Pardah and Portrayal: Rajput Women as Subjects, Patrons, and Collectors

Author(s): Molly Emma Aitken

Source: Artibus Asiae, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2002), pp. 247-280
Published by: Artibus Asiae Publishers
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 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN

PARDAH AND PORTRAYAL:

RAJPUT WOMEN AS SUBJECTS, PATRONS, AND COLLECTORS

The elite women of the Rajput courts were visible only to a select few men. They observedpardah
and lived in walled and screenedportions of Rajput palacescalled zanands.Given the restrictions
ofpardah,it is not surprising that forbidden looks were a cherishedtheme of Rajput paintings, whose
heroes and heroines catch each other's eyes over walls, through windows, in mirrors,and past curtains
designed to shield women from men's view. Though many pictures were conceived as windows, offer-
ing a glimpse of the beloved, in practice, paintings concealed as much as they revealed. The women
exposed in them were pictured as poetic ideals, and it was only in exceptional cases that inscriptions
associateda heroine in a picture with an actual woman of the court. Even dancersand concubines were
depicted as anonymous ideals though most could show their faces.'Consequently, while the painters
of the Rajput courts produced men's portraits in the hundreds, they left almost no pictorial records
for posterity of real women. This pictorial distinction was not simply a consequenceofpardah;it was
a form ofpardahthat served to promote elite men's and elite women's different accessesto public vis-
ibility. In this paper,I approachthis form ofpardahthrough the subject of elite women who, as patrons
and collectors, promoted male visibility and their own effacement in paintings.
Perhapsbecause of women's invisibility, but also in the absence of much concrete evidence, very
little has been written about Rajput women's contributions to painting traditions.2In the following
pages, I present substantial new documentation from court archivesto show that Rajput women were
patrons, collectors, and viewers. I have drawn most of my evidence from the following four sources:
an 1891Mewarinventory,3eighteenth- to nineteenth-centuryrecordsof the Jaipursuratkhand4[paint-

Concubines of the highest status, thepardayats, lived in the zandndand kept pardah.Varshajoshi, Polygamyand Pur-
dah: Womenand SocietyamongRajputs(Jaipur: Rawat Publications, I995), I20.
2
There are scattered referencesto women's patronage in the scholarly literature. For instance, there is the well-known
example of the 1730 colophon which, according to the latest scholarship, names the "LadyMalini" of "good conduct"
as the patron of the painter Manaku'sGita Govinda.See B.N. Goswamy and EberhardFischer, Pahari Masters:Court
Paintersof NorthernIndia (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers and Museum Rietberg Zurich, 1992), 241-242. See also
paintings of a queen in the Guler style, possibly by Nainsukh, two of which are reproduced in Vishakha Desai, Life
at Court:Artfor India'sRulers,i6t-i9th Centuries(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, I985), cat. nos. 67, 68. Naval Krishna
has also published an entry from a 1697-1698 Bikaner court recordwhich documents a Sisodlya Rani giving two por-
traits ("Sisodanijiri Nazar") to the Bikaner ruler (though, as Krishna suggests, the entry could be interpreted to mean
a gift of "nazar"given to the queen). See Naval Krishna, "Painting and Painters in Bikaner: Notes on an Inventory
Register of the I7th Century," in Indian Painting: Essaysin Honourof KarlJ. Khandalavala(New Delhi: Lalit Kala
Akademi, 1995), 254-280.
3 The inventory is located in the Rajasthan State Archives, Udaipur branch.
4 A note on transliteration: I have followed the transliterations used in R.S. McGregor, Outline of Hindi Grammar
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). I have used these symbols to transliterate titles, the names of people, and foreign
words, but not the names of places.

247
ings department],5 the Jaipur Dastur Qaumwar, and an early-nineteenth-centuryillustrated love let-
ter fromJodhpur.7
My study focuses exclusively on paintings from the Rajput courts in the Rajasthaniregion.8The
aims of portrayalat the Rajasthanicourts were not entirely sharedby artists and patrons in the Pahari
region, and the rules of portrayalchanged significantly in the mid to late nineteenth century with the
advent of photography and in response to British painting. Elsewhere, I have discussed Rajput por-
traits of men in Rajasthanas tools of diplomacy and as historical documents.9Here, my principal aim
is to consider how one painting tradition, which was partly fostered by women, reinforceda politics
of male visibility and female invisibility. The study of Rajput women as subjects, viewers, patrons,
and collectors is intrinsic to the study of portrayalin the region generally, and I hope this work will
contribute to a better understanding of Rajasthaniportraiture.10Ultimately, however, I intend this
project to open up broaderquestions about how social and political imperatives shaped what Rajput
paintings could, could not, or could rarelypicture.
In the firstof five sections, I considerseventeenth- to nineteenth-centuryattitudes towardsthe por-
trayal of women and lay out evidence for women's participation in the painting tradition. I go on to
discuss the political functions of portraitureat the Rajput courts and the implications of these func-
tions for the representationof women. After delineating a politics of portrayal- or visibility and invis-
ibility - in the Rajasthaniregion, I look at the case of a particularQueen Regent fromJaipur named
Rani Chundavat,an active patron and collector of paintings." A section follows on paintings of kings
surroundedby women, which looks at the notion of the zandna in constructions of kingly authority,
and at kings as objects of an imagined female gaze. The paperconcludes with exceptions to established
practices for picturing women and with issues of visibility in Rajput painting generally.

The pages of the Jaipursuratkhdnacan be found in the RajasthanState Archives,BikanerandJaipur branches.The pages
that I havestudied arethose in the Bikanerbranch.I havelookedat both the daily summaries,calledroznamda,
and the semi-
annualsummariesof departmentactivities, calledjamakharch.My findings arepresentedin the appendixto this article.
6 The Jaipur Dastur Qaumwar,RajasthanState Archives, Bikaner.
7 RajasthanState Archives, Bikaner.
8 The courts I discuss here fall within the bordersof the modern state of Rajasthan, but of course the region was, in the
period examined here, only loosely defined as a region by alliances among independent kingdoms.
9 Molly Aitken, "ThePracticedEye: Styles and Allusions in MewarPainting" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000),
I52-202.
IO Recent articles in English on the subject of portraiture include Vishakha Desai, "Timeless Symbols: Royal Portraits
from Rajasthan," in The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorationsin RegionalIdentity,ed. Karine Schomer, Joan L. Erdman,
Deryck 0. Lodrick, Lloyd I. Rudolph (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994), 313-342; and B.N.
Goswamy, "Essenceand Appearance:Some Notes on Indian Portraiture,"in Facetsof Indian Art, ed. Robert Skelton
et al. (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986), 193-202.
I A conventionalspelling of the Maharani'sname is Chundavat,as given here. However, the documents I have been study-
ing generally spell her name "Chufiavat."It should be added here, though, that court documents did not use consis-
tent spellings; one finds slight variations even within a single set of documents such as the Jaipur suratkhandrecords.
I2 Ascribed to Bisan Das, ca. 16Io-1615, Museum of Fine Art, Boston (Francis Bartlett Donation of I9I2 and Picture
Fund), acc. no. 14.657. Reproduced in a number of places: Milo C. Beach, TheGrandMogul:ImperialPainting in India,
600oo-66o (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and FrancineClark Art Institute, 1978), pi. I5; Stuart CaryWelch, Imperial
MughalPainting(New York: George Braziller,1978), pi. 16;Amina Okada,IndianMiniaturesof theMughalCourt(New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), 161-162.
 I.
WOMEN'S PAINTINGS AND PAINTINGS OF WOMEN

Theportrayalof women
A numberof women collectorsarenamed in theJaipurarchives,but there is a striking contrastbetween
these named individuals and the nameless female ideals in the paintings that they owned. It is gener-
ally said thatpardah, a custom that shielded women from the eyes of all but a select few men, prevented
painters from portraying elite women as individuals. There is little question that pardah was a serious
hindrance. However, it was not an insurmountable obstacle. A notion of women's portraiture did exist,
and it was neither inconceivable, nor strictly forbidden to depict real women in paintings.
Among the rare, early examples of women's portraiture in North India is the circa I615 Mughal
painting ofJahangir's birth from thejahdngzrndma.11Generally attributed to Bisan Das, the painting
provides what must be a group portraitof the women in Akbar'szandnd.Eachface has a distinct struc-
ture, complexion, and ethnicity. Even the expressions and dynamics among the women suggest his-
torically specific identities and relationships.I3Though unusual, the Bisan Das picture is not a wholly
isolated example of women's portraiture. Several early-seventeenth-century Mughal paintings of a
woman, posed as if in a portrait, may be portraits of Nur Jahan,14and Ellen Smart has argued that the
idealized women in Mughal paintings do bear subtle individualities and can often, with scrupulous
research,be identified with real women.15Mughal examples suggest that the zandndand the ethos of
pardah did not, in and of themselves, provide insurmountable obstacles to portraying specific women.
Certainly a woman's portrait was not an impossible idea to the Mughals.
The Deccan and Rajput courts also flirted with the idea of portraying real women. A number of
Deccan and Rajput pictures of idealized women were labeled with the names of legendary heroines
such as Rupmati'6 and Jodh Ba1.'7A seventeenth-century painting from Isarda, now in the Museum

13 The painting is well known, and several scholars have noted this unusual example of female portraiture. Okada
observes, in her discussion of Bisan Das, that such portraits were unusual becausepainters were not permitted to enter
the zandnd,but shedoesnot speculateabouthow BisanDas might havebeenexemptedfromthis rule.
14 For instance, Abu'l Hasan's painting of a woman holding a rifle, probably dated I6I2-I613, Raza Library,Rampur,
Inv. H.IozI. The woman is now generally thought to be NurJahan. It has been reproducedin severalplaces, includ-
ing Milo C. Beach, Mughal and RajputPainting, The New Cambridge History of India, I: 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, I992), fig. 69. In addition, Wheeler Thackston has reproduced a jharokaportrait of a woman who
may be NurJahan in Thejahangirnama:MemoirsofJahangir,Emperor of India (Washington D.C.: FreerGallery of Art/
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1999), 368. The painting is from a private collection. By contrast with the usual, more
beautified female faces of Mughal painting, this face is unusually forceful, with, I find, an odd touch of resemblance
to Jahangirin the mouthandchin.
15 Ellen Smart, "A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Painting of JahanaraBegum," paper presented at the American Council
for Southern Asian Art Conference, May 12-14, 2000, Philadelphia, PA.
i6 A "portrait,"inscribed "Rupmati," in the Kumar Sangram Singh Collection, Jaipur (KSS 254), seems to express an
almost penetrating intelligence, as if it were modeled on a real woman. The model's name may have been Rupmati,
or the paintingmayhaveportrayeda contemporaneous
womanexaltedas a modern-day"Rupmati."
17 For example, see Joachim Bautze, Indian MiniaturePaintings, c. 0poc.
5 (Amsterdam: Galerie SaundaryaLahari,
1987), cat. no. 40.

249
Rietberg Zurich,18describes its heroine as "No. 5 from the king's harem,"apparentlyreferringto an
actual woman, though denoting her, not with a name, but a number. In addition, a few exceptional
Rajput paintings bore inscriptions that identified their idealized subjects with the names of living
women. A painting from Deogarh, for instance, also in the Rietberg, bears an inscription that names
both its male and female subjects: "RavatSangramSingh"and "Hamarataniji."'9 Other Rajput paint-
ings that pictured rulers in the company of a single, favoredwoman may have intended that woman
to represent a specific wife or concubine, though in the absence of inscriptions or specific facial fea-
tures, and given the large size of most zandnds, it is almost impossible today to guess who these women
were.20 Thus, in theory, the Rajputs recognized the possibility of portraying women, though that the-
orywas rarelyput into practice,and then only tenuously, with artistsrelying on inscriptions, not facial
features,to denote individuality.
In any case, the notion that a woman could be portrayed seems to have been seductive, since it
influenced the conventions used to represent female ideals. Many paintings of ideal women employ
basic portrait conventions like profiles, window frames, and empty, often dark-green or blue back-
grounds. Given the many indications that portraits of women were not strictly prohibited, scholars
have sometimes speculated that painters intended these portrait-like paintings to represent specific
women.21
For the most part, however, portrait conventions were a conceit designed to make ideals appear
within reach. The court records that I have studied indicate that the Rajputs did not consider most
paintings representingwomen to be portraits.Portraitsof women were conceivable, but rare.Instead,
the trend was overwhelmingly for pictures of fictional, archetypalwomen. Both the Mewarinventory
of 1891 and the early-eighteenth- to nineteenth-century records of the Jaipur painting department list
hundreds of portraits of men with specific names and titles. They do not list portraits of women.

