- Title
- Maharaja Savant Singh's Tears Irrigate the Garden of His Poetry
- Date Made
- circa 1750-1775
- Medium
- Opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 14 x 10 1/4 in. (35.5 x 26 cm); Image: 12 7/8 x 9 in. (32.7 x 22.86 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.89.51.2
- Collecting Area
- South and Southeast Asian Art
- Curatorial Notes
This unusual, if not unique, work has for its subject a veritable garden of elegant devanagari calligraphy of poetry composed by the ruler of Kishangarh, Maharaja Savant Singh (r. 1748-1757). Writing under his pen name, Nagaridas, Savant Singh wrote poems and commissioned numerous paintings celebrating the love of Krishna and Radha, as a metaphor for his own deep love for a poetess and singer named Bani Thani. Eventually, he abdicated his throne and moved with his lover to the homeland of Krishna, where they spent the rest of their blissful days composing devotional poetry.
The love poem forming the subject of this extraordinary image is entitled Ishq Caman (The Garden of Love). It was written in c. 1720–1740 in the Rekhta vernacular of early Urdu that was popular in Delhi and Lucknow, rather than in Savant Singh’s more customary linguistic idiom, Hindi Braj Bhasha. The poem on the painting was recently translated and published by Heidi R. M. Pauwels, Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh, Studies in Asian Art and Culture, no. 4 (Berlin: E. B. Verlag, 2015), pp. 245-256. It is also available in Stephen Markel, “The Enigmatic Image: Curious Subjects in Indian Art,” Asianart.com (http://asianart.com/articles/enigmatic/index.html).
- Selected Bibliography
Markel, Stephen. "The Enigmatic Image: Curious Subjects in Indian Art." Asianart.com, July 28, 2015. http://asianart.com/articles/enigmatic.
- Pauwels, Heidi Rika Maria. Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Keshangarh. Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2015.
