Help me understand this artwork

Hello all,

I was walking past a charity shop here in the UK some weeks ago and happened across this huge artwork depicting characters from Indian (Hindu) religion/mythology. I expected the piece to be some £200 but was shocked when the member of staff said it was just £40.

Eagerly I snapped it up and carted it off home. This thing is big. Around 2.5 metres in length.

I would really appreciate some help in finding out what is depicted here. From the research that I have done it appears to be a number of different stories from the Ramayana but with limited knowledge I am struggling to piece it all together.

I see in the middle who I think is Sri Rama, then at the top the five headed snake Shesha. Then I see the ten headed King of Lanka: Rakshasa. So is this the story of the kidnapping of Sita? Where is Sita on here?

Short of this paltry effort I am struggling to find out what is going on here. What are all the little bits going on around it? Like the five headed guy holding the snake? The boar-men (Varaha? but why are there two?)?

Help would be much appreciated :-)

a reply to: george_gaz

Can you post a photo? I'm very curious.

a reply to: george_gaz

the first complete character on the top of the third picture reminds me very much of the South American artwork although the pose seems the same (to my ignorant mind) the South American one has this figure sitting in what looks remarkably like a space capsule. Kurt Con D illustrated it in his book Chairiots of the Gods I think.

Indian culture must have been considerably well travelled and worshipped because in the UK the old God Cernunnus is sitting in a yogic pose - which is quite unnatural to most in the UK unless they are yoga enthusiasts.

As science has us at least 100,000 years old, it seems pointless to think that our kind did not travel all round the world during that long stretch of time. Blavatsky's point that we are arisen and fallen and arisen and fallen several times seems about right to me. The Indians Hindi does have a remarkable number of Gods and their faith is very fascinating and has not been messed about with for political reasons or other reasons so their books are a source of much history, which when Hancock found Dwarka seems to be coming alive to us all.

Nice artwork, very interesting.

Will delve further into the investigation of this piece and let you know what I find.

I have no idea what it represents, but the piece looks similar to a thangka...albeit a fairly basic one when compared to some that get around...

It might be worth taking the pictures to an (traditional) art forum if you don't get any leads here.

a reply to: george_gaz

From just looking at the thing I would say it is a love story. Starting from the bottom, and going up, it shows the courtship of some man and woman which grows/evolves upwards towards them wedding beneath the snake and then some kind of spiritual bond held together by spirits at the very top.

A lot of it seems to be gathering and offering things to her father and gods so they could be wed or to show their bond was approved or accepted by her father and gods.

But that is just my best guess from looking at it without any kind of knowledge of their belief system.

Art is in the eyes of the beholder. I also know art imitates life to a degree. I feel I'm not cultured enough to make a guess because I haven't studied art much. That being said, I know what I like. Art is a good thing. It lets us see what is in the mind of the artist. A good artist will have you believing it was made just for you. What do you see?

a reply to: george_gaz

It's a wood-block cotton print, by the look of it, though at this level of detail it's hard to tell. Very cheap in India.

I may be able to identify it for you if you will post a decent photograph that I can download and observe closely. These images are too small. Upload to ImageShack or some such site and post the link here.

Though the picture is not very clear, I think this is depicting the 'Samudra Manthan' episode in Bhagavath Purana, from Hindu mythology. A snake is used as a churning rope by the Devas (good forces) on one side and the Asuras (bad forces) on the other, to churn the milky ocean (universe). In the process, the celestial bodies are created. This is a symbolic representation of the creation of the universe.


en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: Astyanax

Thanks for looking.

When you click on the images that is the best resolution that I can upload with my phone. I don't have a better camera I am afraid :-(

At a rough guess i'd say it was a depiction of one of the stories in the Mahabharata, an Indian epic that is said to have been written over 5000 years ago, but was supposedly compiled from earlier, now missing texts, which are said to date back to over 40,000 years ago.

originally posted by: MysterX
At a rough guess i'd say it was a depiction of one of the stories in the Mahabharata, an Indian epic that is said to have been written over 5000 years ago, but was supposedly compiled from earlier, now missing texts, which are said to date back to over 40,000 years ago.

Absurd.

Writing isn't that old.
No culture claims a 40,000 year old textual mythos. The Mahabharata story itself dates to around the 9th century BC. And that was an oral tradition that wasn't completely written down until the 400's CE.

That's quite a lot of time for storytellers to embellish the tale.

Harte