I8 Museum Rietberg Zurich, Switzerland, RVI 1069. Georgette Boner et al., SammlungAlice Boner:Geschenkan das
MuseumRietbergZurich(Zurich: Museum Rietberg Zurich, 1994), cat. no. I31. I owe this example to EberhardFischer,
who sent me a copy of the image after reading a draft of this article. The image was also published in Robert Skelton,
Indian Miniaturesfrom the i5th to the Ipth Centuries(Venezia: N. Pozza, I96I), 38, cat. no. 15.The inscription, on the
bottom margin of the front, reads: "Huramapatsah ki 5."
I9 Museum Rietberg Zurich, Switzerland, RVI 1098. Georgette Boner et al., SammlungAlice Boner,cat. no. I34. Again,
I must thank EberhardFischer for bringing this example to my attention.
20 For example, a portrait, from the BarodaMuseum, inv. P.G. 5a.85,of Sawai Madho Simh of Jaipur with a queen and
a young child. Published in O.C. Gangoly, Critical Catalogueof MiniaturePaintings in the Baroda Museum(Baroda:
Government Press, I96I), pl. XXVII A; and in Mulk Raj Anand, Album of Indian Paintings (New Delhi: National
Book Trust, 1973). Also, a portrait of Ram Simh of Amber presenting jewels to a woman in the zannana,reproduced
in Catherine Glynn, "Evidenceof Royal Painting for the Amber Court,"ArtibusAsiae 56, I/2 (I996), fig. 4.
21 The assumption is generally that a picture of a woman, if it was a portrait, must have portrayed a courtesan or danc-
ing girl. For instance, PratapadityaPal writes: "... both in Muslim and Hindu elite societies women led a sheltered
life and rarely revealed themselves before strange males. Thus, there was no question of their portraits being taken,
unless they were favourite dancing girls, musicians, or courtesans. Realistic portraitureof individual women of either
the Mughal or Rajput families is rare indeed.... Only one depiction of a woman is included here as a possible por-
trait, almost certainly of a beautiful courtesan."PratapadityaPal, Divine Images,HumanVisions:The Max Tanenbaum
Collectionof SouthAsian and Himalayan Art in the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada,
1997), I45-I46-

250
Instead, the recordsgroup paintings of women under the heading "maherya" or "women,"and do not
assign them names.22As such they fall into a different class of paintings, akin not to portraits but to
the paintings of anonymous heroes that were classified in the recordsas "marda"or "men."Interest-
ingly, these kinds of paintings of male and female types seem to have been, as a whole, cheaperthan
portraits.23
Though portraitsof women were possible, and even a playful theme in pictures of archetypalhero-
ines, Rajput queens seem to have consistently followed accepted custom and to have rejectedportraits
of themselves in favorof paintings that celebratedfemale types. Such, at least, was the case at Jaipur,
where court recordstouch on the paintings bought by, given to, or received from its queens, whom
they referto either as "maharan"(a wife of the king) or "ma"(mother). 24 Severalentries find queens
patronizing the kinds of shringara paintings that idealize women as lovers and classify them into
romantic types. MaharaniChundavat,25for instance, owned an illustrated Rdsikaprzya,a compilation
of poems by the sixteenth-century poet Kesava Das, which enumerated types of heroes and heroines,
and dwelled, in particular, on the poetic conventions of female beauty. Likewise, Ma Jadam,26Ma
Khichani,27and Ma Rathor28all owned paintings of Barahmasas,or "TheTwelve Months," a genre of
poem that defined each month according to its influences on the moods of lovers. These texts and their
illustrations typically idealized women almost to the point of dematerializing them. Kesava Das, the
poet of the Rdsikaprzya,used extensive metaphor to transmute his heroines:

... her teeth as seeds of sweet pomegranate: Her laughter bright as lightning, feet like lotuses; her
neck and arms, as jars,and belly as betel-leaf: as swans her gait, and limbs that shone as burnished
gold - and her smell sweet as does from earthen vessel rise when water first is poured inside.29

22
Mewar inventory, Rajasthan State Archives, Udaipur branch, 410-434. The term "maherya"is used to categorize
images of women in many places throughout the Jaipur suratkhdanrecords.
23 John Seyller has observed the comparatively high prices given to portraits in Rajasthan in his recent essay "ForLove
or Money: The Shaping of Historical Painting Collections in India," in IntimateWorlds:IndianPaintingsfromtheAlvin
0. Bellak Collection,ed. Dariell Mason (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 200I), I6-I7. He also points out
that, at Mewar, formal portraits tended to be assigned higher prices than less formal portraits. As he himself notes,
however, valuations were anything but systematic. The Mewar inventory I have studied (Rajasthan State Archives,
Udaipur branch) includes many instances of formal portraits that were assigned values of one or two rupees, so it does
not obviously bearout Seyller's conclusions on formal vs. informal portraiture.Nevertheless, it does provide evidence
of certain overall trends, among them that paintings of women were generally valued lower than paintings of kings,
i.e. more consistently at prices of a rupee or two as compared with five, ten, or more for royal portraits. A systematic
study of prices in the Mewarjotdaninventory (RajasthanState Archives, Udaipur branch)would no doubt help address
these questions of painting valuation.
24 For some reason, the majority of these entries date to the later half of the eighteenth century and the early decades of
the nineteenth century.
25 A description of MaharaniChundavat is provided later in this paper.
26
The Jadam Ranis came from the Karauli family.
27 Ma Khichaniwas the motherof MaharajaPratapSimh'seldest child, the MaharajaKumarJagat Simh. She was
MaharajaPratap Simh's fifth wife and the daughter of Rawal Sultan Simh ofJaiselmer.
28
The only Rathor Rani who was a royal mother in the period of these entries was the Rathor Rani from Kishengarh,
a wife of MaharajaPrthvi Simh and the daughter of MaharajaBahadurSimh of Kishengarh.
29 Kesava Das, The Rasikapriya of Keshavadasa, trans. K.P. Bahadur (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, I972), 31.

25I
In the spirit of such verses, the typical woman in Rajput painting was also highly stylized; she was all
line and surface,her gestures shaped by convention and her forms often by literary metaphor - the
lotus petal eye, to name the most obvious example.
Apparentlythe extreme artificialityof these ideals evoked a positive responsefrom femaleviewers.
In addition to illustrations of love poetry, severalqueens also collected paintings of women pictured
solely as examples of beauty without referenceto a story or poem. MaJadam, for instance, possessed a
numberof paintings describedsimply as of "mherya"3 (women) and of"sahalya"(female friends).Like-
wise, MaharaniChundavat'scollection included two albums filled with pictures of idealized women,
and in 1773 she obtained31almost two dozen paintings from the royal stores representing different kinds
of women alone and in groups. None of the women in these paintings bore a name: there was not a
single portrait to be found among the images of women that the Jaipur queens collected.
Why didn't women commission portraits of themselves? Were women too self-effacing to adver-
tise themselves in paintings ? Perhaps, but Rajput women were independently wealthy and often quite
powerful; they hunted and some entered into battle; they could influence policy, and extant accounts
describe several queens who fearlesslydisagreed with their husband'sactions or points of view. Nor
were portraitsexclusively a monarch'sprerogative.Powerful nobles engaged court artists to represent
themselves in positions of power,32so why not Rajasthan'sformidable queens?
It was not that women did not care for portraits. Though they collected the full gamut of paint-
ing themes, from illustrations of musical modes to pictures of deities, court documents suggest that
women collected, and gave away,men's portraitsmore often than any other type of painting. The mat-
ter deepens: why patronize men's portraits but not their own? Part of the answer to these questions
lies, I think, with the specific political purposes that portraits served at the Rajasthani courts. I turn
first to the ways that women participated in the portrait tradition, then to the political functions of
court portraits.

Women's picturesof men

The suratkhdndrecords at Jaipur contain a wealth of information on the portraits that its queens
bought, received as gifts, and gave away. Jaipur's queens could purchase men's portraits directly from
the royal painting department. In 1778, Maharani Jadam bought portraits of her son, husband
(MaharajaPratapSimh), father-in-law (Madho Simh), and three brothers from Karauli.33Later,her
staff bought another picture of her husband and seven of thdkurs.34Queens may also have commis-

30 An "mh"conjunct is often used interchangeably in these documents with "mah."Thus one finds both "mahdranz"
and
"mharaini.
3' The recordsimplynotesthat the paintingsarrived("pahuchi")
in herpresence("hajur").
32 As evidenced by the large number of paintings produced by court artists for thikanadarsthat show nobles as the cen-
tral, most reveredfigures, often with haloes. The Jaipur recordsindicate that nobles were highly involved in painting
production, and paintings of nobles, like those of Mewar's Baba Bakhat Simh, were probably commissioned by the
nobility ratherthan by rulers.
33 One of whom was Karauli's Raja Manik Pal.
34 Asvina, sudi 5, samrvat
1840 (1784 CE). From here on, I have translated the Rajasthani names for the lunar months into
the conventional Hindi terms. For instance, the month of Asvina, in the Jaipur records,is called "dsoj"and the month
Kartikais called "kati"in the records, but I shall use the names Asvina and Kdrtikahere.

252
sionedportraitsby specificpainters:fromthe artistRam,on oneoccasion,SahibRamon another,and
fromthe artistGovindramon a thirdoccasion.35 In addition,they sometimespresentedportraitsas
gifts to their sovereign husbandsand fathers:between I804 and i806, the Vikawat36andJadam37Ranis
bothgavethe rulerportraitsof himselfandof malecourtiers.38
Within the largercontext of the court, there was nothing unusual about women buying or giving
awaymen'sportraits.Rulers,nobles,officials,evenservants- in short,everyone- collectedportraits.39
The gift of a portrait from the ruler (usually of the ruler or his ancestors) was an honor extended to
many valued subjects, and the Maharajasoften rewardedtheir queens with portraits of themselves,
their predecessors,and their heirs. Thus, MaharaniChundavat, for instance, was one among several
nobles who received MaharajaMadho Simh's portrait in indmin I763.40
At Mewar, there seems to have been a particularlystrong imperative that the queens see and value
portraits of the kingdom's rulers. A file in the 1891 inventory of the Mewar royal collection is labeled
or "women'spalace."The file providesthe numbers,prices,anddescriptionsof 256 paint-
"zannad"
ings that were assigned to Mewar'squeens: every one of these paintings was a portrait of a male ruler.
With few exceptions, such as a portrait of Jodhpur's MaharajaTakhat Simh, they depicted Mewar
mahdranasin a variety of poses and settings: standing with a flower in one hand, sitting on a throne,
listeningto musicians,watchingthe moonfroma roof,playingholt,enjoyinggamesof chaupar,
smok-
ing huqqds,andshootingtigersandboar,to namea few examples.
Thesepaintingswereprobablyprovidedto the zandndratherthanpurchasedby its women.For
one, the strikingly homogeneous contents of the file - all portraits of men - suggest the workings of
a single, organizing point of view, even though the Rajput zandndwas infamously not a single, har-
monious administrative unit. Queens maintained separatestaff, and the ambitious among them vied
for power, often in the form of their king's attention or their sons' advancement.Each woman owned
her own land, wealth, and material goods, and not all were devoted to the king's best interest, with
many favoring strong ties to their natal states. It is difficult to imagine that Mewar'squeens would

35 Maharani Chandravat bought a portrait of her husband by the artist Ramji in 1780 (Magha, vadi 11,samvat I837).
MaharaniChundavat'smother purchasedpaintings by Sahib Ram in I765 (Bhddrapada,sudi i, samvatI822). A Rathor
queen bought portraits of her husband (the king) and his predecessorsby Govindram in I80o (Kdrtika,vadi 11,sanmvat
I858).
36 The Vikawat Rani was MaharajaJagat Simh's first wife. She presented twenty-seven paintings to the court between
186I-63); these included two portraits of her husband, and four male nobles, Jiva
I804-06 (Vaisakha, vadi i, samnvat
Raja Palival (2), Thakur Syo Das (i), and Thakur Syo Das's son SyamhbhuDas (I).
37 My entries on this transactionare incomplete. During the same period (on Srdvana,sudi 5, samvatI86I-63), MaJadam
gave o00 paintings to the court, thirty-nine of which are described. Twelve of the thirty-nine were portraits which
pictured, among others, MaharajaMadho Simh, SawaiJayaSimh, and RajaGopal Das, the ruler of the queen mother's
natal state Karauli.
38 In both these examples, the portraits seem to have been assembled from outside sources, as earlierentries in the Jaipur
suratkhdnarecordsdo not mention their purchase.
39 Aitken, "The Practiced Eye," 152-202.
40
MdrgafSrsa,vadi i, samivat1820. The entry appearswithin a larger list of eight paintings that MaharajaMadho Simh
presented in "indm"("rewards")to a variety of his courtiers. Of these eight paintings, seven were portraits of Madho
Simh and one was a picture of a woman. Here, the records treat the Rani simply as one among a group of honored
courtiers.

