"Krishna and Radha Toss a Flower," Folio from the "Kangra Bihari" Sat Sai (Seven Hundred Verses)

The Series to which this and the following two paintings (nos. 88 and 89) belong is the
so­called ‘Kangra Bihari Sat Sai’. The Sat Sai (700 verses) is a collection of sensuous. word-
rich poems written by Bihari Lal Chaube (1595­1663), the court poet of Jai Singh I (r. 1625­67)
of Amber, the ruler of the former kingdom of Jaipur in Rajasthan. Bihari’s work deals with the
nayaka­nayika (hero­heroine) theme. which describes the idealized behavior of lovers and the
everyday situations and predicaments of love. According to legend, Bihari wrote his text to
beguile Jai Singh into leaving the royal harem, where he had tarried for one year, leaving
unfinished various pressing matters of state.
In ca. 1785 a beautiful series of paintings illustrating Bihari’s text was made in the
Punjab Hills for Maharaja Sansar Chand (r. 1775­1823), a great patron of painting and the ruler
of the former kingdom of Kangra in the Punjab Hills. During the early twentieth century this
Series remained largely intact in the ancestral Tehri Garwahl collection. But in the late 1960’s
the remaining paintings were dispersed. Consequently, three paintings from the original Kangra
Series are included here.
86. SK.080 DP334090.TIF
The original, never­completed Kangra Series comprised some 40 paintings. But another
20 works, now existing only as rather sketchy preparatory drawings, were meant to be included
with it. Yet these preparatory drawings, with outlines finalized and compositions highlighted with
faint washes of color, were never prepared for paint, or fully colored. All 20 preparatory
drawings are now in the collection of the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi (Benares).
The existence of these preparatory drawings confirms the idea that the Series was never
completed. “This suggests that the artist who had taken up the project of illustrating the 700
verses of Bihari may have died .... “ (1) The majority of the paintings have no inscriptions on
their reverse sides, or have a poem with a meaningless inscription, “the situation shown in the
painting being entirely different from that described in the poem.” (2)
The original artist, probably Fattu, the nephew of Nainsukh (see cat. nos. 69 and 70),
personified his nayaka (hero) and nayika (heroine) in the persons of Krishna and Radha. In the
various paintings of Fattu’s Series the divine couple argues, reconciles, makes love, and
suffers the pangs of separation, their meetings depicted against the gently rolling topography
and neat villages of the Kangra valley, where Fattu lived.
Probably the most distinctive features of this Series are the Mughal­style oval formats
and the elaborately decorated borders with dark blue spandrels heightened with gold
arabesque. (All but two of the 40 finished paintings are oval in shape.) The name of the artist
Fattu is written on a drawing copied from a painting in the original series. This drawing, now in
the National Museum, New Delhi, is the basis for our attribution of the entire Series to the same
artist, Fattu.
Two other paintings in the Kronos Collection (nos. 88 and 89) are also from the ‘Kangra
Bihari Sat Sai ‘ Series. (3)
(1) M.S. Randhawa, Kangra Paintings of the Bihari Sat Sai (New Delhi: National
Museum, 1966), pg. 37
(2) Ibid
(3) Two later versions of the same text exist. See Joachim Bautze, Lotosmund und
Löwenritt: Indische Miniaturmalerei (Stuttgart: Linden Museum, 1991), pp. 181, 184.

Inscription: Inscribed on the verso in black ink: a two line poem in Hindi written in devanagari script

Ancestral Collection of Maharaja Manvindra Shah of Tehri Garhwal, Narendranagar, Garhwal, U.P., but probably acquired from the Kangra royal collection on the occasion of the wedding of Sansar Chand's two daughters to Raja Sudarshan Shah of Tehri Garhwal in 1829; Swiss Collection until 1983

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.