24 DASHARATHA’S OIL VAT IN THE MEWAR RAMAYANA Subhashini Kaligotla A man’s head bobs in a golden tub while two attendants look on. The scene unfolds in the top-​left corner of a folio from an illustrated Ramayana manuscript made in the western Indian kingdom of Mewar (Figure 24.1). The head belongs to the epic’s patriarch—​king Dasharatha, ruler of Kosala. The king has died of grief due to separation from his cherished son Rama, the epic’s titular hero. Dasharatha had been forced to exile Rama for 14 years and passes away days after Rama leaves the kingdom with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana. The dead king’s turbaned head sinks forward in the tulip-​shaped vessel; his eyes are shut. Attendants fan his body. This image gives form to a fascinating ancient Indian practice for preserving the human body postmortem. Recorded in the Ramayana, the Buddhist Mahaparinibbana Sutta, and in a handful of other early South Asian texts, the process involved conserving the body in an oil-​filled vessel or taila droni. The tiny scene could be easy to miss, for most of the visual field is dominated by two court scenes. Much of the upper half of the horizontally oriented painting is taken up by Dasharatha’s ministers and counselors, who are assembled around his empty throne. In the scene directly below, two groups of standing men outfitted in military gear—​swords, shields, quivers—​look and gesture toward another vacant space. One of them lifts his head thought- fully in the direction of the king’s vacated throne. Outside the palace, four riderless horses wait. The makers of this mid-​seventeenth-​century painted book created for the Rajput ruler Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (r. 1628–​52 CE) convey the anomie that follows in the wake of a sudden vanishing through the pensive gazes and bowed heads of the figures as well as through stretches of monochrome space. In this chapter I am interested in how early modern illustrated Ramayana manuscripts like the Mewar Ramayana handle the mortuary ritual described above. I am concerned with the interface between visual and literary enactments, and the specific narrative or aesthetic interests the two choose to pursue, together or separately. A last strand that the chapter will explore is the relation- ship, if any, between the response of artists and attitudes towards death and mourning in early modern India. DOI: 10.4324/9781003273356-28 313  Subhashini Kaligotla Figure 24.1  Dasharatha’s Droni, Folio from Jagat Singh’s Ramayana (f.82R), Mewar, ca. 1650–​1652, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of The British Library Add. MS 15296(1). The Ramayana is at once an epic poem (kavya) that circulated in ancient India and the distinctive cultural product of an interpretive community like seventeenth-​century Mewar. It began its tenure as an oral composition recited by bards before being written down around 750–​500 BCE in the Sanskrit language. The earliest Sanskrit composition is attributed to Valmiki and celebrated as the first poem (adi kavya), running to a whopping 24,000 verses divided across seven books (kandas). The text itself is self-​conscious about its authorship, citing Valmiki both as creator and character in the story’s drama, although his historicity is uncertain.1 Since Valmiki, the tale has been told and re-​told in every conceivable South and Southeast Asian language, including numerous Sanskrit tellings, and in a staggering range of media. Visual enactments include medieval temple sculpture, large format painted textiles, and deluxe manuscripts like the Mewar Ramayana that include both pictures and words. Alongside these are responses in dance, drama, puppet theater, film, novels, lyric poetry, comic books, and an array of premodern and modern media. The Mewar Ramayana narrates the entirety of the epic tale, and maintains strong affinities with the Valmiki text, including the original’s seven-​book organization scheme. In its extant form the book (rather, set of books) contains 414 paintings out of an original 450.2 What is certain is that a single individual—​a Jain scribe named Mahatma Hirananda—​wrote the Sanskrit text, in Devanagari script. The text was written in black ink and interleaved with the paintings, with the two generally keeping pace with one another except in rare instances.3 By contrast, the proven- ance of the accompanying paintings is far more complicated. Scholars trace at least three distinct visual styles and attribute the paintings to the ateliers of two known Mewar master painters—​ Sahibdin and Manohar—​and an unknown painter of possible Deccan origins (Dehejia 303–​304). Today, the manuscript’s individual books are dispersed across collections in London, Mumbai, Udaipur, and Baroda, with four books in the possession of the British Library. Scholars have theorized the Ramayana’s plurality variously: the Ramayana has been under- stood as a literary genre and likened to a library or a language (Pollock, “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India” 288). Ramayanas have been compared to translations exhibiting divergent relationships to canonical accounts like the Sanskrit Valmiki or the Tamil Kampan (Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas”). In my own writing, I have argued that the Ramayana is a site of ekphrasis, provoking creative engagements across media and in interart media (Kaligotla “Words and Pictures”). 