Nadia Cattoni

How to Think Pictures,

How to Visualize Texts?

Part I includes three chapters discussing the value of studying images, as well
as texts, for the comprehension of early modern literatures, authors, and tra-
ditions. It shows how much we gain from combining approaches and opening
our practices to a dialogue between visuality and textuality, and addresses new
questions that emerge from this cross-disciplinary perspective. Raman Sinha’s
‘Iconography of Tulsīdās’ focuses on the various textual and visual representa-
tions through time (from premodern to modern) of the famous and celebrated
author of the Rāmcaritmānas, Tulsīdās. He underlines the different traditions
in the portraiture of the poet and shows the distinctions between textual and
visual representations, considering also notions of time, context, and audience.
The case studies of Sūrdās’s and Nāgarīdās’s poetry and its illustrations are
discussed in John Stratton Hawley’s ‘When Blindness Makes for Sight’ and
Heidi Pauwels’s ‘Reading Pictures: Towards a Synoptic Reading Combining
Textual and Art Historical Approaches’. They both question the link between
a text and the image(s) related to that text. The inquiry developed by Hawley
is how can an artist keep the surprise (‘oral epiphany’) included in Sūrdās’s
poems when the medium is a visual one, which implies a global vision of the
story at first sight. In other words, how is the complexity of the text retained
when developed step by step in the poem through an image with an immediate
impact? Hawley shows the various strategies adopted by the artists navigating
between Sūrdās’s text and the visual reading they offer, following their own
creativity. Pauwels’s concern is, as a textual historian, how does one include in
a textual study the visual medium which she considers as part of the reception
history of a text, as it is the case for a commentary, in order to create a better un-
derstanding of bhakti poetry. By comparing illustrations based on Nāgarīdās’s
text and illustrations inspired, or probably inspired, by Nāgarīdās’s poetry, and
by taking in consideration arguments made by art historians, she shows how
including the analysis of illustrations in the study of a tradition leads to new
interpretations.

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 Nadia Cattoni

Since the visual turn in the nineties and the development of the visual studies,1
supplied by cultural studies, the image has been the centre of preoccupations
and has shown its interpretative potential, reconfiguring the classical frame of
art history. The debates on what an image is and how they are to be studied have
expanded through many disciplines and fields. It is therefore no surprise that the
need has arisen to analyse images with (and beyond) art history and in dialogue
with textual history for a deeper understanding of early modern literatures and
traditions in South Asian studies, materialised in this volume. Starting from the
various examples discussed and analysed in the contributions in Part I, I consider
here three modes of thinking about visuality: First, I start with a discussion on the
text-image pairing and on possible tools at our disposal to analyse their relation-
ship, especially when they are in co-presence; second, I examine the link between
images and their viewers as considered by religious studies, that is, the study of
images as practices; finally, I interrogate the possible influence of images on
early modern textual production with a brief case study.

The text-image pairing

The three chapters that comprise this part share the concern of studying visuality
in relation with textuality and generate new questions about this relationship and
about what can be produced when comparing the two media. In the various ex-
amples which are developed, the relationship between text and image is shown as
complex, creative, and meaningful, since no simple and unique answer emerges
when the two media express the same object (in our case, the content of a poem or
an author’s portraiture). This complexity and the multileveled reading generated
through the text-image relation is due to a variety of internal and external factors
such as the different actors (poet, painter, patron, audience) involved in the pro-
cess; the context, place, and time of production, which are not always the same;
the specific intrinsic constraints related to each medium; and the dialogue which is
produced between the two media.
In Pauwels’s and Hawley’s chapters (and partly in Sinha’s), the images anal-
ysed are taken as illustrations of poetical texts and discussed as such. Chronologi-
cally, they are subordinated to the text, which they transpose in a visual form. But

1 W.  J.  T. Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn’ (see Picture Theory 1994) and Gottfried Boehm’s
‘iconic turn’ (see Was ist ein Bild? 1994) are the main protagonists of this new perspective,
discussed at the time by many authors in various fields. If their analyses differ on some
points, they share the idea of a language specific to images going beyond the classical
science of art (Stiegler (2008), pp. 2–3). In the German scholarship, the term Bildwissen-
schaften is used to designate the research area of ‘visual studies’.
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 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

this subordination in time does not imply a less significant impact of the image,
nor a less interesting or meaningful reading. Images use their own language and
are an invitation to a multileveled reading:

