Worshipped as a supreme deity, the great goddess Devi is of central importance to the Pahari Hindu tradition. Originally, this folio was one of a series of seventy paintings that showed different aspects of her; these works would have been used by tantric practitioners. Sanskrit verses on the back describe this manifestation:
Equal to a thousand rays of the rising sun. . . She is everything. . . She banishes fear. . . I adore goddess Bhadrakali. . .
Shown against a brilliant yellow background, with the cut beetle wings in her jewelry catching the light, she is venerated by the Hindu gods who surround her. The vibrant style demonstrated here is characteristic of early Pahari painting and had a profound impact on later works produced in the hills of the Himalayas.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
Open Access
As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.
API
Public domain data for this object can also be accessed using the Met's Open Access API.
This artwork is meant to be viewed from right to left. Scroll left to view more.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
Artwork Details
Use your arrow keys to navigate the tabs below, and your tab key to choose an item
Title:Devi in the Form of Bhadrakali Adored by the Gods, folio from a dispersed Tantric Devi series
Artist:Attributed to the Master of the Early Rasamanjari
Date:ca. 1660-70
Culture:India, Punjab Hills, kingdom of Basohli
Medium:Opaque watercolor, gold, silver and beetlewing cases on paper
Dimensions:H. 7 in. (17.8 cm) W. 6 9/16 in. (16.7 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of Steven Kossak, The Kronos Collections
Standing on a golden low table or platform (chauki), Bhadrakali, the Blessed Dark Goddess, presides at the center of this painting. Bhadrakali is a form of the Devi, or the Great Goddess, whom many in India revere as the supreme deity. This painting once belonged to the great Tantric Devi Series (see also. cat. no. 39), which originally comprised some 70 paintings or more, depicting the various forms or incarnations of the Great Goddess, for one of her devotees, probably the ruling monarch or a member of his family from Basohli, a small yet extremely important kingdom in the Punjab Hills. Bhadrakali has the ritual marks, third eye, and crescent moon associated with Shiva, her consort and male energy. (Three of the surviving thirtyfive paintings from the Tantric Devi Series depict Bhairava, a ferocious incarnation of Shiva, and one of the Great Goddess’ consorts.) Bhadrakali is accompanied on her left by three forms of Kali (so identified by the short Hindi labels written in the border), wearing leopard skins and holding two swords, a trident, a severed head, and two skull cups filled with blood or wine. On her right is the Afro- bedecked Bhima, the consort of a terrifying incarnation of Shiva, also wearing a leopard skin and holding a sword and skull cup. Standing next to Bhima is the fireencircled figure of Vahnipriya, the beloved of Agni, the god of fire. And kneeling in the foreground are two diminutive, snakegarlanded minions of the great god Shiva, offering libations to Bhadrakali, and dropping flowers on her feet. All of these attending deities jostle for space around the margins, creating a dense, overlapping mass of figures barely contained by the wide border that encircles This picture has more figures than any other in the series. Yet the meaning of this astonishing assemblage of figures is intentionally obscure. As the deities embody metaphysical abstractions, the thread connecting one figure to the next is often a tangled knot. It can be unraveled only with the meditational insight of the trained tantrika. Like the equally short poem (sloka) written in Sanskrit on the reverse side of each painting (a translation in the Punjabi dialect of Hindi is written in takri script just below it) the figures are the equivalent of sandhya bhasa, a secret language known only to the initiated devotee. Therefore this work is not just a painting, but also a focus for abstruse meditational practices. The convoluted and highly intellectual system this ca. l66070 painting embodies represents a higher form of the tantric, or nonmainstream, Devi worship that was swept away in the Punjab Hills by the Krishnafocused, devotional frenzy of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. B.N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer suggest the Master of the Early Rasamanjari was actually Kripal “of Nurpur” on the basis of a colophon on the reverse side of the last folio from a later Rasamanjari series of 1694/95 (Bharat Kala Bhavan) painted in Basohli by Devidasa, known by his testimony to be the son of Kripal. (1) As this later series was clearly based on the earlier series, Goswamy and Fischer believe the influential master of the earlier series must be the otherwise unknown Kripal, the father of Devidasa. As this earlier series and the ca. 1660 70 Tantric Devi Series were clearly painted by the same artist, these scholars also believe that the Kripal was the painter of the Tantric Devi Series as well. Yet Goswamy and Fischer cannot say or know whether Kripal or his ancestors, originally from Nurpur just across the river Ravi, had resettled at some point in neighboring Basohli, or went to work there. Therefore their desire to ignore decades of criticism and labelling practice, and to reassign the birth and formulation of the Early Pahari Style not to Basohli, the Master of the Early Rasamajari, and his patron, but to neighboring Nurpur and its patron, on the basis of one tangential and later inscription, is interesting, yet rather speculative. Likewise, their desire to identify the Master of the Early Rasamanjari with the artist Kripal is plausible, yet not established beyond doubt. (1) B.N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer 1992, pg. 30. See also ibid, pg. 60.
Inscription: Inscribed on the front along the border in black ink written in takri script with the number “69” and identifying labels of the people portrayed, as well as various inscriptions on the swords. Inscribed on the reverse in black ink in Sanskrit: a poem in praise of the Devi
Terence McInerney 1979
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Seeing the Divine: Pahari Painting of North India," December 22, 2018–July 28, 2019.
Seeing the Divine curator Kurt Behrendt shares insights into a bold and dramatic painting of the goddess Bhadrakali created in the 1660s, at the beginning of the Pahari miniature painting tradition.
The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