314  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana With this background in mind, let’s return to the vessel in which Dasharatha’s body was tem- porarily interred. That scene is from the epic’s second book—​the Ayodhya Book, named for the capital city from which the king ruled. The first book or Book of Youth tells of the miraculous birth of Rama and his three brothers, their princely upbringing, and marriages. The Ayodhya Book sees Rama’s banishment on the eve of his coronation, orchestrated by Dasharatha’s favorite wife Kaikeyi, who covets the throne for her own son Bharata. Later books follow Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana into exile, chronicle Sita’s abduction by demon lord Ravana, and Rama’s battle with Ravana, signifying the cosmic struggle between good and evil. But those events need not con- cern us. Back in Ayodhya, Dasharatha dies of sorrow in the aftermath of Rama’s departure for the forest. Our painting takes us to the moment after his death. Ramayana receivers would have understood the need to preserve the monarch’s body as none of his sons was in the capital to per- form his funeral rites, as required by custom. His two oldest boys, Rama and Lakshmana, had of course been exiled, and his two remaining offspring, Bharata and Shatrughna, were away in their maternal grandfather’s kingdom. The king’s ministers therefore “took the lord of the world [Dasharatha] and placed him in a vat of sesame oil” (Pollock, The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India 213/​ Rām II.60.12)—​the vessel in the top corner of our painting, set against an olive-​green background. Then, messengers were sent to summon Bharata and Shatrughna. The four horses waiting out- side the palace enclosure, directly below the vessel, are meant then for the four men standing closest to the animals (Figure 24.1). The man at the head of the group is in dialogue with family priest Vasishtha, who is instructing the men to hurry to Rajagrha, where the princes are staying. Meanwhile, even before learning the news and on the very night that the messengers set out from Ayodhya, Bharata spends a troubled night. His dreams feature his father and various ill omens. Bharata recounts his nightmares to his concerned companions the next morning. Crucially, sesame oil (taila) and the vat of oil (taila droni) play a prominent part in Bharata’s dream. The corresponding text (which appears on f.83v) first describes many portents, as told by the prince: the moon falls to the earth, the oceans dry, and the sun is swallowed up by the demon Rahu. Bharata then sees his father dragged to the southern direction, typically associated with death and the god of death, Yama. Next, his father reappears, this time smeared with oil, his hair wild, falling from the peak of a mountain into a deep pond of cow dung. Sunk in that pond, I saw how he was drinking sesame oil [taila] with his hand from that dung-​pond, while he laughed again and again […]. Having consumed the taila-​ odana [literally “oil-​food”] again and again, his body smeared with sesame oil, he plunged headfirst into the mass of oil.4 For Bharata, the meaning of these sinister visions is clear: they bode ill for his father’s wellbeing. Sesame oil and immersing the body in oil appear to work in various ways in the Ramayana. When we first encounter the practice, it is clearly an embalming procedure, which, according to several texts in addition to the Ramayana, was known in ancient India.5 Early Buddhist texts, too, show knowledge of the mortuary practice. The Pali Mahaparinibbana Sutta and its Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese counterparts contain variations on the account of the historic Buddha’s last days, the honors paid to his body, as well as those in attendance. Critically, all affirm the use of the oil-​filled vessel.6 In fact, the parallels between the treatment of the Buddha’s body and that of Dasharatha are striking. Like Dasharatha, the Buddha was not immediately cremated.7 Moreover, a seven-​day delay followed his decease, suggesting to some that the body of the Buddha was kept 315  Subhashini Kaligotla in oil to prevent it from decay until Mahakashyapa, his foremost disciple, could perform the last rites.8 Similarly, in the Ramayana, Dasharatha’s ministers submerge the king’s body in the oil-​ filled vat and keep it there until his funeral. Bharata gets back to Ayodhya only seven nights after receiving the summons. Once he arrives, he performs the