ABSTRACT
The Ramayana epic was both a site of invention for creative artists across South and Southeast Asia and the distinctive product of an interpretive community, who invested it with culturally specific concerns. This chapter considers a single episode from the seventeenth-century Mewar Ramayana—the postmortem conservation of the patriarch Dasharatha in an oil-filled vessel. While the painted manuscript from western India represents the incident using both image and text, the two media adopted vastly divergent attitudes. Whereas the text dwells on the dead king’s oil bath directly and in dream form, the corresponding images are far more circumspect. This chapter probes this specific text-image interface to highlight the values of kingship that likely guided the visual artists of this painted book, who created for the courtly audiences of Mewar and ruler Maharana Jagat Singh (r. 1628–52 CE). The chapter also contrasts the treatment of the same episode in a contemporaneous Mughal Ramayana manuscript, where wonder may have been the animating or driving aesthetic interest.
