‘One Object in Question’ Fellowship Report by Indranil Banerjee
Initial Aims and Objectives
My fellowship began on 10th August 2025, with me joining a cohort for the Musavvari Summer School at the Museum Rietberg which continued for the next ten days. Thereafter, in the third week of my residency, my formal research began. On 23rd August, I entered the office, got introduced to my colleagues at the various departments of the museum, and the museum resources for my research.
Initially, my aims and objectives were primarily centered around the painting’s (RVI 939) religious affiliation and its consumption pattern. My approach primarily stemmed from my attempt to extract more information about the painting and its contexts of production and reception which were already not known. At this stage, I began closely studying the painting physically, alongside a few other paintings to brainstorm and develop a method for studying it. What was certain to me was that I wanted to address a core conceptual reason to study one painting and how this would generate fresh chain of discussions within the broader discipline of art history in general and that of South Asia. What followed over the next couple of weeks was trial and error with a myriad of ideas. While I build on some of those ideas, my objective and method have drastically altered.
At the final phase of my fellowship, new discoveries pertaining to the painting opened windows for a methodological intervention that has been hitherto overshadowed in Indian art history. Close investigation of the iconography in the context of circulation of Shivite iconography showed a possibility of trans-temporal connection within the locale of Rajasthan and a trans-regional exchange beyond its immediate surroundings. Accounting for the historical itinerant habit of South Asian artists led me to think afresh about a repertoire of pictorial knowledge that spanned not only across time and space but also medium. It is this question of medium that became increasingly pivotal in my research as the fellowship period drew close. Numerous conversations with my many art historian colleagues from different fields of expertise in the last month ensured that I address the specific questions of medium in inter-pictorial exchanges in relation to the Saundaryalahari folio. The aim of the research, as a matter of fact, transcended the fellowship period and material and waits to see in how many ways a broader corpus of objects can inform such understanding. In the following section I will try to lay out these transitions in a more concrete manner with further observations and accompanying discoveries.
Progress and Achievements
Week 1 & 2 (10th August- 24th August 2025)
The first two weeks at the museum were spent mostly with the cohort of Musavvari and settling down in Zurich. My time around the diverse group of conservators, artists, art historians, and museum curators catalyzed great conversations and deeply impacted my understanding of materiality in South Asian painting that proved to be indispensable in the following weeks as I studied the painting. Especially my personal conversations with the tutors, Dr. Murad Khan Mumtaz and Mr. Manish Soni brought general yet significant insights into workshop practice, copying, and what close-looking can reveal about the formers. One of the more organic outcomes was to learn to pay attention to minute details. Studying paintings from different traditional ‘schools’ together, informed us how to articulate differences and similitudes of observable details. An important outcome of the second week was a brief conversation with Dr. Eberhard Fischer. Dr. Fischer’s personal suggestions have been remarkably helpful in holding the research together and organizing the materials so far.
Week 3 & 4 (25th August- 7th September 2025)
At the beginning of the third week, I was accompanied by Ms. Sonika Soni to the reserve at Park Villa to inspect the painting physically for the first time. This was followed by an inspection of related objects from Mewar and other places, including a later version of RVI 939. Studying the painting with Ms. Soni and her insights led to the most fruitful conversations surrounding the painting so far. I stumbled upon a similar painting, possibly a contemporary version of RVI 939 but of disputed provenance. This finding led to a renewed excitement to think about the copying practice and response to this iconography and its Shaivite/Shakta context in the early 18th century Mewar.
Most of the next few days went in trying to trace the location of this painting. I wrote to Dr. Amina Okada at Musee Guimet with the help of Dr. Axel Langer and to the Victoria and Albert Museum asking for the whereabouts of the second version. However, failure to trace the painting necessitated some eventual and imperative divergence in my line of thoughts by the end of the first month.
The end of the third week also included my first visit to the Schweizerisches Institut fur Kunstwissenschaft (SIK) to deliver the paintings for the scientific analyses. My eventual return to SIK for the second time resulted in prolonged conversations with Dr. Alessandra Vichi on methods of comprehending the analysis results.
A considerable part of these two weeks was spent in the Museum Rietberg library at the Villa Schonberg where I have consulted several books and catalogues on Indian paintings, with a primary motive of finding similar paintings or versions either from Mewar or other parts of Rajasthan. This week, I was also introduced by Ms. Soni to various scholars who worked in allied areas. I initiated my correspondence with Dr. Molly Emma Aitken and Dr. Debra Diamond expressed my methodological concerns and sought their guidance.