Aujourd’hui cela fait longtemps que l’on ne considère plus les images
contenues dans les manuscrits comme de simples « illustrations », dont
la lecture serait subordonnée au texte et l’importance finalement moindre
par rapport à l’écrit. Les images organisent, structurent, commentent et
mettent en scène le texte (lorsque ce n’est pas l’inverse) ou, conçues comme
des aides à la compréhension, attirent l’attention du lecteur sur le message
que l’œuvre veut transmettre. Grâce à un langage qui leur est propre, les
images peuvent même véhiculer un récit ou une lecture sensiblement diffé-
rents du texte qui les entoure. Elles invitent ainsi à une lecture à plusieurs
niveaux de l’œuvre qu’elles accompagnent.2

The complexity of the text-image relationship is due to the fact that the illustrator,
working sometimes in collaboration with his patron (as suggested by Pauwels),
when being in charge of transforming a text into an image, behaves not only as
the illustrator but as an interpreter. And as such adds, cuts, focuses, develops, and
reduces some of the elements he has selected in the text—or outside the text. This
is obvious in the examples developed by Pauwels and Hawley when comparing
a poem and the illustration of that poem, and the same process applies for the
visual description of the biography of Tulsīdās as presented by Sinha. They both
underline the additions, the differences of interpretation, or the introduction of
elements from the context of production which are integrated in the final image.
As they show, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the ‘original’ text
and the image derived from it, no faithful transcription without a visible interven-
tion from the illustrator. Quite the opposite; the process can be described as in-
terpretative, transformative, and creative. Both Pauwels and Hawley use the term
‘translation’ to designate this process, which invites us to consider the issues of
the dialogue between text and image in the same way we consider the translation
process from one text to another.3 Such translation from text to another medium
is theorized by Roman Jakobson in his definition of categories of translation as an
‘intersemiotic translation’, meaning ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
signs of nonverbal sign systems’.4 Our case studies are examples of poems (a ver-

2  Wetzel and Flückiger (2009), p. 12.

3  On translation, see the introduction to Part II by Allison Busch and to Part III by Maya
Burger in this volume.
4  Jakobson (1959), p.  233. The ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation’ is the third
kind of translation identified by Jakobson which can also cover a transposition from a
literary text to other nonverbal signs systems such as music, dance, or photography. The
two others are the ‘intralingual translation or rewording’, which is ‘an interpretation of
verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language’, and the ‘interlingual transpo-
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 Nadia Cattoni

bal signs system) which are interpreted in paintings (a nonverbal signs system), a
creative transposition to be read not as a simple transaction but as a meaningful
process of transformation.
The text-image relation can be thought of in other ways to the transposition
from textuality to visuality. In contrast, the text can be itself an illustration of an
image, clarifying its content, adding information or developing an idea. As Louvel
and Scepi note, this passage from image to text is due to the intrinsic status of the
image itself which is asking for verbalization and explanation. In other words, the
image needs the text.5 The text can also behave as if it is an image (especially in
poetry), developing metaphors and searching to create a mental image for the read-
er. In this case, the link between text and image needs to be studied inside the text
itself.6 And finally, the image can do what a text does in narration; developing its
content and meaning step by step, organising the space, and guiding the viewer’s
eye from one point to another. In the cases where, like in illustrated manuscripts,
text and image are in co-presence, we also need to think about the place where
the text is located.7 Is it beside the painting? On the top or on the bottom? Is it on
the back of the illustration? Is it inside the illustration, for example denominating
some characters who are represented, as is quite common? Should we consider the
text as part of the illustration or not? How do our eyes, as readers or viewers, jump
from text to image or from image to text? In which order? How many times? At
which moment? Is there a correlation between the text and the image? The ques-
tions are numerous and relevant.
Scholarship on the text-image relation has elaborately dealt with the moment
of co-presence of the two media. For this discussion, the literary critics from the
nineties coined the term of ‘iconotext’, taking its roots in the French scholarly
community8 and later defined by Peter Wagner as the ‘use of (by way of reference
or allusion, in an explicit or implicit way) an image in a text or vice versa’.9 From
this perspective, the text-image pairing is seen as mutually interdependent in the
way it establishes meaning. The literary critic and theorist Liliane Louvel, anoth-

