Bhairavi Ragini

This artwork is part of the 34-sheet Ragamala album. Ragamala paintings were designed to induce the perceptive viewer to experience the same mood created by listening to the eponymous motifs in calssical Indian music. Bhairavi Ragini is personified as a woman worshipping a symbol of the Hindu god Shiva in a small shrine. She holds a traditional Indian musical instrument, a pair of clash cymbals manjira. In the painting’s lower field, the artist outlines a lake on whose banks the scene takes place within sight of sacred Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. The album appears to have originated in Avadh in northern India at one of the local Mughal schools established in the courts of local rulers in the 18th century, especially in northern India, at a time when central Mughal rule in Delhi was declining.