253
have shared a single store of portraits, particularlygiven the comparatively independent and varied
tastes of their earlierJaipur counterparts;instead, Mewar'szandndfile probably comprised paintings
that the kingdom's rulersprovided the zandnd.4I
In general, then, queens appearto have been following royalvolition and obeying cultural norms,
as well as (presumably)satisfying personaldesiresin their promotion of men's portraits.But what did
it mean forwomen to embracepracticesthat promotedmen's representationand their own elision from
the visual record?

II.
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF PORTRAITURE

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Rajput rulerswere encouraging a virtual industry of portrait
making.42A brief consideration of what portraits signified and how they functioned at the Rajput
courts may help explain both what it meant for women to trade in men's portraits and why women
did not have themselves portrayed.
Portraitsserved a vital function as gifts.43Rulers, nobles, officers,even servantsgave one another
portraits in the dozens to signify loyalty and allegiance. ShahJahan, for instance, was wont to send
vanquished enemies his portrait to elicit the loyalty he would henceforwardexpect from them.44In a
more amicable gesture, Mewar'sMaharanaAmar Simh II (I698-I7I0) gave a dozen portraitsof him-
self to Amber's SawaiJaya Simh (1692-1743) when the two rulers joined their families in marriage
and'theirkingdoms in an alliance against the Mughals.45The paths in which portraitscirculated thus
followed lines of allegiance, and the Jaipur recordsshow that queens actively participatedin this net-
work of exchange. Without portraitsof themselves to give away,however,their participationwas lim-
ited: Rajput women could use portraits to accept but not forge allegiance.
In addition to its utility as a political gift, the portraitfunctioned as a genealogical record.Accord-
ing to court archives,groups of portraits were stored in genealogical sequence.46Rulers occasionally

41 The court recordsfrom which I am drawing my conclusions reflect royal concerns and reveal only an aspect of what
may have been a broaderand slightly different picture of women as viewers and patrons. Relevant are Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak'sremarkson archivalsources in "TheRani of Simur,"in Europeand its Others,vol. i, Proceedingsof theEssex
Conferenceon the Sociologyof Literature,July 1984, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Diana Loxley
(Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), I46: "As the historical record is made up, who is dropped out, when, and
why?.... The Rani [of Simur] emerges only when she is needed in the space of imperial production." One might
describe the recordsI examine here as belonging to the space of Mewar and Jaipur monarchalproduction.
42 Aitken, "The Practiced Eye," 152-202.
43 Ibid., I52-250.
44 See, for instance, 'InayatKhan, TheShahJahan Nama of'Inayat Khan:An AbridgedHistoryof theMughal Emperor Shah
Jahan, Compiled by His Librarian,trans.A.R. Fuller, ed. W.E. Begley and Z.A. Desai (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
I990), I85 and I92.
45 Three of the portraits were, in fact, group portraits and included the figures of Jaya Simh and Jodhpur's Ajit Simh.
Aitken, "The Practiced Eye," I70-180.
46 One of the categories in the Mewar inventory (vol. I, 208-226, nos. I-207) is labeled "piravalya"("generations")and
contains paintings of Mewar rulers ordered by lineage. Lists of rulers are generally written in chronological order
in the Jaipur suratkhana records as well. For instance, Mughal rulers, in the earliest pages I've studied (VS

254
gave one another and their subjects portraits arrangedby lineage,47and sometimes receivedportraits
of the ruling line from their artists, particularlyin connection with their accessions.48
Royal women shared in this concern with lineage. The zandna file in the Mewar inventory was
orderedinto a loose genealogical sequence,opening with portraitsof MaharanasKumbha (1433-1468),
Amar Simh (I698-17I0), and SangramSimh (I7I0-I734) and concluding, aftera few disorderedpages,
with later rulers such as Bhim Simh (1778-1828). This logic of organization cannot be said to have
encouraged a kind of access to the paintings specific to women, but suggests instead that Mewar's
queens were encouragedto look at portraits, as men did, with an eye to lineage. The theme of geneal-
ogy also surfacesin the Jaipur painting recordson women, where, on one occasion, MaharajaPratap
Simh (I778-1803) was recordedas having given his Rathor Rani six portraits that traceda genealog-
ical line from himself to his illustrious ancestorJaya Simh (1692-1743).
At the Rajput courts, histories were typically structuredaroundgenealogies, and portraitlineages
were often used to illustrate the story of the kingdom's past. When James Tod visited Mewarduring
the early nineteenth century, he noted a portrait gallery where the Maharanawould recite his family
history, pointing to each ruler in turn as he described his life and deeds.49Almost eighty years later,
MaharanaFateh Simh lent a group of chronologically arrangedMughal portraits to the late-nine-
teenth-century Mewar court historian Syamaldasas a resourcefor his four-volume history, the Vzr
Vinod.5
The conventions of Rajput portraits clearly encouraged their use as records of the past. In the
Mughal fashion, rulersand nobles were portrayedin profile, often against a solid backgroundof color,
an efficient format for rendering faces recognizable. Painters relied on such clearly individuated
featuresas complexions, styles of facialhair, unusual nose contours,and heavyor angularchins to iden-
tify their subjects in summaryform. Though the Rajput taste for stylization could threaten to under-
mine efforts to individualize subjects, royal and elite faces were codified, and looked the same no
matter who had painted them. Their repetition in portrait after portrait created an effect of authen-
ticity, so that these faces became people's identities in the visual record,regardlessof their accuracy.
It seems claims for the accuracyof these portraits were made, for Tod wrote that the portraits in
the Maharana'sportraitgallery reproduced"exactheights," and "everybodily peculiarity, whether of
complexion or form."rIHowever, resemblancewas not the only essential featureof portraits. Portraits
also depended on a close association with names, which were often provided in inscriptions. The ten-

176I-62/I704-5 CE), are listed by order of lineage under the cursoryheading "Humayun etc.," i.e. paintings of first
Humayun, then Akbar, Jahangir, and Awrangzeb.
47 For example, in VS I822/1765 CE and VS 1842/1785CE, MaharajaPratapSimh gave the "phireigz"(firangi)in Calcutta
paintings of himself and of his immediate predecessorson the Jaipur throne.
48 Andrew Topsfield mentions a series of portraits of maharanadsthat the Mewar painter Sahaji presented to Maharana
ArnSimh shortly after his accession. See Andrew Topsfield, PaintingsfromRajasthanin theNational Galleryof Victoria
(Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, I980), I25.
49 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or The Centraland WesternRajpootStates of India, I829, 3 vols., ed.
William Crooke (London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1920), 358.
50 Mewar inventory, 754-756. Syamaldasoften described large painted court scenes to supplement his accounts of events
at Mewar. See KavirajaSyamaldas, Vir Vinod,2 vols. (Udaipur: Rajayantralaya,i886).
5I Tod, Annals and Antiquities,358.

255
dency to label faceswith names meant that for many viewers a name could conjurea face, a facea name.
The relationshipthat came to subsist between namesand portraitsis perhapsmost provocativelyillus-
trated by a late-eighteenth-century Mewar scroll that combined text and image to relate the king-
dom's history.52Following the traditional structure of a genealogy, the scroll punctuated scenes of
events associatedwith particularkings with long lists of names.These lists wereparalleledin the illus-
trations by rows of portraits,each labeled with a name and each slightly different from the next. None
of these portraitswas basedon physical fact; they servedas visual denotations to supplement the names
of long past kings.
If the recordsI have presented here tell the whole story, then women, by patronizing men's por-
traits and not their own, chose to promote this visual history of male power while remaining outside
it. One might arguethat the courtly aesthetic of the time, which favoredlong, flowing lines, abstracted
forms, and archetypalideals led women to eschew the irregularitiesof individual forms. Or perhaps,
one might suggest, niceties dictated women not be shown fat or poxed. However, like pardah, such
obstacles to a woman's portrayalcould have been surmounted by inscriptions, and, indeed, were sur-
mounted in a few exceptional paintings that I will discuss later. The lack of women's names in asso-
ciation with most pictures of women was thereforeprofoundly telling. This lack was paralleledat the
courts by naming practicesthat tended to obfuscatewomen's identities. Court recordssuch asJaipur's
DasturQaumwarandsuratkhdnaaccountsdo not use Rajput women's firstnames.Though concubines,
dancers, and maid servants bore proper names, Rajput women were known by the names of their
fathers'clans: Rathorani, Sisodyani, Bhatyani, and so on. Often more than one woman by the same
clan name gained eminence in the zandna at one time, making it impossible to determine which
Rathoranior Sisodyania recordis alluding to. Women of a lower rank,though named, rarelyachieved
sufficient notoriety for their names to acquire lasting fame; they certainly do not figure more fre-
quently in court texts or receiveany more individualized treatment in court paintings than their royal
mistresses.
In general, then, court texts, customs, and portraits tended to leave the names of Rajput women
outside the historical record.53Thus I suggest that the paucity of women's portraitswas at least partly
a result of the portrait's function as a tool of male diplomacy and as a visual recordof male history.
Though many elite women were politically active, they did not occupy the public positions at court,
nordid they cultivate the kinds of official,political relationshipsthat portraitswere explicitly designed
to representand serve. The elision of women's names and faces in most paintings may have been akin
to their elision in texts, a function of the customaryelision of women from the official, public record.
It is worth pointing out a contrasting approachto the portrayalof men and women in the Pahari
region. Severalpaintings attributed to the Guler painter Nainsukh picture a woman who appearsto
be a queen, bearing many of the thematic, compositional, and emblematic prerogatives of rule.54

52 A large portion of this scroll is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. no. 07965 (IS).
53 One might argue that paintings, which picture a king with a woman under his arm, may intend the woman to re-
present a particularqueen or courtesan. If intended, such a means of identifying women - through their relationships
to kings - would likewise parallel naming conventions that identified women by their relationships to their fathers.
Such identifications cease to be very informative for posterity.
54 For two of these paintings and more information on the group, see Desai, Life at Court,cat. nos. 67, 68.

256
Fig. i Fig. 2
MaharanaArl Simh in a garden pavilion. Ruler in his zandna (detail).
Mewar, ca. I760s. Jodhpur, first quarter of the
Private collection. nineteenth century.
Collection of MaharajaGajai Singhji,
Umaid Bhavan Palace,
no. I360.

Fig. 3
Woman on a swing.
Uniara, mid-eighteenth century.
Collection of Kumar Sangram Singh
of Nawalgarh, Jaipur, KSS I4.
Fig. 4
Chokha, attr. MaharanaBhim Simh
of Udaipur and companions.
Mewar, early nineteenth century.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Gift of Paul F. Walter in memory
of Mark Kaminski, AC I993.I91.2
(Photo ? 2002 Museum Associates/
LACMA).

