Devi in the Form of Bhadrakali Adored by the Gods, folio from a dispersed Tantric Devi series

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.

Martin Lerner. The Flame and the Lotus: Indian and Southeast Asian Art from the Kronos Collections. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984, pp. 158–63, cat. no. 61a.