Week 5 & 6 (7th September- 21st September 2025)
Into the beginning of the second month, my personal conversations with Ms. Soni continued along with the occasional inspection of the paintings. At this juncture, I started an extensive study of the paintings from the Sangram Singh II’s period (r. 1710-1734) which are published and digitized in various sources. A pattern emerged from other contemporary small series and manuscripts like the Shiva Puja series, Eklingamahatmya etc. that an array of motifs and elements were recycled and repeated in the Shivite themed paintings, including some minute stylistic similarities.
A breakthrough came in the fifth week as one of my colleagues, Vinit Vyas, brought a 19th century sculptural depiction of Shiva- Parvati to my notice and it opened a fresh avenue of inquiry in the same line of copying practice and repetition but beyond the painted surface. A deeper and critical engagement with the motif in two mediums resulted in a reassessment of the existing scholarship on Mewar paintings in general and slowly signaled to a possible intervention.
Subsequently, I have connected with my colleagues in India who are working on Mewar to be able to see some objects for comparative study. My colleagues in India generously shared photographs from his own documentation at the Government Museum, Udaipur, and agreed to photograph the sculptures from the Ahar cenotaph complex and the Archaeological Museum at Ahar. While I was informed that the Ahar cenotaph complex has been shut for an indefinite period, some photographs of objects in the collection of the archaeological museum highlighted the kind of iconographic styles the artists might have ready access to. In a way, it marked a beginning of me thinking about the medieval sculptures as possible iconographic source for the 18th century painting.
In the same week, I also reached out to a few Sanskritists and Religious Studies scholars soliciting their guidance on the inscription, its translation, and its source. A main aspect of this inquiry was to understand the stability of the painting's traditional identification as ‘Saundrya Lahari’ and how much does that affect the painting’s ready Shakta cultic affiliation. I have started conversations by email with Dr. Madhu Khanna and Dr. Sandra Sattler, both scholars of Shakta materials and landscapes, seeking their expertise on Shaiva and Shakta oscillations in the western India. Simultaneously, I have sought guidance from Ms. Shruti Devale, Dr. Sadananda Das, and Dr. Mayank Gupta (IGNCA) on the translation of the Sanskrit text. However, at the time of writing I await their responses.
The sixth week was divided primarily between two tasks. I have started surveying scholarly literature both in Hindi and English to understand the influence of Shaivism in Mewar in the long durational history. In a parallel effort, I have started surveying the corpus of pre-modern Shaivite sculptures from the region (ancient Medapata, Uparamala, and Marudesa) to understand their iconographies and stylistic traits better. These findings will be crucial in order to establish a longer history of motif and trans-medial circulations of images and iconographies. This week I have initiated my correspondence with Dr. Cynthia Packert, Dr. Deepak Kannal, Dr. Dipti Khera, and Prof. Naman P. Ahuja seeking their suggestions on the methodology and the material.
Week 7 & 8 (22 September- 5 October 2025)
These weeks marked the deliverance of a milestone mid-fellowship report. The report consisted of all the developments till this stage of the fellowship and the present objectives and plan for the rest of my stay. In the following days, my report was thoroughly reviewed by Dr. Johannes Beltz at the Museum Rietberg, and a set of significant concerns came up in a subsequent review meeting. Dr. Beltz’s rigorous inquiry into my foundational ideas eventually strengthened my core ideas in the days to come. My suggestion of a longe-durée connection between paintings and sculptures was asked, ‘if there is a sculptural quality in the painting, why is there a need in the first place for it to be retained? Why would the artists choose to retain it?’ This line of questioning eventually enabled me to think through the issues of viewership and artistic agency. Indeed, if the sculptural tradition merely served as an iconographic source point, why would the artists retain the visual qualities of the medium?
To this wondering, added my singular most valuable experience outside the Museum Rietberg. During my trip through France, my close encounter with the European middle age heritage in the cathedrals and numerous museums in Paris, Dijon, Rouen, and Strasbourg made it inevitably impossible to not think about the interdependency of the mediums in the global Middle Ages. Although it was evident that the phenomenon of my interest, i.e. intermediality was omnipresent in medieval Europe, especially between small format paintings, painted murals, sculptures, textiles etc. it provided a framework to think about South Asian art in all its interconnectedness of mediums.
In the following week, I discussed some of my initial ideas with Dr. Debra Diamond and Dr. Naman P. Ahuja. My conversation with Dr. Diamond made a number of valuable textual information to surface. She brought a valuable medieval Sanskrit poem to my notice that was composed by a Jain priest in praise of a 14th century Jain temple. In enumerating the amusing display of images and their perplexing reception by an extremely diverse group of audience, the author underlines the undeniable coexistence of paintings and sculptures within the visual field and their shared reception. Although apart from technical treatises, textual sources describing the beauty and the experience of Indian religious spaces are scanty, it surely made me seriously consider the moments of exchange in their shared production.