Fig. 5
Detail from an illustrated letter
to MaharanaMan Simh.
Jodhpur, early nineteenth century.
RajasthanState Archives, Bikaner.
Fig. 6
Mialalotar.
MaharanaBhim Simh and his Pasavan
AsiuajiSafitidasji.
Mewar, 1788.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Fig. 7
Gangaram.
Scene from a zannad.
Mewar, eighteenth century.
Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi
(Photo: Enrico Isacco
Photographic Library).
Although she is not clearly individualized, inscriptions on two paintings identify her as the Princess
of Basohli and wife of Raja GovardhanChand of Guler. Note the absence of a first name, but also the
possibilities for portraying a woman without clearly individualizing her: Nainsukh associated her
with a regional landscape and palace setting and showed her to be powerful and respected. By con-
trast, the very few Rajasthanipaintings of women that were inscribed with names pictured women as
subordinatesin the company of their husbands or lovers, not in their own right.
It is my conjecturethat Nainsukh's portrayalof the princess reflecteda local view of portraitureas
less strictly harnessedto royalprerogatives.CertainlyNainsukh's portraitstranscendedconcernswith
the trappings of sovereign authority. Unlike the Rajasthaniportraits of men discussed so far, Nain-
sukh depicted his patron, Balwafit Simh of Jasrota,55as touchingly human: wrapped in a blanket or
shawl by his fireside,being shaved, scribbling in a notebook on a chdrpdibeforehis tent, and dwarfed,
in several drawings and paintings, by the tall, sheer walls of his palace.6 These were views of a king
that would have been so humbling as to have been anathema in Rajasthan,and it is possible that a
more expansive, more personal, and less politically scripted approachto portraitureopened the genre
to a wider variety of uses and a wider variety of subjects, including elite women.
Certainly the pictorial conventions of Guler and Rajasthaniportraitswere significantly different.
Where Balwant Simh often looked face forwardin his portraits, as if trusting his viewers to appreci-
ate him at vulnerable, contemplative moments, Rajasthani rulers and nobles never dropped their
masks of power in their portraits. One can well imagine a mistress gazing fondly on the image of
Balwanit Simh leaning out a window,57 but it is difficult to see how Rajasthani portraits anticipate view-
ers intimate with their subjects.
Indeed, the conventions of Rajasthani portraits code for the viewer an unemotional, highly formal
relationship with those they picture. Indefinite backgrounds place those portrayed in a world seem-
ingly remote from the viewer's. Rulers, set apart by their halos, often appear in the company of courtiers
whose gestures of obeisance and respect enjoin the viewer to regard the king with a like sentiment.
Nobles appear without the emblems of rule, but no less formally. Most are depicted in profile, a con-
ventional (though not essential) means of distinguishing nobles from commoners. Unlike minor, often
marginal figures, such as servants, acrobats, musicians, or holy men, who tend to look forward with
faces distorted by laughter, grimacing, song, or exertion, in portraits and court scenes the faces of the
elite bear no expressions, do not engage the viewer's gaze, and do not encourage personal, intimate
responses from their viewers.

55 B.N. Goswamy is the principal authority on Nainsukh and has published extensively on the artist and his portrayals
of MaharajaBalwant Simrh.See B.N. Goswamy, Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painterfrom a Small Hill-State,
Artibus Asiae Publishers Supplementum 41 (Zurich: Museum Rietberg Zurich, I997); EberhardFischer and B.N.
Goswamy, Indian Miniatures:Paintings by Nainsukh of Guler, Worksfrom the Pahari Regionof the i8th Centuryin the
Collectionof the MuseumRietbergZurich(Zurich: Museum Rietberg Zurich, I999).
56 Reproduced in Goswamy, Nainsukh of Guler,cat. nos. 74, 73, 79, and 45-49 respectively and belonging, respectively,
to the following collections: Museum Rietberg Zurich, acc. no. RVI I552; Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, acc. no.
33.IIo and acc. no. 33.Io08;Indian Museum, Calcutta, acc. no. 14149/655and acc. no. I4145/662; Government Museum
and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, acc. no. 419 (25) and acc. no. 419 (24).
57 Ibid., cat. no. 78. W. G. Archer Collection, Museum Rietberg Zurich.

26i
 It seems then that women can only be assumed to have approachedportraits as men did, as sub-
jects of a kingdom oriented towardsthe facesof power, consciousof history and the respectdue author-
ity. Yet surely women did not look with a formal, distanced eye at portraits of their sons, husbands,
and lovers. Many women would have collected portraits for partially sentimental reasons.While the
Karauli(Jadam) queens at Jaipur owned portraits of their husbandsand sons, who were the reigning
monarchsofJaipur, they also owned pictures of their fathersand brothers.To the latter, at least, they
owed more an emotional than a political allegiance, and these portraitswould have probablysatisfied
not a subject gaze so much as a fond eye.58Portraitsof husbandswere undoubtedly intended to evoke
fond thoughts as well. Attesting to the romantic possibilities of portraits, DhandsriRdgini was typi-
cally illustrated by the picture of a young woman painting a portrait of her absent lover as a way of
remembering and bringing him closer. Poets also used portraits as incitements to love. When one of
KesavaDas's heroinessees her lover in a portrait,the immediacy of the image makesher feel "asthough
he had caught her forearm!"59
Many of the Jaipur ranzsare not mentioned in the suratkhinarecords,60and those who are do not
seem to have engaged with the painting department on a systematic basis. Instead, their transactions
were intermittent, possibly indicating that the customs surroundingportraiturewere not obligatory,
but were motivated by personal sentiment. Portraitsmay have offered a means of expressing feeling
over and above convention. Still, it is unlikely that political allegianceswere ever wholly distinct from
personalfeelings, as formality never stood in clear opposition to intimacy at the Rajput courts. In an
early-nineteenth-centuryletter, which I shall discuss at greater length later, a woman addressedher
beloved, the Jodhpur rulerMan Simh, with an interminable list of his titles, mingled with quite for-
mal endearments. She compared him to the moon, but so might a court poet, and she called him
"MaharajaDhirajaMaharaja"without failing to omit a single one of his io8 "Sris."She expressedher
love, in short, with the words of a respectful subject.
At this level, however,the problemof responseto portraitscomes down to the relationshipbetween
a highly codified tradition of royalportraits, which partly serve to unify viewers in their allegiance to
a sovereign, and a wide variety of individual viewers, who have more or less distinct relationships to
their king. Feminist scholars have noted the unpredictability of individual women's responses to
images, even those images that engage powerful sexual dynamics.6'Ultimately, what is raisedhere is

58 It should be recalled, however, that a queen's male relatives were crucial to her backing and power at her husband's
court. Thus such portrait mementos can not be said to have been entirely apolitical.
59 Kesava Das, The Rasikapriya,63.
60 The Jaipur suratkhdnarecordsinclude entries on paintings that royal women gave to the court, but had not purchased
directly from the court, making it clear that much of what women collected they collected through their own chan-
nels. That a woman's name does not appearin the suratkhdnarecordsdoes not mean that she did not patronize or col-
lect paintings.
6' Natalie Harris Bluestone, for instance, has explored the notion of a "femalegaze" by looking at women's responses to
a relief attributed to the female sculptor Properziade' Rossi (1490-I530). Though she believes men and women to be
influenced by the notion of the sculptor's gender, she finds women's responses to de' Rossi's relief to have diverged
enormously, belying any notion of an essential, quantifiable female gaze. See Natalie Harris Bluestone, "The Female
Gaze: Women's Interpretations of the Life and Work of ProperziaDe'Rossi, RenaissanceSculptor," in DoubleVision:
on Genderand the Visual Arts, ed. Natalie Harris Bluestone (London and Toronto: Associated University
Perspectives

262
as much a reception as a feminist problem that could be addressedfrom the point of view of many dif-
ferent kinds of viewer. Pictures of men on horsesor elephants, standing on a terrace,sitting and smok-
ing, depict elite men in a highly formal, codified manner. They do not seem to invite a specifically
sexed gaze and do not structure informal perspectives for their viewers. Evidently, they are not
influenced by their female viewers' sometimes intimate relationshipsto the men they picture, but nei-
ther arethey influenced by other personalrelationships. Instead, their conventions areso fixed as to be
almost neutralized, so that they seem neither to encourage nor absolutely to reject their use for pur-
poses over and above those of documentation and legitimation.

III.
THE CHUNDAVAT RANI

Though paintings do not visually acknowledge women as subjects and viewers, women patronsclearly
played a part in shaping pictorial traditions.62Some of these women, though excised from the visual
record,shapedpolitics and their kingdoms as well. Thus, gazing on images of beauty'spower and allure
were actual queens wielding political power that was often based, not only on sexual connections, but
on family, allies, wealth, savvy, and seniority. A remarkableexample was the Chundavat Rani, who
ruled as Queen Regent ofJaipur in the late eighteenth century.
By far the most powerful of the Jaipur queens mentioned in the suratkhdanrecords, Maharani
Chundavatwas the fifth wife of MaharajaMadho Simh, and the mother of his sons, PratapSimh and
Prthvi Simh.63The lives of Rajput women were ruled by politics, and the MaharaniChundavat,whose
marriagehad been arrangedby the Maharanaof Mewar,was no exception.64The Maharani'sfatherwas
a powerful Mewar noble, and her union with Madho Simh provided the Mewar ruler a critical coun-
terbalance to a marriage alliance between Madho Simh's elder brother and the daughter of another
important Mewar noble. Succession to the Jaipur throne and, ultimately, war between the two states
were at stake. When Madho Simh died in 1768 CE, her sons were still in their minority and the
MaharaniChundavatbecameJaipur'sQueen Regent. No longer a pawn of state affairs,she now became
a force behind them.
The Queen's father, RawatJaswant Simh of Deogarh, lived in Jaipur during the regency to help
back his daughter and advise her on matters of state.65With seeming consternation, historians write

Presses, I995), 38-64. Janet Bergstrom, CameraObscura20-21 (1989): 98, writing about female spectatorship in the
context of film, admits "I can talk about the ways in which textual systems are organized in Akerman's films, but I
cannot hope to predict any given individual's 'reception' of this 'information' - what is internalized, how, when,
according to what associations, with what degree of affect, etc."
62 For speculations on female viewers looking at and influencing the shape of pictures of idealized women, see Molly
Emma Aitken, "Spectatorshipand Femininity in Kangra Style Painting," in Representing the Body: GenderIssuesin
Indian Art, ed. Vidya Dehejia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997), 82-102.
63 Accounts differ on whether she was Prthvi Simh's mother or simply his guardian.
64 Joshi, Purdahand Polygamy,46.
65 Art historians have often pointed to particularrelationships or connections between courts to explain incidents ofpic-
torial influence. If there is one lesson to be learned from the many entries on pictorial gifts in the archives and from
the history of relationships, it is that connections were many and virtually constant. I believe the question is not why

263
that the Queen placed an "elephantdriver"named Firoz in the position of prime minister, and a mere
"trooper"at the head of the army.Writing in the earlyand mid-nineteenth century, the British agents
James Tod and J.S. Brooke turned to rumors to describe the Queen's reign.66According to Tod, the
Queen was "ofan ambitious and resolute character,"but was "degradedby her paramour"- the "ele-
phant-driver."67The Queen'schoice of paramour,he wrote, "disgusted"the chief nobles, who revolted,
driving the Queen to hire the support of a mercenaryarmy.68Both Tod and Brooke understood the
Queen to have been Prthvi Simh's step-mother, not his mother, and suggested that she poisoned the
boy to free the throne for her real son, PratapSimh.69More recent historiansdismiss the Queen on the
grounds of gender: the Mewar historian Syamaldasnoted that the regency led to bad management,
while Jadunath Sarkarhas more recently concluded that "aminority is a perilous time among a proud
and intractableracelike the Rajputs, who cannot tolerate a woman's rule."70There is little concretely
known about the Queen Regent to counter such attitudes. A mid-nineteenth-century Rajasthanihis-
tory of Jaipur, the Kachhawanri Vanshavali,offers a brief summary of events, but includes no more
than a passing referenceto the Queen.71
Women were partly responsible for their place - or non-place - in such histories. VarshaJoshi's
Purdahand Polygamygoes a long way toward redressingthe traditional silence on women's contribu-
tions to Rajput history, amply demonstrating Rajput women's bravery,influence, and political apti-
tude. But as Joshi herself points out, Rajput women could be among the most staunch defendersof
their culture's values; they often placed their strength behind, not in opposition to, Rajput patriar-
chal norms. In the realmof painting patronage,too, women seem to haveparticipatedactively in what
appearto havebeen highly patriarchalcustoms. The rdnisofJaipurheld wealth, status, and, to a greater
or lesserdegree, power. Yet, as we have seen, they did not commission portraitsto advertisetheir posi-
tions and promote their names. By patronizing paintings of ideal women, the rdnzsaccepted and con-
tributed to Rajput norms of femininity. This is nowheremore evident than in the case of the Chunda-
vat Regent. Her husband beforeher and her sons, even during her regency, had their portraits made,
stored, and disseminated in considerablenumbers, yet she herself did not enter her face in the histor-
ical record,taking her place in neither the pictorial nor the textual genealogies. Instead, she collected
and gave away portraits of men, embracing a genre that painted over her own role in the
instate's his-
tory and command. Thus, she helped renderherself anonymous to posterity.