required rituals, which include cremation and the twelfth-​day shraddha ceremony. But first, the mourners must retrieve Dasharatha from the oil vat. Bharata’s immediate impression of his father’s face is that it had a “yellowish tinge and he seemed to be asleep” (Pollock, The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki 232/​ Rām II.70, 4–​5). Presumably that lifelike effect could not have been achieved without the body’s conservation in oil.9 A second meaning for the taila droni comes from the reactions of the court ladies to whom recourse to the vessel signals that the king was neither ill nor slumbering but had transitioned into the afterlife. According to the narrative, the women had spent the night in the king’s company and found him unresponsive in the morning. His ministers’ decision to immerse the monarch in a vat of oil was thus akin to a contemporary doctor calling time of death. It confirmed that there was no going back. And so, the women began to wail unconsolably. A third and final meaning is suggested by Bharata’s dream, where it is not the oil-​filled vessel per se but the oil itself that portends death. While Bharata envisions other terrifying omens, it seems to me that the text (especially that used in the Mewar manuscript) puts particular emphasis on the oil. Dasharatha is coated in oil, ingesting oil over and over, and is eventually entirely submerged in oil. It is only through Bharata’s dream, then, that Ramayana receivers experience the oil immersion from Dasharatha’s somatic perspec- tive, for the initial description of his ministers’ actions is perfunctory. The rich sensory details and the repetition of the word taila help us see Dasharatha filling with oil and sinking further and further into the unction, which was exactly what was happening to his physical body as Bharata dreamt. In sharp contrast, the painters of Mewar’s Ayodhya Book chose to enact a completely different feature of the prince’s nightmares, involving an interaction between the king and a woman, which feels, to my mind, less crucial to the text. In other words, other than the small segment in the left corner of folio 82r (Figure 24.1), the king’s oil immersion receives little attention visually. Is this because the mortuary process itself was alien to the painted Ramayana’s contemporary seventeenth-​century audience and its visual artists? Another way to put it: does the choice reflect sensitivity to contemporary taboos or knowledge? Or perhaps the decision to exclude the scene was motivated by technical constraints—​space issues or even the difficulty of representing the dream’s complexities in the tight pictorial frame allocated by a painting supervisor? It is worth pointing out that Bharata’s dream follows the taila droni scene, with just a page of text separating the two images. Notably, both paintings are divided into three visual fields with distinct scenes confined to each field. In the latter painting, ​the left half of the picture plane shows the four messengers arriving in Rajagrha to summon Bharata (Figure 24.2). The right half of the picture is organized vertically into two registers, both depicting interior space. The top register shows the sleeping prince’s bed chamber and attendants attempting to wake him. The third and final scene, set in the space below the bedchamber, is meant to represent the prince’s dream. Whereas Bharata witnesses many terrifying signs, as we just saw, the Mewar painting depicts only one: Dasharatha seated on a throne close to a woman in a blue sari brandishing a stick. The king’s countenance does not betray his altered state nor his passage into the afterlife. Intriguingly, while the corresponding text mentions women in two places, the visual represen- tation is undoubtedly a painterly response, independent of the text. According to Hirananda’s text (appearing on f.83v): “Dark red-​brown [krsnapingala] women were laughing at the king, who was seated on a throne of black iron and wearing black clothes.”10 Nowhere does the text suggest that the women were physically violent toward Dasharatha. Clearly, image and text 316  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana Figure 24.2  Bharata’s Dream, Folio from Jagat Singh’s Ramayana (f.83R), Mewar, ca. 1650–​1652, water- color on paper. Courtesy of The British Library Add. MS 15296(1). pursue separate paths. The text speaks of women, whereas the painting shows a single woman gesticulating with a stick. The painting renders Dasharatha in royal garb, dressed in a red jama, necklaces, earrings, cummerbund, and crown—​not in somber black as the text would have it. The other textual reference to a woman occurs prior to this scene and involves Dasharatha being dragged towards the south by men and a single woman. That vision too bears no relation to the visual depiction. There can be little doubt that text and image adopt divergent attitudes towards Dasharatha’s post- mortem oil immersion. While visual artists allocated