Painting a Musical Trans-ition: The (Un)making of Set-Malhār Rāginī

From as early as the fifteenth century, artists in South Asia developed a vocabulary to paint music, especially the musical modes (rāga). Evoking an ocean of moods and emotions accompanying the rāga, this genre of paintings is known as Rāgamālās (lit. “garland of rāgas”). Musicians, musicologists and connoisseurs’ taste blended an array of themes and iconographies in Rāgamālā, and by the 1600s, musical modes came to be gendered, with rāga (husband), rāginī (wife) and rāgaputras (their sons). Within this rich tradition, a fundamental question remains unanswered: when and how did Rāgamālā come to be gendered? More importantly, was this a gendering binary, as is assumed conventionally? And why is gender expansiveness articulated in the language and depiction of asceticism? This paper focuses on a single folio of a rāginī named Set-Malhār, from a Rāgamālā series made in mid-18th century Rajasthan (possibly Jaipur), to think through provisional answers.