paintings and artists from different courts sometimes influenced one another, but why, so often, they did not. Thus,
for instance, I think it is noteworthy that there is no clearpictorial evidence of the Deogarh Rawat'spresence in Jaipur
nor of his daughter's presence.
66 J.S. Brooke, PoliticalHistoryoftheStateofJaipur(Calcutta: Office of the Superintendentof Government
Printing, I868).
67 Tod, Annals and Antiquities,136I.
68 Ibid.
SeeJoshi, Purdahand Polygamy,I03.
69 Tod, Annals and Antiquities,
1361.
70 Jadunath Sarkar,A HistoryofJaipur,c. I503-I938, rev. ed. (Hyderabad,India: Orient Longman, 1984), 259. It is difficult
to judge the truth of such statements. Regencies had long been the Rajput state's answerto minorities, and the nobles
must have deemed them tolerable. J.S. Brooke acknowledges that regencies were considered far preferableto allow-
ing one noble to gain ascendancyover his rivals, a situation that could quickly divide a kingdom.
71 Syam Singh Ratnawat, Kachhawanri Vanshavali(A genealogical account of the Kachhawa nobility) (Jaipur: Center
for Rajasthan Studies, 1981).

264
 Comparedto other queens, she seems to have commissioned few portraitsof her husband, only two
in fact, both purchasedin 1763. Her taste seems to have run more towardsportraitsof Muslim emper-
ors. A forty-page album of "pdtsah(s)"came into her possession in I773,72 and included portraits of
Jahangir, Awrangzeb, Azam Shah, and a Tughluk emperor.A picture of a young ShahJahan was also
included among the twenty-nine paintings she received from the royal stores earlierthat year.73One
can only wonder what these portraitsmay have meant to her. Perhapsthe Tughluks and Mughals were
her models for rule; perhapsshe collected these portraits to present as gifts to visiting dignitaries; or
perhaps her interest in these portraits gave a masculine touch to her "image"(unseen) in the imagi-
nations of the men she ruled and rivaled.
While the image of power in her paintings was male, the image of femininity in the works she col-
lected reflected none of her power. As mentioned earlier,she purchaseda forty-nine-page illustrated
Rasikapya in 1778In77.addition, most of the twenty-nine paintings sent to her in 1773were of women
whose sole business was pleasure and reproduction. In several paintings, women approachfaqirs,
presumably for charms and prayers to overcome infertility. The heroines of other paintings sit on
swings, become intoxicated with wine, stand amidst fields of flowers, ride boats, listen to music,
celebrate Gangor, and watch tamasdsin the palace. Women of the zanandwould have enjoyed such
activities. Jaipur recordsof the Jadam Rani's activities, for instance, describeher trip to a famous local
garden, meeting the crown prince at the Amber Fort, riding a boat, and buying copious jewels and
clothing.74However, pleasurewas by no means the soe aim of a Queen Regent like Chundavatji.
For the Queen Regent, identification with the desirablewomen of poems and paintings can only
have been partial. Tellingly, the women in her paintings were not queens. The recordsexplicitly clas-
sify a number of them as "sdhzvjddz(s),""khatrdnz(s),"and "musalmdni(s)." "Musalmdni" simply means
Muslim girl, but "sAhzvjdzd" (sahibzadi)roughly translatesas "young lady," and "khatrdnf"
can mean
either a wealthy merchant'sdaughter or a Rajput girl. These are the perfect romantic heroines, pre-
sumably elite, moneyed, beautiful, and leisured, but without a clearpurpose in life other than to lux-
uriate in pleasure.They do not pretend to expressanything of women's lives outside the games of love.
Taking the artful poses of seduction, the women described in the Rani's paintings picture roles and
types, not people.
With her taste for paintings of women on display, it is ironic that the Chundavat Rani is a pres-
ence for the art historian only as a pair of eyes, not as the subject of a painting. During their lifetimes,
elite women like the ChundavatRani would have made themselves felt primarily through their eyes
allowed women to look into the marddnd75and watch
and influence. Screenedwindows in the zandnda

72 Chaitra, vadi 10, sanmvat

1830 (1773 CE)
73 Pausa, sudi i, sanmvat
i830 (I773 CE)
74 Dastur Qaumwar,RajasthanState Archives, Bikaner.
75 Joshi, Purdah and Polygamy,I75, writes that "The apartments [of zananas] were constructed in such a manner that
each of them could look out onto the ceremonial functions held in the mardanapalace. A common hall withjharokhas
covered by the jalis (pierced stone screen) carved in the stone were constructed for the female inmates; this was con-
structed opposite to the hall reservedfor ceremonial functions." Another excellent source for basic information on the
zanand is A ZENANA: Scenesand Recollections, video, dirs. Roger Sandall and Jayasinhji Jhala, 1982. In the film, a
singer from the Jhala court of Dhrangadhra, Gujarat, recalls her visit tojaiselmer and remembers how the Maharani,
looking through binoculars, spied the approachof her caravanfrom an upper window of her zandna,a vivid reminder

265
men's activities, both from their own apartmentsand from a common, screened hall. At Jaipur, the
Hawa Mahal provided a looming wall of pierced, screen windows through which royal women could
watch tamasdas held in the city streets below. These were not powerless eyes: the queens had influence
enough to act on what they saw. The king, of course, had free access to the zanana, but it is difficult
to say how his subjects felt under the presenceof so many unseen, but not impotent, women's eyes.
The British appear to have found the experience of negotiating with invisible queens acutely
uncomfortable. According to the historian Robert Stern, the Jaipur Queen Regent Bhatyani, a suc-
cessor to Maharani Chundavat, pointedly used her invisibility to "pursue a policy of non-cooperation"
with the British.76 The British retaliated by spreading rumors of sexual intrigue in the Rani's quar-
ters.77 When the seventeenth-century Italian adventurer Manucci entered the Mughal harem blind-
folded, he had "his hand softly bitten and drawn to unseen breasts,"an experienceof somewhat help-
less passivity that he does not seem to have found at all unpleasant.78 The Indian aristocracy probably
felt more comfortable with an arrangement familiar to them from birth. Perhaps because it was so
unremarkable, few Indian aristocrats have described the zandanad as experienced from the outside. Yet
a fairly recent account - from 1931 - conveys a strong sense of stunned discomfort:

We were sitting like idiots in these chairs wondering how these women in purdah were going to
see us, when suddenly we saw this big satranji (carpet) with holes in it coming towards us. The
carpetstopped about six feet awayfrom us and we could see eyes at all these holes! We didn't know
where to look! Then after ten minutes or so the carpetwent back.79

Paintings did not recognizethe authority that could underlie a queen'sgaze. Nor, as we saw, did men's
portraits accommodate women's intimate looking. However, the fact of women looking at men - in
portraits and in person - was an important theme in Rajput court culture. The royal darbar and the

that women in the zanana had access to screened windows looking outside the palace, allowing them some view of
activities in the streets and beyond.
76 Robert Stern, The Cat and the Lion:Jaipur State in the British Raj (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1988), 70-71.
Stern writes: "The regency was, of course, ideally situated in the zenanato pursue a policy of non-cooperation with its
new protector. The zenana'soperations and its principals, and many of their agents, were literally hidden from British
sight, much less scrutiny, behind the palacepurdah- as was the knowledge that can be power, hidden. In effect, the
ladies of the regency used the purdahto bar the Company's access to its protectorate: to any knowledge of its work-
ing, or of the roles that were crucial to its maintenance, or vulnerable to British interferenceand non-interference."
77 Ibid., 70-73. Literally in the dark, the British fell back on rumors of sexual intrigue remarkablylike those Tod had
told about the Chundavat Rani. While, according to Tod, the Chundavat Rani was said to sleep with her low-caste
diwan, the British intimated that her successor, the Bhatyaniji Rani was engaged in a menagea trois with both her
prime minister, who was also "of low extraction,"and Rupa Bundharin, the late Maharaja'sconcubine. It seems what
the British did not know, they imagined to be foul. Hoping to bring a visible male rulerto the throne, they attempted,
according to Stern, to fill the minds ofJaipur's nobles with an uneasy sense of what was going on in there (the zandna),
beyond their apprehension. Interestingly, the nobility did not react as expected, and the British strategy failed.
78 Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor or Mogul India:I653-i708, trans. William Irvine (Calcutta: Editions Indian, I965),
vol. 2, 329.
79 Charles Allen and SharadaDwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes(New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1984), 189. The
account is from a Muslim prince, the son of the Palampur Nawab.

266
custom of public darshanmade the visual experience of the king a vital element of kingly ritual. The
dissemination of royal portraits expanded this experience of seeing the king to encourage a kind of
darbarin absentia. Paralleling the many scenes of kings with their nobles that illustrate this basic
theme were similar paintings that depicted women surroundingkings, often in darbar-likecomposi-
tions. Curiously, the Jaipur and Mewar recordsI have examined do not mention examples of these
zananapaintings in women's possession. Nevertheless, for our purposes, the considerablenumber of
paintings that show kings in their zandndsis evidence that the king's public image partly depended
on an idealized view of his relationships to the court's female elite. The practice of women looking at
paintings of their king was a corollaryto women in paintings looking at their king.

IV.
THE SEXUALIZED KING

Rajput rulers were conventionally represented in heroic guises as brave hunters, liberal and lavish
entertainers,generous patrons of the arts, powerful sovereigns, and lovers. The theme of the king as a
lover originated in Mughal paintings,80but was probably spurredby the strong emphasis on sringara
rasa(the erotic mood) in court poetry and devotional literatureand practice.Eroticism was an implicit
theme in relatively formal assembly scenes of women flanking the king and explicit when the king
was pictured making love with a favoredmistress or with his women bathing, playing holi, boating,
or enjoying a garden. Such paintings not only acknowledged a female presenceat the court, they made
that presence a powerful device in the construction of the king's authority, an authority that partly
derived from the king's ostensive virtues, among them virility, beauty, and artfulnessas a lover.
Like other types of portraits, contextual portraits of kings amidst women were primarily about
power, and consistently showed kings to be in command of what must, in reality, have been a poten-
tially volatile environment. Thus, for the most part, when a king appearedin a painting beside a par-
ticular wife or mistress, she sat to one side of his carpet, often held her hands in a gesture of respect,
and could be diminutive to an almost symbolic degree. In largerzandnascenes, centrality frequently
served to express the king's supremacy. A composition found at many courts located the king at its
center,framedwithin a garden,and surroundedby femaleattendants.81This centralityheld to the point
of hyperbole when the king appearedmore than once in a painting, as in Howard Hodgkin's visually
seductive image of Amar Simh II in his zandnd,which placed the Maharanathree times on a central

80 For several examples and a discussion of this theme, see Desai, Life at Court,86-95; catalogue entries 70-72 provide
three excellent Mughal examples. There is also a striking similarity between the ways Rajput kings are eroticized and
the way the Nayaka rulersofVijayanagarawere eroticized; there may have been a connection between these two as well.
8' A well-known seventeenth-century example is the painting of MaharaoJagat Simh of Kotah in a garden, ca. I66o
("Knellington Collection"), reproduced most recently in Steven Kossak, Indian Court Painting, I6th-l9th Century
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), cat. no. 29. A few eighteenth-century examples are a scene of Amar
Simh II with ladies in a garden, ca. 1705, and a painting of MaharanaAri Simh with his rdni and ladies in a pavilion,
ca. I765, both in the Collection of Gopi Krishna and Vinod Krishna Kanoria, and reproduced in Desai, Life at Court,
cat. nos. 73 and 74 respectively; and MaharajaTakht Simh with a queen/mistress and ladies in a garden, ca. I800, pri-
vate collection, reproducedin PratapadityaPal, CourtPaintingsofIndia, i6th -Igth Centuries(New York: Navin Kumar,
1983), fig. R44.

