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In 1736, the court painter Jai Ram recorded Maharana Jagat Singh II of Udaipur attending a Raslila, the sacred dance-drama in which costumed actors re-enact the love story of the god Krishna and the cowherd women of Braj. The work belongs to the great age of Mewar court painting, when Udaipur's artists documented royal life event by event.
Consider what a Raslila performance actually was. In the Braj tradition, young boys were dressed and crowned as Krishna and Radha, and for the duration of the play devotees treated them not as actors but as living embodiments of the divine, called svarups. People bowed to children. Yet Jai Ram stages the encounter without lowering the king: the Maharana sits elevated and haloed in a white marble pavilion at the left, while the costumed performance fills the courtyard before him. That meeting of royal majesty and sacred spectacle is the charged situation Jai Ram was asked to fix on paper, and it tells you more about eighteenth-century Mewar than any chronicle of battles.
Udaipur, 1736: A King in the Audience of a God
Two years into his reign, Jagat Singh II was already commissioning paintings of the ceremonies that structured his court calendar. Festivals, processions, darbars, hunts: each occasion could become a picture, inscribed, dated, and archived. The Raslila painting of 1736 sits inside that documentary habit. It isn't an imagined mythological scene. It's a record of a specific devotional performance staged for a specific ruler, with the artist's name, Jai Ram, attached to it.
Maharana Jagat Singh Attending the Raslila, Jai Ram, 1736. View print options
The double subject is the point. Jai Ram had to paint a performance and its audience at once, the divine story and the earthly power watching it. European painters wrestled with the same problem of where a picture's true subject lives. Bruegel solved it by pushing his mythological event to the margin, as we traced in our story on Bruegel's Icarus drowning in the corner of a calm farm scene. Udaipur's painters made the opposite choice. Nothing is marginal. The ritual and the ruler share one continuous world, because in Mewar's own self-understanding, they did.
What Is the Raslila? Krishna's Circle Dance from the Bhagavata Purana
Anyone asking about the meaning of the Raslila painting has to start with the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana. There, on an autumn night in the forests of Braj, Krishna plays his flute and the gopis, the married cowherd women of the region, leave their homes to join him. He multiplies himself so that each woman believes she dances with him alone. The circle they form is the rasa mandala, and Hindu devotional tradition reads it as an image of the soul's love for God: total, reciprocal, and beyond social law.
The theatrical Raslila grew up around Vrindavan and Mathura as a way to make that episode present again. Boy actors take the roles. Song, dance, and spoken drama alternate. The performance opens with the circular dance itself, then moves through episodes of Krishna's life, his childhood pranks, the lifting of Mount Govardhan, his teasing of the gopis. For the audience, watching is worship. The Sanskrit term for such seeing is darshan, the act of beholding the deity and being beheld in return. When Jagat Singh II attended a Raslila, he wasn't consuming entertainment. He was performing devotion in public, and Jai Ram's painting preserved the proof.
Jagat Singh II of Mewar, 1734 to 1751: The Patron in the Picture
Jagat Singh II ruled Mewar from 1734 to 1751, from the city of Udaipur that his ancestors had made their capital. His reign was politically difficult, squeezed by Maratha demands for tribute, yet it became one of the most productive periods in the history of Udaipur court painting. He built the Jag Niwas pleasure palace on Lake Pichola, completed in 1746 and known today as the Lake Palace, and he kept his ateliers busy recording the festivities that filled it.
Krishna devotion ran deep in Mewar. In the early 1670s, under Maharana Raj Singh, the celebrated image of Shrinathji, a form of Krishna, had been given refuge in Mewar territory at the town now called Nathdwara, north of Udaipur. The shrine became the center of the Pushtimarg sect founded by the philosopher Vallabhacharya, and the Mewar rulers styled themselves its protectors. Sponsoring a Raslila, and commissioning its portrait, advertised that role. Royal patronage of religious imagery worked this way across the world in the same century; Goya's career began with a comparable act of decoration for a monarch, as we showed in our article on the boy riding a ram that Goya designed for the Spanish royal palace. A king's walls, in Madrid or Udaipur, were never neutral.