a small fraction of a single painted surface to the event, the text dwells on images of Dasharatha’s submersion, particularly in Bharata’s dreams. And while those dreams receive vivid treatment in textual form, they take on an unexpected turn visually, with just the single bizarre scene between the woman and Dasharatha receiving attention. These text-​image slippages raise many questions, not least of which is the ever-​relevant question about reception. Questions about makers’ visual tactics for enlivening the epic are just as relevant, as are questions about the relationship between visual representations and contemporary funerary practices. That is, could painters have been drawing from their immediate western Indian material environment to give form to Dasharatha’s droni and the other death rites depicted in this painted book? Another contemporaneous depiction of the oil vessel included in a Ramayana manuscript made in the last part of the sixteenth century for the Mughal courtier Abd al-​Rahim Khan-​i-​Khanan (1556–​1626) may illuminate some of these questions. Dasharatha’s droni takes centerstage in the Mughal painting in a striking monoscenic image (Figure 24.3). What’s fascinating about this droni scene is its marked difference from the Mewar painting: unlike Mewar, painters array Bharata, Shatrughna, and Dasharatha’s ministers around the droni, and moreover, the figures actively engage with the vessel. This droni has a substantial presence besides. Let me press the point even further. In the Mughal paintings, mourners touch Dasharatha’s corpse as opposed to in Mewari images, where contact is conspicuously absent. To be sure, Mewari painters depicted Dasharatha on his death bed: attired in sumptuous yellow, surrounded by the distressed court women who nudge his head, shoulders, and hands to wake him (Figure 24.4). But the only glimpses of Dasharatha thereafter are in the small droni scene with which I began the chapter 317  Subhashini Kaligotla Figure 24.3  Dasharatha’s Droni, Folio from Rahim’s Ramayana (f.102b), 1597–​1605, Mughal India, ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.271.173–​346. 318  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana Figure 24.4  Dasharatha’s Death, Folio from Jagat Singh’s Ramayana (f.80R), Mewar, ca. 1650–​1652, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of The British Library Add. MS 15296(1). and in the cremation scene which I will discuss presently. The important point, however, is that Mewari painters did not show the princes or ministers interacting with Dasharatha after his oil submersion even though this is mentioned in the Valmiki text and included in the Mewar manu- script.11 The droni scene is not only small but also compressed with two larger court scenes, and the king is noticeably alone, except for the two attendants. He is visualized from the neck up, in strict profile, as if depicted on a coin (Figure 24.1). The attendants fan his body, but do not handle it. Their presence is analogous to the fly whisk bearers who accompany royal and divine figures in premodern painting and sculpture—​a necessary trope meant to highlight the central figure’s venerable status. Here is the Mughal droni painting by contrast. An aerial view of Vasishtha, Bharata, Shatrughna, and six courtiers, the image is a poignant portrait of grief. Heads drooping like wilted flowers, the princes approach their father’s oily coffin. Closest to the vessel, Vasishtha plunges his hands in the oil, ready to retrieve Dasharatha now that Bharata is home to perform the death rites.12 The figures are organized into the bottom half of the vertically oriented painting. They stand within the palace walls, in a garden dotted with flowers, and are boxed in by a domed pavilion on the right. Directly above is a large block of text in Persian, the Mughal administrative language, into which the Sanskrit Ramayana had been translated for the emperor Akbar (1542–​1605) and about which I will have more to say. A pretty landscape constituted of pink rocks, bird-​pairs in a blue sky, and a distant palace make up the very top band of the picture plane. The vessel is large, taller than Vasishtha’s waist, and resembles a decorative jar with a scrolling floral design across the top and bottom. All except two figures look toward it. While Mewari makers show Dasharatha’s head peeking from the droni, Mughal artists take a more playful approach. The lower half of Vasishtha’s body is obscured by the droni, presumably because he is leaning against it. Moreover, his hands have disappeared into the oil. And now this rather delightful detail: a hand—​palm forward, fingers splayed—​is visible at the vessel’s rim. Whose hand could it be? It doesn’t look as if it quite belongs with Vasishtha’s wrist. The inscrip- tion on the cremation folio (f.103b) answers the question. The hand belongs to Dasharatha not Vasishtha!13 It seems painters couldn’t resist showing the dead king reaching towards