267
axis in three moments of pleasure.82 Employing a similar composition over a hundred years later, a
Jodhpur artist positioned MaharajaMan Simh three times at the commanding center of his zandnd,
surroundedby identical women dressedfor faradprnzimdin the same white garb.83
Power and powerlessness were also functions of individuality in these paintings. Specific rulers
appeared with individual faces and names that were sometimes inscribed in the margins or on the verso.
Beside them, the women of the court almost entered into history; by contrast, however, they were
neither individualized nor named. Though significant differences in status were acknowledged, with
some women portrayedas dancers,others as servants,and still others as elite, women were physically
identical in these paintings, sharing one archetypal, stylistically determined face.84 In addition, the
more subtle signs of status, which differentiatedwomen in life, were absent. None of the women was
shown to cover her face, for instance, though, in practice,pardah was observed by junior women before
senior women, and by many women, such as daughters-in-law, before the king.85 With both the phys-
ical and social marks of distinction erased, it was as if, though framed with the king in a historical
time, these women did not belong to it.
Finally, the king showed his supremacy by being the most active presence in these scenes. He was
active on a symbolic level as the organizing principle around which such compositions were organ-
ized, but he was also active on a literal level, as he ordered women to dance for him, embraced a wife,
or orchestrated a tamdsa. Thus, on a purely representational level, the peripheries of these paintings
were female, cooperative, and physically identical, while their focal points were male, active, and indi-
vidualized.
Rajput paintings of kings with women drew much of their force from obvious, cultivated paral-
lels with paintings of courtly heroes and of the deity Krsna. The conventions for scenes of love or erotic
abandon were much the same, whether a painting showed, for instance, a king playing holz in a zandnd
garden or Krsna playing holz with his gopzs in a courtly setting. Many painters depicted Krsna with
their kings' features, their kings with Krsna's blue skin and garb. Through such equations,86 kings
became manifestations of heroic, Krsna-like erotic power, infinitely seductive, naturally drawing every
woman under their libidinous sway.

82 Howard Hodgkin Collection. Andrew Topsfield and Milo C. Beach, eds., Indian Paintings and Drawings from the
Collectionof HowardHodgkin(New York: Thames and Hudson, I991), cat. no. 20.
83 Rosemary Crill, Marwar Painting (Mumbai: India Book House Limited in association with
MehrangarhPublishers,
2000), fig. I12. The painting is in the possession of the MehrangarhFort Trust, Jodhpur.
84 The only physical variations marking women's faces in these
paintings were complexion and age, but these do not
seem to have been used as markersof identity, other than to show class distinctions and demarcate roles such as that
of the old servant or duenna.
85 Hanna Papanek, "Purdah:SeparateWorlds and Symbolic Shelter,"in SeparateWorlds:Studiesof Purdahin SouthAsia
(Delhi: ChanakyaPublications, 1982), 3-53.
86
Although familiar to scholars in the field, this phenomenon deserves a full study. Examples abound. At Kishangarh,
for instance, one finds a full range of ways in which rulers and Krsna could be equated, from portraits in which rulers
were depicted with blue skin, to paintings of Radha and Krsna in the courtly settings and landscapesof Kishangarh,
to juxtapositions of kings and Krsna such as that in Raja SavantSimhwith a Courtesanin the Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney, acc. no. I31.1995, reproduced in Jim Masselos,Jackie Menzies, and PratapadityaPal, eds., Dancing to
the Flute: Musicand Dance in Indian Art (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), cat. no. 7I1.

z68
 That said, however, paintings that emphasized the king's sexual charismatended to sacrificethe
flavorof uncontrolled abandon,preferredby the poetic tradition, for an image of controlled, ritual love
play, and the king's power was generally shown to take precedence over the headiness of passion.87
What appearto have been a series of Mewarpaintings88illustrating types of poetic hero matched the
hero of the text with the image of MaharanaAri Simh. In one painting, Ari Simh sits with his beloved
in a garden pavilion (fig. I). The text above describeshis beloved as the willful heroine who must have
herway with her lover. The "willful"heroine,like Radhawith Krsna,hasdressedthe king in a woman's
saffronsari blouse.89Radha'sgames with Krsna topple human and divine hierarchies,and wrest for
the devotee heady and unprecedented power over her deity. In paintings, the two appearequally in
one another'sthrall, and Radhawears Krsna'sclothes as often as he does hers.90By contrast, the artist
of the Ari Simh painting tempered his heroine's subversiveplay by making her small, partly obscur-
ing her with a column, and placing her respectfully to one side of the white cloth on which the king
sits. Interestingly, she does not wearthe king's clothes. There is no male role here to the king's female.
In short, the masqueradedoes not disturb the established balancesof power, of male over female, and
king over subject.
Likewise, when atJodhpur a king or noble stands upon a swing, adopting a pose traditionally asso-
ciated in paintings with alluring women, a scene that had once expresseda woman's enticing aban-
don becomes an image of orderedauthority.91Swings were traditionally associatedwith sringararasa.
Nevertheless, at least three paintings of elite men on swings from Marwar,92a detail of one of which I
illustrate here (fig. 2), contrast sharply with the popular images of women swinging that turned on
the thrill of seeing a woman unposed and unconscious of being seen. These Marwarscenes are highly

87 Desai, Life at Court,has noted the formal composition used to portrayMuhammad Shah making love (cat. no. 71), and
has pointed out the contrast between physical intimacy and public ceremonial in a Mewar painting of MaharanaAri
Simh with a wife or consort (cat. no. 74).
88 The two
paintings I know arepainted as if from a series. The one I discuss here was published in Sotheby's New York,
Indian and SoutheastAsian Art, June 4, 1994, lot. no. 146. The second is in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's
Avery Brundage Collection, inv. B84 Dz.
89 It is the same color as the blouse worn by the other women in the painting. The king does wear a translucent gown
over the blouse, but his back, bared by the see-through cloth, bends in a sensuous curve usually seen in paintings of
women.
90 See, for instance, the Bundi-style painting of Radha and Krsna reproducedin Masselos et al., eds., Dancingto theFlute,
cat. no. 40. The painting, in the collection of Maximilian Hughes (Sydney, Australia), shows Radha wearing Krsna's
clothes, peacock crown, even halo, while playing his flute. Krsna, wearing Radha's clothes, stands below her, clearly
looking up to her and adopting a slightly bent posture under the weight of a saheli'sarms. The only give-away is his
blue skin and the fact that Radha's clothes, on him, have taken on Krsna'ssignature yellow hue.
91 The image dates back at least as early as the murals at Ajanta. See, for instance, Princess Irandati swinging in the Vid-
hurapanditaJdtakain cave 2 at Ajanta.
92 The three paintings to which I referare as follows: (i) A detail of a larger scene: below the principal scene of a zannan
darbdr,MaharajaTakht Simh swings between rows of women who stand in anjali, reproduced in B.N. Goswamy,
Essenceof Indian Art (San Francisco:Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1986), cat. no. 5. The painting is in the col-
lection of MaharajaGajai Singhji, Umaid Bhavan Palace, no. I360. (z) A ruler, probably of a Marwarthikdnd,swings
between rows of men on one side, and women on the other in a painting reproduced in Sotheby's New York, Indian
and SoutheastAsian Art, December 5,1992, lot no. 154. (3) AJodhpur painting of MaharajaMan Simh watching a noble
on a swing in the MehrangarhFort Museum Trust, Jodhpur, no. 79, reproducedin Crill, Marwar Painting, fig. 107.

269
structured and self-conscious: the men in them are flanked by ordered rows of observerswho stand
with a formal gravity. Unlike the woman in, for instance, Figure 3, whose back bends voluptuously
and whose skirts fly seductively as she swings, these men are in no danger of enflaming unruly pas-
sions, of being toppled from their swings and ravaged.93Rather, they seem to play a part, or strike a
pose, without fully succumbing to the spirit of their role.
The fact that women patronizedportraits of men and that there existed scenes of women looking
at men in the zandndraise questions about men as objects of a female gaze. EarlierI touched on the
ways in which most formalportraitsof men seemed to addressa non-gendered,reverentialpublic. Iron-
ically, it was these portraits that most women seem to have collected. By contrast, scenes of kings or
nobles in their zandnas, which pose a man for female eyes, seem not to have been intended specifically
forwomen; at least, none is noted in the recordsI have found documenting women's paintings. Rather
it seems these images were meant to representthe king primarily to men, but as if seen through the
eyes of imagined, ideal women. Fora male or general audience, the king's attractivenesswas not, then,
the issue; it was ratherhis capacity to fulfill the role of king, which partly demanded a large zandnd
and a courtier'stalent for the games of love. Thus, the point was neverto make the king a sexual object
for a viewer's imagined consumption. Instead, the aim, as expressedin the image of the willful hero-
ine and of kings on swings, was to define the king's officialvirtues, such as his charm,beauty, and viril-
ity, while balancing these virtues with his sovereign authority.
A painting of Mewar'sMaharanaBhim Simh, in the style of the artistChokha(fig. 4), takesunusual
risks in this balancing act and hence serveswell to demonstratethe concernsthat sexualizing a king's
image could raise.Drawing on a fairly common depiction of kings looking into mirrors,Chokhapor-
trayed the Maharanatying his turban beforea mirror.94In general, Chokhawent further in sexualiz-
ing royal bodies than had most Rajput artists before him. He made MaharanaBhim Simh's corpu-
lence a matter of pride, emphatically shading the volumes of his heavy male breasts,of his meaty arms,
and bulging, hirsute stomach. His representationof Bhim Simh gazing into a mirror eschewed the
usual premise; this was not a court ritual but a toilette scene, such as was generally associated, like
images of swings, with female heroines.The king ties his turban,while seven attendantsstand around
him, holding his mirrorand his jewels at the ready.Severalsimply watch, turning the king's dressing
into a spectacle. The king wears a resplendent lungzand his hairy chest, though draped in pearls, is
bare, Together, the king and his attendants occupy the conventional positions and roles typically
assigned the heroine and her attendants in archetypalfemale toilette scenes. Chokha'sconceit seems
to have been that the king's fleshy bulk, while quintessentially masculine, had become a vision of
beauty, an essential characteristicof kingship according to a number of Indian texts on the subject.95

93 Kumar Sangram Singh Collection, Jaipur, KSS 14. The painting is one in a group from Uniara, mid-eighteenth cen-
tury. In paintings like this one, the woman is intended to be seductive to the viewer, who takes the role, implicitly,
of a voyeur. The notion that a male viewer has caught the woman unawares in such paintings is made explicit in
Sotheby's New York, Fine Indianand PersianMiniatures,March25, 1987, lot no. 119,in which a Bikaner ruler, embody-
ing the male viewer, enters the scene on horsebackfrom the right.
94 Paul F. Walter Collection. Reproduced in PratapadityaPal, The Classical Traditionin RajputPaintingfrom the Paul
F. WalterCollection(New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library 978), , p. 48.

