The Devimahatmya Paintings Preserved at the National Archives, Kathmandu.

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Review

By MASAHIDE MORI and YOSHIKO MORI. Translated by ROLF W. GIEBEL. Bibliotheca Codicum Asiaticorum, vol. 9. Tokyo: THE CENTRE FOR EAST ASIAN CULTURAL STUDIES, FOR UNESCO, 1995. Pp. 125, 124 pl. 6300.

The 124 paintings illustrated in this book, all in color, were painted in 1863 in Pokhara, a provincial town in Nepal some one hundred fifty kilometers west of Kathmandu. They are illustrations of the Devimahatmya, a fifth or sixth century A.D. Sanskrit text that presents the goddess as the dominant deity in the Hindu pantheon. The goddess as a cosmic deity, as great as such "male" deities as Siva and Visnu, was from then on to grow in importance throughout the South Asian continent.

When Tej Bahadur Rana commissioned a painter to illustrate the text, he was a colonel, living with his family in Pokhara. Colonel Rana is depicted in a single painting in the series (pl. 124), seated at ease beside his wife and surrounded by his children, four girls sitting informally with their parents and four boys standing at attention before their father in a single file and in order of their age. The authors make the point that, while the wife and children are given generic faces, the Colonel's is clearly meant to be a specific portrait. The family is at home, and the artist has carefully depicted the furnishings that indicate their high status: large glass windows, an ornate wall-to-wall carpet, heavy draperies, and a large clock that (if I can make it out) shows 7:15. The Colonel's uncle was the prime minister of Nepal, who governed for over thirty years, but Tej Bahadur Rana never rose to political importance himself.

The paintings now are kept in the National Archives in Kathmandu. The authors, Masahide and Yoshiko Mori, present them with a fairly brief introduction followed by descriptions of each of the paintings. The originals are watercolors on paper, each approximately 67 x 50 cm in size. It is never made clear what such an extensive set of illustrations were for, nor how they were used. The Moris demonstrate how closely the illustrations follow the narrative, and many of the descriptive details, of the Sanskrit text. Actually, there are several different versions of the text, five of which the authors use in a comparative table to indicate for each painting the pages in the various texts to which each corresponds. The...