Sugriva, desiring King Vali’s crown, entered into battle knowing Rama would intervene and slay his brother with an arrow. As Vali lay dying, he accuses Rama of “taking him unaware like a serpent bites a sleeping man.” In turn, Rama replies that it was because Vali slept with Sugriva’s wife that he intervened and shot him. This scene describes the qualities of a moral king and the dangers of lust and desire. Vali’s wives, shown as human women, surround the fallen king while his son, the great monkey warrior Angada, looks out from a cave.
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Artwork Details
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Title:The Death of the Monkey King Vali; Illustrated folio from the dispersed Mankot Ramayana series
Date:ca. 1710–25
Culture:India, Punjab Hills, kingdom of Mankot or Nurpur
Medium:Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper
Dimensions:H. 8 1/16 in. (20.5 cm) W. 12 1/4 in. (31.1 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
In Book IV of the Ramayana (Epic of Rama), Sugriva, the deposed king of the monkeys, enlists the aid of Rama and Lakshmana to regain his kingdom from his older monkey brother, Bali, the former monarch of the same territory. Sugriva makes a binding agreement with the divine brothers. He will help in their efforts to free Sita from Ravana if Rama and Lakshmana will assist him to regain the forested and mountainous land of the monkeys (called Kishkindha), over which he once ruled. In this painting Rama, Lakshmana, Sugriva (the lead monkey), and Hanuman, the semidivine monkey assistant at the rear, are standing over the dead body of Bali. After a climactic battle Rama had fired his arrow at Bali, his arrow “resembling the sun shorn of its rays”; and the former monkey king fell dead. Here, the prostrate figure of Bali, with Rama’s bloody arrow piercing his chest, is mourned by his wife, Tara, and by three of her ladies, all of whom have unbound their hair. This knot of mourning figures is grouped at the base of the Kishkindha mountain. Bali’s son Angada stands at the entrance of a cave in the mountain, while a tree at the mountain’s summit bends towards the mourning ladies, as if in grief. (For illustrations from the same Series of the two incidents in the narrative that directly follow the incident illustrated here, see Darielle Mason et al 2001, no. 31 and B.N. Goswamy with Usha Bhatia 1999, no. 178.) This fine painting derives from a very large series (the exact number of folios in the series is unknown) illustrating the great Indian epic the Ramayana, written by Valmiki in probably the fourth century B.C. Composed in Sanskrit, the text running to twenty four thousand stanzas, is divided into seven books. It recounts the adventures of Rama, seventh incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Deprived of his kingdom, Rama is banished to the forest wilderness, where his loyal wife Sita is abducted by the allpowerful, tenheaded king of the demons, Ravana. The Ramayana describes Rama’s actionpacked adventures in recapturing Sita, while combating the ever vigilant forces of evil, which Ravana represents. (For other illustrations to the Ramayana, see cat. nos. .......... ) No one is certain where in the Punjab Hills the present important, yet widely scattered Series was made. All of its known paintings appear to illustrate incidents described in Book IV (Kishkindha Kanda) of the Ramayana, where Rama and Lakshmana’s exploits in the land located in the south center of an imagined India are described. Some scholars (W.G. Archer, Pratapaditya Pal, etc.) believe these pictures were painted in Mankot. Others (Eberhard Fischer) have suggested Guler, while most recently the kingdom of Nurpur, following B.N. Goswamy, has been proposed. (1) Over the last 40 years various distinguished scholars have examined the facial types, landscape and sky conventions characteristic of the Series, and its color combinations as well: yet they can not agree. (1) John Seyller and Jagdish Mittal 2014, no. 10
Inscription: Inscribed on the verso with 11 lines of Sanskrit text written in black and red ink in devanagari script, as well as the Sanskrit number 27 written in black ink.
Art of the Past 2001??
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. "Sita and Rama: The Ramayana in Indian Painting," August 3, 2019–March 7, 2021.
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.