270
 However, in one respect, Chokha'sdisplay of beauty differed from the kind of display that female
toilette scenes typically structured. Chokha diverted the viewer's attention from the king's prepara-
tions by placing a second focus of attention, nobles watching dancing girls and musicians, in the fore-
ground. Rajput artists almost never permitted any aspect of a composition to overlap the main focus
of attention, particularlyif he was royal or divine. I suggest that Chokha offeredthe dancing girl as a
distraction from the intense, highly tactile, volumetric physicality of the ruler. Lest this king-beauty
in ndyikapose be seen as a potential object of sexual (hence, potentially active or aggressive) desire,
the dancing woman offered a proper object for the heterosexual gaze. In contrast to her, the king
became a regally sexual ratherthan a sexually seductive vision, his bare-chestedsplendor a sovereign
virtue.
In an even more atypical gesture, the dancing girl literally stole the eyes of the king's three nobles
from the sight of their bare-breasted sovereign, whom the king's own gaze would seem to have
identified as the proper center of attention. This irregularityis telling, for in most paintings a king's
nobles only looked away from him when they were looking where the king looked, at what the king
had directed to be the appropriatecollective focus. The result, in Chokha's painting, was two foci,
uneasily balancedand competing, and a scene that, though seductive, pointedly rejecteda sexual read-
ing from its viewers. Where a ndyikdwould incite passion, the king ceded the obviously seductive role
to the nautch girl.96
Rajput paintings pictured life at court in a transfiguredform, both by idealizing the king, his
courtiers, and their daily activities, and by omitting realities that might deflate the king's heroic
image. For our purposes, paintings of kings surroundedby women acknowledged the presence of an
active female gaze at the court and raisedthe issue of the king as an object of female desire. The metic-
ulousness with which these paintings were scripted, however, illustrated the dangers of letting real
sexual dynamics into the picture. We know of many instanceswhen a queen or mistress used her posi-
tion as the king's favoriteto exert enormouspolitical power. The "willful"heroinewas not just a poetic
trope. Yet paintings always showed women's wills to be submissive to the king's stronger will, and
the representationof women as idealized types was essential to the effectiveness of these paintings as
a kind of public statement about the king's rightness to rule. That said, exceptions existed, and the
occasionalpainting was inscribedwith the name of a realwoman; it is to these exceptions that I finally
turn.

95 Ramdev P. Kathuria, Life in the Courtsof RajasthanDuring the i8th Century(New Delhi: Ram Nagar, 1987), 34-35.
Kathuria lists beauty as one of the qualities of a king and cites two texts, the I759 Niti Prakashby Mohta Hathi Singh
from Bikaner, and an eighteenth-century text called the Rajan Raut ri Bat Banav, which lists "rup"and "sakalnayak"
among its thirty-three characteristicsof a king.
96 These paintings of the seductive king raise the question of a sub-genre of paintings that show the king, or a hero phys-
ically resembling the king, explicitly making love to a wife or consort. However, though this distinctive and unusu-
ally informal view of royalty deservesfurtherstudy, it is a topic I must leave aside here. Sufficeit to say that the beloved
in erotic paintings of kings is generally unnamed and anonymous. Like the women in the paintings discussed above,
she is pictured as a mere prop in the expression of the king's virility.

27I
 V.
"PORTRAITS" OF WOMEN

Within courts, even across courts, Rajput paintings tended to express an almost uniform, idyllic point
of view, and in the absence of archival records, one might assume that they developed under tight
monarchalcontrol. In fact, recordsbring to light many people - kings, nobles, artists, staff, and the
women of the zandna - who helped nurture painting traditions. At each court, these people together
fostered a single dominant style of painting; they patronized the same themes, the same conventions,
the same iconography,over and over and over again. Was this uniformity driven by collective, uncon-
scious, and unquestioned agreement ? Only exceptions to tradition express the conceivableness, at the
time, of alternative points of view. A few exceptional paintings, to which I now turn, labeled the
figures of idealized women with the names of real, contemporaneouswomen.

A letter to MaharajaMan Simh begins with countless praisesto the king, who is of unequaled beauty,
his face filled with every virtue, dearest, clear as the water of the Ganges, who is the foundation of the
soul, the happinessof the world, the flavorof the bed, and the emperorof all Hindus (fig. 5).The writer's
name is not given,97 but she is pictured in an intimate scene painted above the long page on which the
letter is written. She may be a queen or a courtesan. A small child sits at her side; evidently, she and
the king share a child together. Though intended to represent an individual, her face is the face borne
by all the hundreds of women inJodhpur painting. Matched to an epistolary voice and a self, however,
that face becomes the face of a real person; though generic in its contours, the image would have served
to conjure the writer's intimately known featuresto the king's mind.
The painting reiteratessome of the formality but, unusually, more of the intimacy expressed in
the letter. On the one hand, Man Simh is nimbate, more centrally placed, and quite a bit larger than
the woman. On the other hand, the two share liquor from a small glass, sit on a single carpet, and share
one pillow. Their bodies overlap and they wear an identical green fabric ornamentedwith gold. The
two seem to sit as relative equals, with hierarchy downplayed. The painting is unlike most images of
kings with women, which typically favored more hierarchical structures, and one wonders whether
the artist intended to create this impression of greater equality. The placement of the painting on the
letter suggests that it was composed for the woman, even, perhaps, by the woman herself. If she was
the painter, then the image's unusual qualities would express something of her point of view.
The painting calls to mind a similar image from Mewar, now in the National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, which framesMaharanaBhim Simh and a woman in a scalloped arch (fig. 6).98Like the
writer of the Jodhpur letter, the Mewar woman is generic in appearance. Nevertheless, an inscription
on the back of the painting names her as the "pdsavdnAsuaji Safitidasji."99Like Man Simh and his

97 It is always possible that a scribe wrote the letter for the queen/courtesan, but Rajput women in royal families were
often literate, so there is no reason to assume that the woman did not write the letter herself. The rathercrude hand-
writingsuggeststhe handof someonewho did not writeprofessionally.
98 Topsfield, Paintingsfrom Rajasthan,cat. no. 204.
99 The name is curious, and Topsfield, ibid., transcribesit as "?suaji."The first letter of the name seems to be an "a"so
I have transcribedit thus here.

272
beloved, Safitidasjiand Bhim Simh sit acrossfrom one anotherand sharea bed. The center of the paint-
ing is ceded to their interaction. On the vertical axis, the exact center of the painting is the pdn he
lovinglyhandsher.His handis poisedjustto the left ofcenteron thehorizontalaxis,caughtin amove-
menttowardsher.Theireyesarelockedin a mutualgaze.Foronce,theking doesnothavea halo.Shar-
ing, not hierarchyor power, appearsto be the subject here. Like the painting on the letter, this image
may have been painted to the woman's prescription. The artist, whom the inscription names
"Mialalotar,"is not known to have been attached to the king's service and may have worked for
Be that as it may,the paintingoffersa secondexampleof a genericfemaleidealusedto
Safitidasji.I??
portrayan actualwoman.
Here and there, the odd example of a woman named in a painting has been published. Virtually
scribbled acrossthe upper margin of a Mewarpainting, published by Stella Kramrisch,is the name of
ajaiselmer princess, "HataAkara,"the wife of Umed Simh.I10The painting illustrates a musical mode,
Madhmddhavi
Rdginz,and its heroineis clearlya romantictype, with thoroughlyidealizedfeatures.
The princess's name seems to have been added as an afterthought, perhapsby someone for whom the
paintingsomehowbroughtherto mind.
Kramrisch'sRagini page aside, most Rajasthanipaintings that bear women's names picture the
women in the company of a king or nobleman. A Jodhpur love scene, dated I8I4, is more formally
inscribed than the Riginz page.'02Idealized though the scene may be, it featuresa deceasedJodhpur
king, MaharajaAjit Simh, gazing down on his beloved, a dancer,whose name, "Chabrup,"is inscribed
on the walls of the palace. Though named, the woman is as generic an ideal as any of the women dis-
cussedso far.A comparisonwith the writerof theJodhpurloveletterfindsthe two sharea face.That
same face, the archetypalfemaleJodhpur face of the period, appearsyet again in anotherJodhpur love
scene, published by O.C. Gangoly, which also bears the name of its female subject.'03 By the court
painterSiv Das Bhatti,the paintingis inscribedwith the namesof the man, "ThakurSahebRajaSri
BaktwarSimhji,"andhis queen"RanijiSriChundavatji." Thoughthesewomenarerepresented with
wholly conventional faces, names grant them distinct identities and record their existences for pos-
terity. Such paintings indicate that at least some patrons sought to identify real women in the facesof
pictorialideals.
Theidealizedformsof facesandfiguresin Rajputpaintingswerenotpoliticallyneutral,andthese
tentative attempts to identify realwomen with anonymous ideals raisean ideological issue at the crux
of which are styles. Setting aside shades of complexion, and the occasionalaged duenna, the sole dis-
tinction among women's faces in Rajput paintings is stylistic. The Jodhpur women with which our
100 This is a somewhat unusual
portrait of MaharanaBhim Simh. It does not conform as exactly to the conventional Bhim
Simh face as those faces painted by his court artists, possibly another clue that Mialalotarwas not in the king's service.
IOI Private collection. Stella Kramrisch, Painted Delight: Indian Paintingsfrom Philadelphia Collections(Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, I986), cat. no. 66.
102
Jane Greenough Green Collection. Published in PratapadityaPal, Stephen Markel, and Janice Leoshko, eds., Pleasure
Gardensof the Mind: Indian Paintingsfrom theJane GreenoughGreenCollection(Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt.
Ltd., I993), cat. no. 52.
103 O.C. Gangoly, "Rajput Portraits of the Indigenous School,"Marg 7,4 (September 1954): I2-21, fig. i. The painting is
one of a group that Gangoly rathermysteriously identifies as "recentlycome to light." He does not identify the loca-
tion of these paintings.

273
letter writer, Sri Chundavat, and the dancer Chadrup were identified, are physically identical to one
another, but quite distinct from Kotah, Mewar, Bikaner, Kishangarh, orJaipur women. Likewise, the
Mewar women with which Safitidasji was identified are replications of a single type that was clearly
different from the types employed at any other court. While stylistic templates informed the depic-
tion of both male and female faces,only for representationsof men (mainly elite men) did artists inflect
their template with distinguishing characteristics.Women, by contrast,were all template. They were
literally, at each court, multiplications of a single ideal that a court's artists were trained to repeat.
Royal women were certainly familiar with these different stylistic templates. Elite women gener-
ally married outside their father's kingdom and had to leave home for their husbands' courts, where
they would have encountered artists working in a different court idiom. Nevertheless, women
remainedin close touch with their families and natalstates. Forinstance, the fatherofJaipur'sChunda-
vat Queen Regent, the Rawal of Deogarh, came to live at Jaipur during the period of his daughter's
regency. Deogarh patronized some of Mewar'smost talented artists, and it is quite possible that the
Rawal and his daughter continued to encourageartists at home during this time, even while oversee-
ing production in the Jaipur workshop. An entry to this effect in the Jaipur Dastur Qaumwar notes a
payment of one hundred forty rupeesthat the Queen Regent made in I763 to the painter "Vara"(pos-
sibly meaning "senior") of "Devagadha."104The entry notes that the Queen engaged the artist's serv-
ices in connection with a temple she was having erected. The artist may not have worked in a court
style, and was, perhaps, employed for decorative work. Be that as it may, the entry shows the Queen
to have maintained a connection with the artists and craftsmenof her natal thikdana,
Deogarh.
As a consequence, a woman like the Chundavat Rani would have experienced women in paintings
the female faces of her father'sand of her husband'scourts. Facialtypes, like
with at least two faces:105
styles, developed in the service of male rulers and their clans. Anyone who shifted allegiance entered,
in painting, into a new stylistic milieu. A man, depending on where he was represented,would find
his features taken up in a variety of possible styles. A woman confronted a whole new face, a new figure
of style closely associatedwith her sovereign'spatronage.Fora woman, then, visual identity in paint-
ing was purely a matter of courtly affiliation, not self.
I have suggested that the portrait was fundamentally a political tool designed to cement relations
among men and to record a man's place in history. History, structured on genealogy, was male. It
is always possible that further research will locate clues, such as elements of clothing, that served to
identify female subjects; or it may be shown that women pictured with a particularking were recog-
nized in the moment, only to be forgotten when records were drawn up. For posterity, however, what
the portrait represented was something women did not have: an official, public, political, and record-
worthy existence. Even the Chundavat Rani, who ruled the kingdom, did so in the name of her sons.
Names, like portraits, were the prerogative of positions that women could not occupy. And positions,
together with the historical fact of specific male individuals occupying those positions (rdja, rdwat,

104 The Jaipur Dastur Qaumwar.

05 Mewar and Jaipur records indicate that royal collections included paintings from a wide variety of courts, many of
which passed through the hands of nobles and probably of noble women. Most courtiers with an interest in paintings
would have been familiar with the major painting styles and, hence, with far more than two female facial types.

274
 werethe truesubjectsof Rajasthaniportraiture.In a traditionprofoundly
thakur,evenchamardhar),
dedicated to male rule, painters portrayedwomen in relation to male power, as mostly anonymous,
submissive ideals in the king's thrall and as figures of court styles that were closely associated with
kings. Presumably women did not challenge these traditions for the same reason that they did not
challengemale authority:becausepatriarchy,in Rajputcultureas in manypartsof the world,was
upheldby the men andwomenof the courtstogether.