My multiple conversations with Prof. Ahuja brought to my notice other sites in India where such activities were prevalent in the ancient and medieval period. For examples, in many sites in Tamil Nadu and in the paradigmatic site of Ajanta, paintings, sculptures, and painted sculptures coexisted within the same visual field and were perhaps viewed in conjunction. These conversations also led to thinking about the shilpashastras or treatises on art where different mediums of artistic production are constantly put into comparisons with each other, including performance arts. Although these texts or any of the sites do not particularly refer to any transregional or transtemporal connections, as my concern have been so far, they certainly inform a possibility of a long durational history of painting. They strengthened my conviction that sculptures would not be unlikely sources for painters trying to develop an unprecedented iconography in the 18th century.
Week 9 & 10 & 11 (6 October- 26 October 2025)
In the final phase, my research observed a couple of breakthroughs in terms of the text and iconography of the painting. My correspondence with three Sanskrit specialists, Dr. Sadananda Das, Dr. Mayank Shekhar, and Ms. Shruti Dhavale proved to be of significant guidance. Ms. Dhavale and Dr. Ravikant helped me decipher the text inscribed on top the painting that had hitherto been identified as the eighth verse of Saundaryalahari. I arrived at an understanding that the text in concern albeit and partially belonged to the Saundaryalahari, and in fact the eighth verse as scholars like Fischer, Topsfield, and Diamond have suggested, but the second part ran an unidentified commentary of the text. As I returned to my primary sources from Udaipur, it became apparent that Saundaryalahari was quite well known in Udaipur’s courtly intellectual circles alongside some of its commentaries. However, the commentary that is inscribed on the painting is certainly a third commentary and does not match with the two commentaries that I was able to refer to.
Iconographic discrepancies between the inscribed text and the painted image pointed to a complex phenomenon. It bolstered our recent skepticism regarding the artistic knowledge of the texts and the actual modes of transmission. If the artists were painting something slightly different that than what the text prescribed, I asked, what was the mode of diffusion of knowledge to these artists. Given that we are talking about a Tantric text that is, firstly, quite esoteric in nature, and secondly, did not belong to the genre of texts that were regularly painted and thus did not warrant to be a common knowledge for the artists, I suggested that the artist was orally informed about a broad Tripurasundari textual iconography that derived from an overall understanding of the text and its commentarial tradition.
Dr. Carolin Widmer generously reviewed my initial proposition at this stage and provided valuable insights. She suggested that the issues of textual transmission between the artists, scribes, and scholars be carefully examined in order to understand the nuances of the textual and pictorial sources for the painting. She resonated with the argument that the artists were not particularly studying a text as such but were painting from their understanding of the text and perhaps that’s why we see an iconographic affinity to a commentary other than the one inscribed above. She also generously shared a Pahari depiction of the same date belonging to the succeeding century. Although the Pahari corpus of the deity doesn’t directly fall under the purview of my research now, it certainly bolstered the possibility of the RVI 939 folio being one of the earliest painted depictions of the deity in early modern India.
The final week before my final presentation was marked by two major interactions. Dr. Eberhard Fischer’s visit to Museum Rietberg for a special viewing session of the paintings I am concerned with was revelatory. At a very critical juncture, interacting with him taught me the process of intimate viewing and further, comparative viewing. This session secured my attention to a particular motif in the painting. Although he warned against such methods that could run the threat of overlooking other important details of the paintings, he also encouraged the necessity of focusing on the iconography of the divine couple and their relative peculiarity vis-à-vis other elements in the painting to favour my methodological approach.
Outcome and Future Possibilities
Expectations of GBF Foundation and the research possibilities and the actual research contingencies coincided into three possible outcomes—a series of presentations, a publication, and a one-room display with the research process and outcome. Two consecutive presentations were scheduled in the closing week of my fellowship. The first one, on the 30th of October, was the first and preliminary presentation in the presence of museum colleagues, including the director, the deputy director, and curators of several departments of the museum. The final one was on the 6th of November to a limited audience of the trustees and members of the GBF Foundation including Dr. Eberhard Fischer, Barbara Fischer, Catharina Dohrn, and Dominik Keller. Both the presentations were followed by thought provoking questions, insightful conversations, and positive criticism from the experts. Some of the methodological complexities of looking at the three mediums together—painting, sculptures, and texts in the South Asian contexts, and simultaneously considering the temporal gap were highlighted. The deep sense of appreciation coming from the attendees encouraged me to think of a future of the project.
