painting by the artist Sita Ram, a watercolour depicting a Muharram procession in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, between the years of 1815 and 1825

 

painting by the artist Sita Ram, a watercolour depicting a Muharram procession in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, between the years of 1815 and 1825. It is not a large painting, by any means, just 11.5 x 17.5 inches, but brims with minute detail of the procession in the memory of the martyrdom of the grandson of the prophet, Hussain, commemorated by the Shia Muslims, replete with elephants, standards, horses, infantry, attendants and musicians.

“Its distinctive style—often called the Company style or school—was one of the happier outcomes of the Indo-European interaction in the Indian subcontinent,” wrote Mrinalini Venkateswaran for a companion essay with the piece. “Artists applied their traditional painterly skills to the new medium of watercolour to create work in a ‘Western’ style, resulting in remarkable paintings like this one.”

What was known of Sita Ram’s oeuvre was restricted to 220 paintings he created while traveling with the Marquess of Hastings, before more of his work started to be found in the 1970s.

Other painting of note on view are by Henry Singleton depicting the killing of Tipu Sultan, M. V. Dhurandhar’s painting At Chowpatty Beach, and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s scathing drawing of the Bengal famine, among others.