CONCLUSION:
THOUGHTS ON TRADITION AND EFFACEMENT

In additionto women,manypeopleandrealitieswereeffacedby a traditionthat eschewedthe par-

ticularitiesof the everydayin preferenceforpoeticideals,heroicroles,andharmoniousidyllsbuilt on
the strength of established conventions. The omission of elite women from paintings points to their
limited accessnot so much to power as to the accoutrementsof power, which beautified, aggrandized,
andlegitimatedthosewho worethem. Theseaccoutrements wereessentialto the politicaleffective-
nessof Rajputpainting.However,the greatestomissionslay deeperthanthe representation of who
couldor couldnot enjoypower'sforms.Rdnisandcourtesans,artistsworkingon the lowerrungsof
fractisous clans,all comprisedindividualswith differentinter-
thecourtladder,noblesfromsometimes
ests, yet all contributed to a pictorial tradition that revealed none of this underlying variety. In its
nearlyseamlessconsistency, the tradition itself wielded authority, though on the strengths of the insti-
tutionsthatsupportedit. Howeverunconsciousandwidelysharedobeisanceto this authoritywas,it
constituted a form of submission. In accepting a rigid, highly conventionalpictorial tradition, women,
nobles,artistsin the king'sserviceaccepteda single vision that was shapedfor the malemonarchy.
The nearly unchallenged hegemony of this vision makes it difficult if not impossible to judge what,
if anything, may have lain beyond the consensus represented.Yet it would be a mistake, I think, to
accept that consensus as natural, and not question the interests it served, for instance, by asking
whether women or artists ever chafed at the limits of convention.
The customs of power andpardahby no means faced anything like a feminist resistance, but the
odd exception to the implicit rules, such as an inscribed female face, suggests that customs did cir-
cumscribe possibilities that some wished to test. Not all these customs served men alone. I wish to
conclude with an exceptionalpainting that purportsto look behind the pretty, stylized surfacesof con-
ventional Rajput femininity and court hierarchyto a moment that, one imagines, the women of the
zandanadwould not have wished to advertise.
The painting, from Mewar,is in Varanasi'sBharatKala Bhavan(fig. 7).o06 By the artist Ganigaram,
it pictures a moment of hideous violence. Two female servants undergo punishment - one is being
whipped while the other's hands have been tied behind her back. The women cry out and appearto
have struggled, for their cholisare awry and their orhnzslost. The women charged with their punish-
ment inflict gratuitous pain, yanking at their captives' bound arms, while in the back, four women
look on with expressionsranging from fascination to coy pleasureand outright delight.

I06 Bharat Kala Bhavan, Enrico Isacco Photographic Library.

275
 Gangaramhas abandonedthe decorousprofiles preferredby stylistic convention to picture most
of the women with their heads turned forward.He has also abandonedthe bland serenity of the typi-
cal face. With their variously anguished, taunting, and grimacing expressions, these women are no
figuresof court style. The two most richly dressedamong them laugh with open, toothy mouths; the
maid with a whip bites her lower lip; and the servant being flogged furrowsher brow and draws her
cheeks into stretched hollows of pain. One lingers on the details because they are so astonishingly
unusual in the Rajput tradition. By contrast, the quiescent, expressionlessfaces preferredin nearly
every Rajput painting seem necessaryattributes of beauty: in this painting expressionis grotesque.
To date it has proved impossible to say why most artists did not test the limits of tradition, and
whether their conservatismresulted from a lack of imagination, from a respect for propriety, or from
the fearof antagonizing patrons. Only exceptions to the pictorial rules, like the works of Galngaram,
who made a careerof violent scenes, point to the existence of a will to push beyond conventional lim-
its. This artist, at least, chose to countermand the conventional vision of femininity to illustrate an
uglier side of life in the zandna.Though no one is heroic here, the queens seem the more villainous
party, suggesting a reversalof sympathies rarelyto be found in Rajput painting. Unfortunately, the
purpose of this painting is unclear. "It is known," wrote one scholar, "that many cruel practicespre-
vailed in the harems and that servant girls were often cruelly beaten for trifling faults. Whether
[Gafigaram] painted such themes out of sadistic delight, cynicism, or out of a reforming zeal, or
whether he cateredto the pervertedtastes of his patron, we do not know."107
A red curtain is drawn acrossalmost two thirds of the colonnade at the back of the scene, and one
of the women, looking out from behind it, pulls the cloth to her breast, as if in partial concealment.
It is tempting to read a sly comment in the curtain on the concealing walls and cloths of the zandnd.
An over-readingperhaps, but the artist has, in effect, pulled the zandndcurtains open on something
surely never meant to be seen; these are no portraits, but they are, in some sense, more revealing, for
they expose a range of expressionsand sentiments generally hidden behind the conventional masks of
Rajput beauty. A reminder that invisibility, in more ways than one, could be seen as a privilege of
power, in this case, the power of women.

107 Karl Khandalavala,Moti Chandra,and Pramod Chandra,MiniaturePainting: A Catalogueof the Exhibitionof the Sri
MotichandKhajanchiCollectionHeld by the Lalit Kala Akademi,1960 (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1960), 6i.

276
 APPENDIX
Entries from the Jaipur suratkhanarecordsconcerningJaipur's
queens

Name Date Artist Paintings Other details

I.

Maharanl Margasirsa,vadi I, 2 portraitsof M. MadhoSimh

Chundavat sarivat I820 (1763CE) MaharajaSawai presentedthe paintings
MadhoSimh in "indm."
Jamakharch,p. I02 and
roznama.

The mother of Bhadrapada,sudi I, Sahib Ram 4 paintings of Maharaja M. MadhoSimh

MaharaniChundavat sarvat 1822(I765 CE) MadhoSimh wor- presentedthe paintings
shipping Govindji at in "indm."
Nathdvara Jamakharch,p. 113.

2.

Maji (in this period Pausa,sudi I, sarhvat 29 paintings: 24 of Andarkharch (inside

"Maji"would have been I830 (I773 CE) women, I of a young purchase).Sent to
Ma Chundavat) Shh Jahan, i of Sri the presenceof"sdhTv"
Bhagirathand Gangaji, (M. MadhoSimh).
I of a sardr and his Jamdkharch,p. I54.
beloved, I of a horse
rider,I in the "spiritof
Gangor"

Maji (as above) Chaitra,vadi Io, sarivat 98 paintings and These were sent to
1830(I773 CE) 3 albums. Two of the the presenceof the
albums contain repre- Maharanithrough
sentationsof women Jay Ram Darogaand
(including 48 and 41 Nathu Ram.
paintings respectively). Jamdkharch,p. I57
The third album con- (reverse).
tains 40 paintings
of Patsahs(emperors),
including Awrangzeb,
Jahangir,and Azam
Shah.1

The pages listing the 98 paintings aremissing. It may still be possible to locate them in the archives.

277
Name Date Artist Paintings Other details

3.
MaharaniJadam Kartika,sudi 3, sarivat Io portraits: I of Andarkharch.
I835(I778 CE) M. Prthvi Simh, I of The paintings were
M. PratapSimh, 7 of handledby Nathu Ram
M. MadhoSimh, and Palival.
I of the KarauliMaharaja Jamakharch,p. I75 and
Manik Pal and his two roznama.
brothers(all three broth-
ers of the Maharani)

MaharaniJadam Kartika,sudi 15, I muraqqa Price: 30 rupees.

samvatI835(1778CE)
containing 36 paintings Through Nathu
making up ragamald Ram Palival. Presented
to the Maharaniin
nazarby Ram Kisan.
Jamakharch,p. 176
(reverse).

MaharaniJadam Asvina, sudisarivat

5, 8 portraits: Andarkharch.
1840 (1783CE) I ofM. PratapSimh To the palaceof the
and 7 of thdkurs Maharani.Handled
(unspecified) by Nathu Ram Palival.
Jamakharch,p. 270
(reverse).

4.
(The palaceof) Maharani Magha,vadi II, sarhvat Ramji I portraitof Andarkharch.
The
Chandravat 1837(1780 CE) M. PratapSimh roznamaentry specifies
"inAmber,"probably
in referenceto the palace
of M. Jadamji.
Jamdkharch,p. 270 and
roznama.

5.
MaharaniRathor Asarha,vadi I0, sarivat I portraitof Andarkharch.
1855(I798 CE) M. PratapSimh Presentedby "Hukam
gri Hajur"(M. Pratap
Simh).
Jamakharch,p. 383
(reverse).
Name Date Artist Paintings Other details

MaharaniRathor Kartika,vadi 11,sarhvat Govind Ram Chatera 9 paintings: 6 portraits Andarkharch.

Presented
I858(i8oi CE) of mahdrdjasin a lineage by "HukamSri Hajur"
series- Maharajas (M. PratapSimh) to the
JayaSimh, IsvariSimh, agent (sarkar)of the
MadhoSimh, Prthvi Maharani.
Simh, 2 of PratapSimh; Jamakharch,p. 383
and 3 paintings of (reverse)and roznama.
Govind Dev in sringara
rasa

MaharaniRathor Margasirsa,vadi 2, I portraitof the Maharaja Andarkharch.Handed

sarhvati858 (i8oi CE) Kuvar(heir apparent) over by Ram Chand
ChaVarato the agent
of the Maharani.
(sarkdir)
Jamdkharch,p. 385and
roznama.

6.

Maji Rathor Bhadrapada,vadi II, 93 paintings (images The entry is somewhat

sarivat I859(1802 CE) of deities, agosain,and unclear.It mentions
from a barahmdsa): a Fateh Ram from the
40 of Radhaand Krsna, country(des)of Abvali.
4 of Krsna,io of Rama, The paintings entered
3 of Nathji, 2 of Govind the suratkhandfrom
Dev, 6 of Mahadev, the belongings of Maji
I of Chatrabhuj,I of Rathor.Rozndma.
Nandji, I of Hanumanji,
I of Ganesh, I6 bdrahmasa
paintings, and I of Gosai
Vrijadhis

7.
Ma Khichani Chaitra,vadi 7, sarhvat 22 paintings (of deities The page heading also
1861-63 (I804-o6 CE) and from a barahmasa): mentions FatehRam
ii bdrahmdsa pages, of Abvali. The paintings
9 of Krsnaand Radha, entered the suratkhana
i of Govind Dev, from the belongings
i of ThakurSri Chatra- of Mi ri Khichaniji.
bhuj Jamakharch,p. 136.

279
Name Date Artist Paintings Other details

8.

MaharaniVikawat Vaiiskha, vadi I, samvat 27 paintings (of deities As above, this entry
I861-63 and courtiers):II of appearsundera heading
(I804-o6 CE) Ramaand Laksmana, referringto FatehRam
6 of Krsna,I of Narsimh, of Abvali. The paintings
I of Mahadev,2 of Raya enteredthe suratkhdna
Sridhar,2 ofJiva Raja from the belongings of
Palival, I of ThakurSyo Maharanigri VikIvatji.
Das, i of SyarhbhuDas Jamakharch,p. I36.
(the son of Syo Das), 2 of
M. Jagat Singh

9.

MajiJadam Sravana,sudi 5, samvat Ioo paintings (miscella- Fromthe samepages as

I861-63 (I804-o6 CE) neous subjectsincluding above(referringto
portraits):3 portraits Fateh Ram). The paint-
ofM. MadhoSimh, I of ings enteredthe surat-
RajaGopal Das of khdnafrom the belong-
Karauli,I of Kuvar ings ofMaji riJdamji.
Kisan Simh, I of Jamdkharch,p. I37
M. SaranSimh, I of Raja (reverse).
RayaSimh, I of M.
BhagatDas, I of the elder
JayaSimh, I of Prthvi
Raj, I of M. Visan Simh,
I ofM. Bhao Simh, 5
of girlfriends(saheliya),
I of elephants,I of five
deities, 6 of women
(mheriyc),12pages from
a barahmasa,2 of ri
Govind Deoll

nI The remainingentries arenot available.Again, it might be possible to locate them on furtherstudy of the suratkhanarecords.

280