his son from 319  Subhashini Kaligotla the other world. The significant point is that both Mughal and Mewari visual artists have taken creative liberties within the broader narrative framework offered by the Ramayana. They inserted details absent from the text (Mughal) or else emphasized details that are negligible (Mewar). Dasharatha’s cremation scene in the same Mughal manuscript is even more concerned with his physical body (Figure 24.5). The king’s pyre forms the apex of this arresting painting, which is also vertically organized in keeping with the conventions of Mughal manuscripts. The enshrouded body lies on a lattice pattern of wood, tilted upward to give viewers a full impression of the cre- mation. Braids of fire and smoke issue forth to consume the king’s body, which is encased by a flaming orange oval. Crucially, the king is not laid directly on the pyre but on the laps of two women, one cradling his crowned head and the other his calves and feet. Both ladies lean tenderly toward him, extending their arms in an embrace. To be clear: the women are on the pyre with the king, whose entire body is visible, as is his crowned head. Here then is another detail absent from the text. For nowhere in the Valmiki Ramayana’s description of Dasharatha’s cremation is there even a hint of widow immolation; the king’s wives circumambulate the pyre, as do the princes, priests, and others, but they do not sit with the king on the burning pyre.14 An anthropomorphized sun with eyes, nose, and mouth observes from the painting’s top right—​a further echo of the fire eating the dead king and his widows. In the remaining two thirds of the picture plane are other mourners, including a fainting Bharata and many more of the king’s visibly grieving women. The Mewar analogue of this scene is far more sedate in comparison (Figure 24.6). One obvious difference is its treatment of Dasharatha’s pyre, shown in the painting’s bottom-​left quadrant, surrounded by the two princes and other males. Though the rising flames are high, there is little indication of Dasharatha’s physical presence, merely dashes of white for the shroud. And while the painting also includes Dasharatha’s bier as it makes its way to the cremation ground, there too only the head is visible in its numismatic profile, recognizable from the earlier droni scene. Importantly, no one touches Dasharatha. Thus, if the Mughal painting is concerned with documenting con- temporary social practices such as widow immolation—​which are also noted in the Annals of Akbar (Ain-​i-​Akbari) text—​and in the dramatic potential of the scene’s emotional outpouring, then Mewar seems much more interested in representing the somber, respectful, and socially correct attitude expected during a monarch’s funeral. Mewari painters are careful, for instance, to include specific funerary rituals such as the udakam—​the libation ritual for the dead, which takes place only once the body has been burnt. Notice the kneeling princes, against a mauve background in the painting’s bottom right quadrant, pouring water for their father while their mothers and the court ladies look on. It is tempting to ask whether these differences between the two Ramayana manuscripts hint at variant attitudes toward Dasharatha’s physical body after death and suggest more broadly varying agendas for making and even viewing such painted books. It’s time to return to the chapter’s central interest: the Mewar Ramayana’s portrayal of Dasharatha’s postmortem body. While the accompanying text informs us of both the king’s submersion in the oil vat and the retrieval of his body, the paintings allocate a tiny space to the oil vat, where, for all intents and purposes, the king is alone and untouched. Furthermore, if the text’s vivid descriptions of Bharata’s dreams evoke the king’s ignominious oil and dung bath, then the painterly analogue features him in a pose of relative ease seated on a blue platform. The painting does not deny the king’s death. However, neither his countenance nor his attitude betrays the distress and indignity he suffers in his son’s dreams. If artists have made any concession to the prince’s visions, it is with respect to dress. For in the dream-​picture, and only in that picture, Dasharatha appears in a red jama. In the rest of the paintings, he is attired in a translucent white jama or a yellow dhoti. 