My paper investigated an early 18th-century Udaipur painting of goddess Tripurasundari, traditionally identified as a folio from the Sanskrit text Saundarya Lahari. My intention was to probe what it means to study “one painting” within South Asian art history without reproducing Eurocentric object-based methods, and how such a study can benefit the discipline broadly. My study of iconography of the Goddess have remained carefully aware of the Panofskian model of iconology. Through a combined study of iconographic details, materiality, and the inscribed text, it aimed to highlight a very different contour of artistic practice in India. Moving beyond the expectations of textual hermeneutics, my discussion on the texts entailed a comparative analysis of different analysis and the eventual discrepancies between the text and the image. On the other hand, the painting also showed intriguing similarities with some minor and later parts of some versions of the text. While it was obvious that the painting must be put in close dialogue with similar paintings, it’s different versions, and exact copies, my proposition explored another facet that has often been presupposed and mostly understudied in the South Asian context.
I believed that engaging the painting with a close conversation with the sculptural practice in the region may provide valuable insights into the early modern painting practices. Despite the gap between the period of achievement for medieval sculptures in western India and the painting practices in early modern Rajput courts, I suggested that the sculptures were accessible to the painters. An unusual intimacy, agency, and corporeal presence, particularly in her physical interaction with Shiva permeates through the entire painting—but especially in the central iconography of Tripurasundari. Visual strategies adopted by the artists to show this intimacy through diminutive details like the goddess’s gentle and sensuous touch on Shiva’s arm, his arm falling comfortably over her shoulder, their interlocked diagonal gaze, are largely without precedence in paintings. The text, on the other hand, being a strotra refrains from these ekphrastic details. I argued that such expressive features are best explained through the artist’s engagement with medieval Shaiva sculptures from the Medapata region, where elongated bodies, languid poses, interlocking gazes, and reciprocal gestures of touch were well established. Shaivite sculpture making, after all, found a renewed spirit in the region, and many of the medieval temples were active into the 17th and 18th century.
Scholars of South Asian paintings have suggested that the artists and workshops, in general, responded to the painting tradition that preceded them, copied, adopted, and recycled images, motifs, and iconographies to their fresh and innovative ends. Recently, the interface between the built environment and paintings has also been explored. However, I am excited to make a foray into the relation between sculptures and paintings. Drawing from scholarships in other areas of art history, I propose the method of ‘intermedial response/ translation’ that South Asian artists were more naturally inclined to than we imagine today. Even for ancient sites such as in Ajanta, Walter Spink has convincingly claimed that there was virtually no difference between the sculptors and the painted. Although the argument is acceptable for many sites in India across historical periods, the nature of shared learning, practice, and reception needs more research. The sculptural quality and iconography that I claim the artists have responded to is also visible in another painting from the period of Sangram Singh II and in the collection of Museum Rietberg.
While the method of intermediality is instrumental in broadening the routes of circulation of images and aesthetic components, the issue of artistic agency is also germane to it. The artistic response to sculptures is not just an unconscious one but there are a decided structuring and organization of visual elements onto the painted surface by the artist to create an interplay between different sources. Tracing how motifs and sensibilities moved across text, painting, and sculpture, the paper proposes an “inter-medial” or “medial border-crossing” framework for South Asian art history. Rather than treating artistic media as isolated or merely analogous “sister arts,” I suggest that artists actively drew upon a shared reservoir of embodied, visual knowledge across forms. The study concludes by situating this approach within the longue durée of South Asian religious practice, where paintings and sculptures coexisted, informed one another, and jointly shaped devotional experience.
Images
Image 1: “The Goddess on the Jewel Island”, folio possibly from a large Saundarya Lahari series, Master at the court of Maharana Sangram Singh II, c. 1720-1730. Pigment and gold on paper, 42.2 x 22.3 cm. Museum Rietberg, Zurich. RVI 939.
Image 2: The Goddess on the Jewel Island, unknown artist, c. 1750-60. Pigment and gold on paper, 30.6 x 19.2 cm. Museum Rietberg, Zurich. RVI 806.
Image 3: Uma-Maheshwar, from Hinglajgadh, India. c. 8th-9th century. Indore Museum, Madhya Pradesh. Reproduced after Packert (1997).
Image 4: Siva and Parvati, from Kanauj, India. c. 9th-10th century, Pratihara dynasty. Nelson-Atkins Museum.