their overlords, the maharanas of Mewar at their capital at Udaipur. Indeed, in this period of political decline and royal penury for the Sisodia rulers, it was largely Bagta and Chokha between them who preserved the best traditions of mid-18th-century Mewar painting, while boldly reinterpreting and reinvigorating its conventional forms.

On leaving the Udaipur court in the later 1760s to work for the Rawats of Devgarh, Bagta had enjoyed a new freedom from the conformity of royal studio production. Within a short time he developed an expressive and flamboyant personal style, whose final flowering appears in his remarkable series of late masterpieces painted for Rawat Gokul Das in the first decade of the 19th century. Less innovative than his father and less versatile as a portraitist, Chokha was nonetheless a vigorous and intensely characterful painter who remained active up to the mid-1820s, again first at Udaipur and later at Devgarh. His work is robust, sensuous, playful, and resourcefully eclectic in style, and it often reveals an earthy sense of humour. Chokha was succeeded by his son Baijnath, who continued to work in a strong though increasingly diminished version of the family style until around 1850.

Most of the ancestral paintings collection of the Rawats of Devgarh was dispersed soon after Independence, before any scholar had a chance to study it. Many important Devgarh pictures thus entered Indian museum and private collections, while others gradually went abroad to Europe or America. Brief initial studies of the newly recognized Devgarh substyle of Mewar painting, based on a selective range of material, were published by Shridhar Andhare (1967), Milo Cleveland Beach (1970), and by Andhare with Rawat Nahar Singh (1977, repr. 1983). But the various contributions by these and later writers have remained far from exhaustive.

It was welcome news therefore that Milo Beach, who over the last three decades has published a stream of distinguished studies of Mughal painting, had revisited his earlier hunting grounds in Rajasthan. This concise and masterly survey of Devgarh painting, written in collaboration with Rawat Nahar Singh and admirably produced in the Artibus Asiae monograph series, is by far the best account of the subject to date. Although not a long book, Bagta and Chokha: Master artists at Devgarh surveys almost a century of painting in lucid and thoughtful fashion and introduces many important unpublished paintings, not least those in the Rawat's own collection. While it does not attempt a full survey of the widely scattered corpus of Devgarh works, it will provide a valuable basis for any future comprehensive study. (Besides a substantial number of paintings as yet unpublished, it is possible, as Beach suggests in his preface, that contemporary documents preserved in the court archives may eventually prove to be another useful source of information.)

The book opens with an arresting frontispiece painting by Chokha of a corpulent, blue-skinned yogi who listens in a reverie to a musician (one of the treasures of the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum in Hyderabad). Following a historical introduction, some new light is thrown on Bagta's transitional period between his early Udaipur works and the more compelling portraits and durbar groups painted at Devgarh up to 1780. It is suggested that after leaving Maharana Ari Singh's court Bagta spent an intervening period at Jaipur, where a Devgarh family contingent was resident from 1768 to help manage the regency held by Kundan Kumari (daughter of Rawat Jaswant Singh) for Maharaja Prithvi Singh. At Jaipur, Bagta would have associated with local artists and studied their work. The interesting figure of Kunvar Gopal Das, the brother of Rawat Ragho Das, is also brought to the fore in Beach's discussion of this Jaipur connection.

The career of Bagta's son Kavala, a capable artist whose style closely followed that of his father, is also clarified and shorn of the confusions of earlier writers. Chokha's early development at Udaipur is briefly covered, from the tentative hunting scene of Bhim Singh dated 1799 to his series of unusually intimate scenes of the Maharana with his women or courtiers. His subsequent work at Devgarh, offering a still richer and more eclectic range of subject matter, is explored in some detail. Moving on to the third and final generation of Devgarh painters, the book ends with the first coherent account of the career of Baijnath, largely based on hitherto unknown works in Rawat Nahar Singh's collection.

A few points appear questionable, including one or two attributions: fig. 8, described as "Udaipur, c. 1740", seems closer in style to Jaipur and later in date; and fig. 20, said to be by Bagta at Udaipur c. 1765, appears rather to be in his Devgarh idiom of the following decade, with its robust drawing, yellow sky, and white inscription. In fig. 17, this upper courtyard in the Udaipur palace in fact no longer exists, having been replaced by a complex superstructure in the 19th century (a different, tile-adorned "Chini Mahal" survives elsewhere in the palace). In fig. 88, I am not persuaded that the nimbate priest is intended for Maharana Bhim Singh, as is suggested. In relation to figs. 104-05, further comparison with the European topographical prints and their local copies found in Kutch at this period could perhaps have been fruitful. In fig. 106 (Colonel Tod on an elephant) the image has been inverted. In note 33, Beach cautiously awaits publication of an inscription, cited by the present writer, giving Bagta's father's name as Pema: I hope this omission can indeed be remedied in due course (as also the unpublished inscription on the reverse of Baijnath's picture of Balwant Singh of Ratlam, in a San Francisco collection: note 106).

