THE BHAKTI POETESS MIRABAI AT COURT SURROUNDED BY ASCETIC DEVOTEES
Provincial Mughal school, possibly Punjab Hills or Rajasthan, North-Western India, late 18th - early 19th century

THE BHAKTI POETESS MIRABAI AT COURT SURROUNDED BY ASCETIC DEVOTEES
Provincial Mughal school, possibly Punjab Hills or Rajasthan, North-Western India, late 18th - early 19th century

Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, the horizontal composition depicting the Hindu mystic poetess and Lord Krishna's fervent devotee Mirabai in the centre, surrounded by a large gathering of naked ascetics, with matted hair and long beards, next to them and to Mirabai a haloed, bejewelled ruler, possibly her husband Bhoj Raj crown prince of Mewar in 1516, to the left of Mirabai a vina and in front of her encrusted trays with offerings and spices, one of the ascetics in the foreground performing a full-body frontal bow to pay respect to the poetess, the scene set within ochre and black rules, and dark green borders, the recto with fainted stamped annotations "Muhammad Ali, Jaipur", mounted on a white cardboard frame, 24.8cm x 33cm excluding the mount.

Mirabai was one of the central poet-saints of the 16th-century Bhakti movement and all her poems (bhajan) advocate for a personal, almost intimate relationship with Krishna as her lover and lord. Her character became the subject of numerous folk tales and hagiographic legends, always mentioning her fearless disregard for social and family conventions, and passionate praise of Lord Krishna. Although Mirabai's compositions are mostly written in Hindustani, an older form of modern-day Hindi, some of her poems also appear in the Prem Ambodh Pothi, a text attributed to Guru Gobind Singh and completed in 1693, in which Mirabai is mentioned as one of the sixteen historic Bhakti saints important to Sikhism (JS Hawley and GS Mann, Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India, 2014, pp. 113 - 136).

Dimensions: 24.8cm x 33cm excluding the mount