320  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana Figure 24.5  Dasharatha’s Cremation, Folio from Rahim’s Ramayana (f.103b), 1597–​1605, Mughal India, ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.271.173–​346. Is it possible that these divergences between image and text have to do with the challenges Bharata’s dreams posed to Mewari painters? That is, were artists hampered by space issues or tech- nical constraints? I believe the answer is a decisive no. It is worth remembering that the paintings in Mewar’s Ayodhya Book—​68 in total, finished between 1648 and 1652—​are sophisticated 321  Subhashini Kaligotla Figure 24.6  Dasharatha’s Death Rites, Folio from Jagat Singh’s Ramayana (f.93R), Mewar, ca. 1650–​1652, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of The British Library Add. MS 15296(1). compositions.15 Many deftly encompass multiple Ramayana episodes, with painters using innova- tive pictorial strategies such as multiplication of figures and the stacking and segmenting of space to depict multiple temporalities in a compact visual field.16 One painting repeats the figures of Rama, Bharata, and Shatrughna seven times to convey seven discrete points in space and time (f.114r). Importantly, we can attribute the book to the workshop of master painter Sahibdin (c. 1620–​55) who had by then solidified his reputation and distinctive painting style through a slew of earlier commissions. Which is to say, the evidence of the book argues for painters’ facility with their subject matter: they could have represented Bharata’s dreams more fully, including the king’s various postmortem debasements, if they had intended to do so. No doubt, the parallel text was not shy about doing so. That they did not, confirms kingship as an indisputable emphasis of the Mewar Ramayana, particularly of this book, and the imperative to depict the honors due to the king despite the situation. It is the office of kingship, regardless of who held it, that visual artists were at pains to esteem—​ a pattern that is clearly discernible in the portraits of sovereigns and sovereignty throughout. Take the sumptuous court scenes that open and close the book (f.2r and f.129r). In both, the throne under a fulsome parasol, the parasol being one of the preeminent and enduring symbols of Indic kingship, is set off in a red, proscenium-​like space. The Kosalan court is assembled around it. The key difference between the two images is that Dasharatha sits on the throne in the opening image whereas Rama’s sandals occupy the seat in the latter. Thus, the book opens on the still living patri- arch and closes after Rama’s departure for the forest and Dasharatha’s death. Since loyal Bharata considers the exiled Rama the rightful ruler, the sandals in the last picture, as Rama’s indices, sym- bolize his sovereignty and the continuation of righteous governance. Moreover, here is Bharata on the left, dressed as an ascetic holding up the parasol, while Shatrughna waves the fly whisk. Kingship, then, rarely makes a public appearance without its appropriate visual markers—​the parasol, flanking flywhisk bearers, and the crown and other ornaments. And artists remain solici- tous throughout of Dasharatha’s appearance—​no, of the king’s appearance. In court scenes, he is seated cross-​legged, dressed in the fine, white jama I alluded to earlier: his crowned head shown in strict profile while the bejeweled body is rotated in full view of the court (and the viewer). Not only do artists approach Dasharatha in this way but also his peer, the king of Kekaya, Bharata’s 322  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana grandfather. Indeed, the two kings are indistinguishable from one another in dress, ornamentation, facial features, and bearing; only context helps us tell them apart (compare Dasharatha in f.2r with Kekaya in f.6r). Their jharokha or balcony portraits are also identical: the kings are simply mirror images of one another (compare Kekaya’s portrait in f.4r with Dasharatha’s in f.13r). Most strik- ingly, their flattened, hieratic profiles are eerily like Dasharatha’s profile in the droni and cremation scenes. The representation of Dasharatha in the oil vat—​not to mention artists’ diffidence toward the undignified dream scenarios—​begins to make sense in light of this visual world’s aesthetic commitments. The crucial point is that the droni image belongs to the family of kingship portraits dispersed throughout the book, from throne scenes to jharokha portraits. The droni image is thus a close kin of the closing picture, where the twin princes, Bharata and Shatrughna, like the flywhisk bearers in the tiny droni scene, visually demarcate the central sign of kingship through their reverences. Thus, despite my continued interest in researching links between the droni scene and con- temporary mortuary and material practices, I suspect that it was a stylized representation tucked away in a corner to be faithful to the Ramayana narrative without calling undue attention to itself. Nonetheless, future research might look for parallels in contemporaneous western Indian material culture and the form, materials, and décor of the droni. Surviving metalware or representations of objects in painting and other media may also provide further clues concerning these questions as well as about techniques of production. Conclusion It is perhaps unremarkable that a painted Ramayana made for a western Indian ruler should emphasize kingship as an overarching value, especially if that king’s Rajput clan claimed descent from the