Some time after Beach and Nahar Singh's book appeared, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco announced a major exhibition of Mewar painting for early 2007, organized by Joanna Williams, who is well known as a leading scholar of Gupta art and Orissan painting. Entitled Princes, Palaces and Passion: The Art of India's Mewar Kingdom, the exhibition was described as the first of its kind to be held outside India. (In fact, a Mewar loan exhibition of similar scale had been held by the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, in 2002, while a smaller show took place at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1985.) Both the exhibition and its catalogue, reviewed here, turned out to be something of a mixed bag. Of the 74 exhibits, about two-thirds were Udaipur or Devgarh paintings. These were accompanied by some quite mediocre examples of Nathdwara painting and a range of modern folk terracotta plaques of deities and related works. Apart from the narrative scroll-painting of Pabuji, the latter items seem to bear little or no relation to the court paintings selected, or to the theme of "princes, palaces and passion". One wonders if their inclusion was governed in part by some fashionable academic sense of cultural anti-elitism.

This alternative emphasis on folk or deshi traditions becomes more explicit in the catalogue, Kingdom of the Sun: Indian court and village art from the princely state of Mewar. The book begins with five substantial essays by different authors. Only one, by Joanna Williams, deals directly with Mewar painting, although Cynthia Talbot's stimulating discussion of "The Mewar court's construction of history" is also relevant to it. The three essays on indigenous forms of folk painting and sculpture, by Tryna Lyons, Kavita Singh, and Jyotindra Jain, are all informative and useful accounts in their way, but have little bearing on the style or matter of court painting. As a whole, these studies fall short of the stated aim (Introduction, p. 11) of going "beyond an exploration of the courtly arts of Rajasthan to highlight some of the many ways in which court, temple, and village were inextricably linked". A book or show that set out to explore such links purposefully and in detail would be of much interest, but this is not it.

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The selection of Mewar court paintings is also too limited to do full justice to this prolific and diverse school of painting, which endured from the 16th century until as late as the 1940s. The pre-1700 period--and the age of the master manuscript painter Sahibdin (fl. 1628-55) in particular--is passed over cursorily. There is a wider selection of early- to mid-18th-century Udaipur portraits and court scenes, some of excellent and others of more moderate quality. This is followed by a still more numerous representation of works of the late 18th to early 19th century from Devgarh and Udaipur. The heavy emphasis on this period is indeed unbalanced. But it is a phase of Mewar painting which Joanna Williams has studied for some years, and one wonders if her original plan may have been to focus on it exclusively in the exhibition. If so, for whatever reason, the idea seems to have been abandoned or watered down. The resulting selection remains patchy as a general survey of Mewar painting and a little over-familiar, as if drawn more from existing publications rather than from flesh exploration of museum and private collections.

Some errors in the catalogue entries may be noted. A Jain manuscript page by Manohar (cat. 7) is from Udaipur not Idar (the 1636 Fashodharacharita published by Doshi is a different series), and it goes unnoticed that Manohar is named as artist in the central inscription. Cat. 16 cannot be regarded as a Mughal painting, but belongs to a small group of Mewar versions of Mughal court scenes painted around 1715. In cat. 21, both the inscription and drawing look to be late 19th century rather than 18th; an artist's name in the last line of the inscription is mutilated. Under cat. 23, Bagta could not have worked for the "father" of Jagat Singh II: he worked for the latter's younger son Ari Singh. The "Court beauty" cloth-painting (cat. 25) is in fact somewhat larger (not smaller) than the Ashmolean Bhim Singh portrait on cloth and would probably not have been paired with it. "Scenes from the life of Krishna" (cat. 26) is painted on paper not cloth. The attribution of Chokha's "Conception of Skanda" (cat. 47) to Dungarpur on the basis of a (probably derivative) mural there is unconvincing. A coarse Nathdwara-style painting (cat. 54) seems to be of 20th-century date, not 19th. The impressive Pabuji par in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum (cat. 61) is ambitiously dated c. 1825, but Jaravchand is a well-known early 20th-century artist (as John D. Smith and Joe Miller kindly inform me), with dated works in the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum of 1917 and 1938 CE; the date on the Asian Art Museum par has been read by Miller as vs 1986 or 1929-30 CE.