Folio from a Nala—Damayanti series
By artists from the first generation after Nainsukh
India, Himachal Pradesh or Jammu and Kashmir, ca. 1775–1800
Opaque watercolor on paper
22.2 x 33.4 cm
Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment
Freer Gallery of Art
F1923.10
This drawing is one of a series that illustrates the love story of the heroic Nala and the beautiful Damayanti—the manuscript paintings at the center of Amit Dutta’s film Chitrashala. The drawing depicts the events surrounding the wedding of Nala and Damayanti. The image’s emotional core is located in the lower left corner, where Damayanti departs for Nala’s kingdom. In varied postures of grief, Damayanti’s female friends and relatives pour out of an arched doorway. Weeping with affection, they surge toward the already symbolically departed Damayanti, who is invisible inside a rectangular palanquin.
After 2009, Amit Dutta’s use of cinematic time and space developed in conversation with Indian paintings, which often simultaneously represent sequent events. This drawing depicts processions that take place before and after the wedding of Nala and Damayanti. On the upper right, the groom, seated in a horse-drawn carriage, comes to the wedding. On the upper left, he sits within the palace and observes his wife’s post-wedding departure. Myriad details convey the varied textures of a royal wedding. Several details, including the palace servant unfurling a canvas wall, grappling with the weight of the bolt as he creates an opening for Damayanti’s palanquin, play with the conditions of visibility.
The Amar Mahal Palace Museum in Jammu, India, is the stage for Dutta’s film Chitrashala. Forty-seven paintings made in the Pahari school of master-painter Nainsukh's immediate descendants adorn the museum’s walls. After nightfall, the images stir to life, thanks to Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan’s subtle animation.