Jai Ram and the Udaipur Workshop: Painting as Court Record
About Jai Ram the man, the record is thin, and honesty demands saying so. Like most Rajput court painters, he survives chiefly through inscriptions on the works themselves. Udaipur paintings of this period often carry notations on the reverse naming the artist, the event, and the date, entered by court scribes. That's how we know a painter called Jai Ram made this picture in 1736, and it's a more secure form of authorship than many European paintings of the same decade can claim.
The workshop system mattered more than individual fame. Udaipur's artists worked in teams under the ruler's eye, producing court scenes on a scale that's unusual for works on paper, ambitious compositions filled with dozens of observed figures. Their job resembled that of a chronicler: attend the event, memorize it, reconstruct it. Repetition was part of the discipline. A painter might depict the same festival year after year, refining the formula each time, much as Van Gogh found meaning in working from an existing image when he transformed a Doré engraving into his own picture, a process we followed in our account of Van Gogh painting The Prison Courtyard in the asylum. Copying, in both traditions, could be an act of devotion rather than a shortcut.
Mewar Painting vs Mughal Miniature: Two Ways to Picture a King
Set Mewar painting and Mughal miniature side by side and the differences are immediate. The Mughal ateliers, shaped by Persian masters and European prints, prized naturalistic portraiture, atmospheric depth, and finely graded shading. Mewar's painters kept faith with older Indian conventions: saturated color laid in flat fields, profile portraiture, and a bird's-eye staging that lets one sheet hold an entire palace complex. Udaipur artists also used continuous narrative, showing the same protagonist at successive moments within a single painting, so that a picture reads through time as well as across space.
Neither approach is more sophisticated; they answer different questions. The Mughal miniature asks what a man looks like. The Mewar court scene asks what a reign looks like, what it means for a kingdom to gather around its ruler and its god on a given night in 1736. European art of exactly this era was asking its own version of the question, staging power through drama, gilt, and ceremony; the parallels become vivid if you browse our baroque art prints collection, where courts from Rome to Madrid perform themselves for the viewer just as insistently as Udaipur did.
Living with the Raslila: The Print at Home
Paintings like this were made to be looked at slowly, passed hand to hand at court, studied detail by detail. A fine art reproduction restores that way of seeing. The Raslila scene rewards a spot you pass daily, a hallway, a study, a reading corner, because new figures and incidents keep surfacing on the tenth viewing and the hundredth.
Maharana Jagat Singh Attending the Raslila, Jai Ram, 1736. View print options
The composition rewards that slow attention. In the white marble pavilion at the left the Maharana sits enthroned and haloed; a row of turbaned courtiers lines the lower edge; the courtyard fills with gopi dancers in gold, and musicians with flute and drum gather at the right beside a red staircase. The piece carries its devotional history lightly: what a viewer sees first is a night of music, color, and ceremony, and the story unfolds from there.
Jai Ram's originals are under museum glass. Yours can be on your wall this week.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Jai Ram's Raslila painting depict?
It records Maharana Jagat Singh II of Udaipur attending a Raslila in 1736. The Raslila is a devotional dance-drama in which costumed actors re-enact episodes from the life of the god Krishna, above all his circular dance with the gopis described in the Bhagavata Purana.
Where can you see Mewar court paintings like this one?
The City Palace Museum in Udaipur holds one of the most important collections of Mewar court painting. Significant Mewar works are also kept in the National Museum in New Delhi and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Who was Jai Ram?
Jai Ram was a painter active at the Udaipur court of Mewar in the 1730s. Like most Rajput court artists he is known chiefly through inscriptions on his works; court scribes recorded artists' names, dates, and events on paintings, which is how this 1736 work is attributed to him.
Why did the Maharana of Udaipur attend a Krishna performance?
Krishna devotion was central to Mewar's royal identity. Since the early 1670s the dynasty had protected the Shrinathji shrine at Nathdwara, seat of the Pushtimarg sect. Attending and sponsoring a Raslila displayed the ruler's piety, and watching the performance was itself considered an act of worship.
How does Mewar painting differ from Mughal miniature painting?
Mughal miniatures favor naturalistic portraiture and atmospheric shading, while Mewar painting uses flat saturated color, profile portraits, and panoramic staging. Udaipur artists also employed continuous narrative, showing the same figure at several moments within one painting.
Eleanor Hart
Eleanor Hart writes about European painting for Symbol Art Gallery. She chases the small stories behind big landscapes, and still thinks one brushstroke can change a room.