divine Rama. Remarkable, however, is the sensitivity with which visual artists rendered the death rites of the epic’s paterfamilias, charting an independent aesthetic path and illustrating once again that the Ramayana was a flexible and fecund site of ekphrasis. A single scribe may have written the text of the Mewar Ramayana, but teams of artists likely worked on each of the Ramayana’s seven books. It is also likely that painters themselves worked out how to render the scenes chosen for illustration even if the choices were made by a master painter. Moreover, the distinct visual strategies of individual books suggest that a larger vision belonging to a master such as Sahibdin prevailed. Possibly such an individual ensured the book’s overall vision and remained attentive to the preoccupations of its elite audience. Certainly, the choices of the Rahim Ramayana, whose droni and cremation scenes we also examined, point to a different set of animating interests, though it would be a mistake to align those differences merely along an insider versus outsider perspective on the epic. Of course, that manuscript was a result of the large-​scale translation projects Mughal emperor Akbar initiated during the 1580s and 1590s for his Persianate court. And the translated texts included scores of Indic literary, philosophical, religious, and political texts as well as the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Rahim Ramayana was one among three illustrated manuscripts produced after the Persian translation was complete in 1588.17 The most lavish of these and the first in the series was made for the emperor himself and included 176 paintings. While an in-​depth analysis of those manuscripts is well beyond the scope of this short chapter, one insight into the translations may help situate the curious attitude of the Mughal droni image, which is arguably less circumspect about the dead king’s mortal flesh. Audrey Truschke has 323  Subhashini Kaligotla written about Mughal elites’ fascination with the fantastical elements of Indic texts, specifically the Mahabharata, which the emperor prized above all and had translated before the Ramayana (Culture of Encounters).18 Truschke makes a persuasive argument that not only the translators but also the visual artists who worked on illuminating the Mahabharata (Razmnama in Persian) catered to the enduring and long-​standing inclination of Islamicate courts toward wondrous stories of oddities and marvels (aja’ib in Persian) (Truschke 109–​110). Thus, Dasharatha’s droni—​seen from above, with the court as audience, and the dead king’s hand creeping out—​must belong within the category of strange tales and “extraordinary things” that Mughal elites found on almost every page of books like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Wonder may in fact be a good starting point in any future investigation of the connection between such early modern painted images of Dasharatha’s oil vat and the coeval material culture. Notes 1 For the dates of composition, authorship, and other questions about the Ramayana’s historicity, see Goldman’s excellent introduction. 2 I have relied on Losty’s analysis of the Mewar book for the factual details cited here (“The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa Manuscripts” 17). 3 See Brockington’s essay, “The Textual Evidence of the Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts,” for the visual qualities of the Mewar Ramayana’s text, and for an analysis of the narrative’s progress in textual form and how that corresponds with its visual progress. 4 I am grateful to Phyllis Granoff for deciphering and translating the Sanskrit text on folio 83v cited in this essay. 5 The authoritative source on the subject is Kane’s History of Dharmaśāstra (233–​234). Besides the Ramayana, Kane cites the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, which mentions that the body of Nimi was covered in oil and fragrant substances and therefore prevented from decomposing. Nimi’s body, importantly, “looked as if death was recent.” In addition, the Vaikhānasa Śrautasūtra and the Satyāṣāḍha Śrautasūtra also mention the practice in relation to brahmins who die away from home and whose bodies must therefore be preserved in a trough of sesame oil and brought home. 6 Another Buddhist text—​a Pali story about the grief-​anguished king Munda who wants to keep seeing his dead wife Bhadda and so proposes to inter her in a taila droni—​also affirms the use of the oil vat in early India for postmortem conservation. The narrative appears in the Aṅguttaranikāya portion of the Sutta Piṭaka and has been explored by a number of scholars in the broader context of ancient Indian mortuary rituals. See Strong’s “The Buddha’s Funeral” (39) and von Hinüber’s “Cremated like a King: The Funeral of the Buddha within the Ancient Indian Cultural Context” (46–​47). 7 For an excellent account of the timeline of the Buddha’s funeral as well as the diverse scholarly interpret- ations of the available sources, see Strong, pp. 32–​59. 8 Strong, p. 38. 9 This is not all that different from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa’s characterization of the body of Nimi, cited earlier. See note 5. 10 Once again, I have relied on Granoff’s translation. 11 For instance, in the critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana, it is Bharata who takes the body of Dasharatha and places it on a bed and adorns it while attendants place it on a bier. Notably, in the text included in the Mewar Ramayana on f.93v, Bharata places the body on the bier, adorns it, and carries the bier together with Shatrughna. Here, too, I am indebted to Granoff’s analysis of several Ramayana recensions and the Mewar text. 12 Note that in the critical edition of the Ramayana it is unclear who removes the body of Dasharatha from the oil vat. There’s no doubt of course that it was done. See Rām.II.70, 4–​5. Thus, again, we see the agency and creativity of visual artists at work in giving visual form to this key scene. 13 I thank Mohit Manohar for reading the corresponding Persian, and for verifying that the text confirms that it was Dasharatha who was being pulled out of the oil vat by the hand. 14 See Rām.II.70, 19–​22 for the participation of the women at the cremation. 15 Dehejia gives a date range (324); Topsfield by contrast dates the Ayodhya book to 1650 (72). 324  Dasharatha’s Oil Vat in the Mewar Ramayana 16 See Dehejia for Sahibdin’s synoptic narrative strategies and Topsfield for an analysis of such visual strat- egies as segmentation and stacking. 17 The three Ramayanas, in the order of their creation, are: emperor Akbar’s manuscript; the now dispersed manuscript of the Queen Mother Hamida Banu Begum; and Abd al-​Rahim’s Ramayana. Of these, the first, held by the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum of Jaipur, has remained inaccessible to scholars and so has been little studied. For monographic treatments of the last two books, see Seyller, Sardar, and Truschke’s The Ramayana of Hamida Banu Begum, Queen Mother of Mughal India and Seyller’s Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: the Freer Rāmāyaṇa and other Illustrated Manuscripts of ʻAbd al-​Raḥīm. 18 See chapter three for Akbar’s special interest in the Mahabharata (102). Works Cited Brockington, J. L. “The Textual Evidence of the Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts.” https://​www.bl.uk/​ online​gall​ery/​what​son/​exhi​biti​ons/​ramay​ana/​pdf/​mewa​r_​ra​maya​na_​t​extu​al_​e​vide​nce.pdf. Accessed 1 September 2022. Dehejia, Vidya. “The Treatment of Narrative in Jagat Singh’s Rāmāyaṇa: A Preliminary Study.” Artibus Asiae, vol. 56, no. 3/​4, 1996, pp. 303–​324. Goldman, Robert P. “History and Historicity.” The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 1, Bālakāṇḍa, edited by Robert P. Goldman, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 14–​59. Kaligotla, Subhashini. “Words and Pictures: Rāmāyaṇa Traditions and the Art of Ekphrasis.” Religions, vol. 11, no. 7, p. 364. https://​doi.org/​10.3390/​rel1​1070​364. Accessed 8 August 2022. Kane, P. V. History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. 5. Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 1930–​1962. Losty, J. P. “The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa Manuscripts.” https://​www.bl.uk/​online​gall​ery/​what​son/​exhi​biti​ons/​ ramay​ana/​pdf/​mew​ar_​r​amay​ana_​manu​scri​pts.pdf. Accessed 1 September 2022. Pollock, Sheldon I, translator. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 2, Ayodhyakāṇḍa, Princeton University Press, 1986. —​—​—​. “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India.” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, May 1993, pp. 261–​297. Ramanujan, A. K. “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwardker, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 131–​160. Seyller, John, Marika Sardar, and Audrey Truschke. The Ramayana of Hamida Banu Begum, Queen Mother of Mughal India. Museum of Islamic Art: Qatar Museums; Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana editoriale, 2020. Seyller, John. Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: the Freer Rāmāyaṇa and other Illustrated Manuscripts of ʻAbd al-​Raḥīm. Artibus Asiae Publishers: Museum Rietberg in association with the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999. Strong, John. “The Buddha’s Funeral.” The Buddhist Dead, edited by Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, pp. 32–​59. Topsfield, Andrew. Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar. Artibus Asiae Publishers and Museum Rietberg, 2002. Truschke, Audrey. Culture of Encounters. Columbia University Press, 2016. von Hinüber, Oskar. “Cremated like a King: The Funeral of the Buddha within the Ancient Indian Cultural Context.” Journal of the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies, vol. 13, 2009, pp. 33–​66. 325