sition or translation proper’, which is ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some
other language’.
5  ‘Si l’image, par opposition au texte, appelle une perception d’ensemble immédiate—
ainsi qu’y insistait Lessing—, il reste que le perçu n’est pas le su et que le visible semble
attirer à lui la parole : l’image sollicite le texte, réclame la verbalisation.’ (Louvel and
Scepi (2005), p. 10)
6  An example of this process is analysed in the thesis of Biljana Zrnic (2016).
7  Pauwels, in her chapter, pays attention to where the text of Nāgarīdās is positioned from
one painting to another.
8  Heck (1999), p. 37, in a collection of critical essays entitled Iconotextes and edited by
Alain Montandon in 1990.
9  Wagner (1996), p. 15. On Wagner’s use of iconotext, see also his Reading Iconotexts
(1997).
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 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

er French scholar, grasped this term and theorized it in several works published in
French and translated partially in English.10 For her, the iconotext

illustrates perfectly the attempt to merge text and image in a pluriform fu-
sion, as in an oxymoron. The word ‘iconotext’ conveys the desire to bring
together two irreducible objects and form a new object in a fruitful tension
in which each object maintains its specificity. It is therefore a perfect word to
designate the ambiguous, aporetic, and in-between object of our analysis.11

In this definition, the interdependence between the two media is always present,
neither the image nor the text is free from its counterpart. But in addition, their
co-presence and interdependence creates a third object, a new one, an in-be-
tween object producing its own signification. This is clearly visible in the case
studies presented in this part of the volume, since the new object created by the
fusion of text and image carries new significations which are built on a fructu-
ous dynamic of going and coming back. With this notion of iconotext and the
idea that texts and images are in an ‘infinite dialogue’, Louvel elaborates a de-
tailed typology of the various forms of relation between text and image,12 show-
ing the multiple variations of this dialogue. Even if strong emphasis is placed
on the literary modalities of inscribing images in the text and on the narrative
functions of the image, the diverse concepts elaborated by Louvel, in dialogue
with the authors of visual studies, help us to rethink the text-image relationship.

The image and the viewer

The three chapters in this part are all concerned with the production of religious
poetry connected to the bhakti movement of early modern India. The illustra-
tions they discuss need to be understood as objects of communication (beside
textual production) of religious ideals belonging to the Krishnaite and Ramaite
traditions. In some illustrations discussed by Pauwels, it is shown how the patron,
and in some cases his family, are inserted in the paintings and become ‘active
participants in the mythological realm’. The reasons for a patron to ask for the
illustration of a specific manuscript are numerous: to reach a wider audience, to
follow the fashion of major courts, to produce a parallel between a text, its author,

10  See her Poetics of the Iconotext (2011), edited by Jacobs and translated by Petit, which
is a selection of her previous works: L’oeil du texte. Texte et image dans la littérature de
langue anglaise (1998) and Texte/image: images à lire, textes à voir (2002).
11  Louvel (2011), p. 15.
12  Her typology (see Part II of Poetics of the Iconotext, especially pp. 56–66) draws on
Genette’s categories of transtextuality, developed in Palimpsestes (1982).
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 Nadia Cattoni

its content, and the patron’s own story, to spread religious or political messages.
In the study of Tulsīdās’s premodern portraitures, Sinha argues for a sanctifica-
tion and a deification process in the representations of the poet, being assimilated
to the content of his poetry. In modern and performative representations, on the
contrary, the human aspects of the poet are depicted ‘in such a way that the con-
temporary viewer may empathize with the poet in his distress and sublimation’.
Hawley shows in one of his examples that the poet Sūrdās is represented in the
painting illustrating one of his poems and suggests a simultaneous seeing-listen-
ing process for the connoisseur. As we can see in these examples, the context of
production and of the diffusion of a visual representation is important and needs
to be considered. Who is asking for the production of an image or a statue? For
what purpose? For whom is the representation conceived? Where will the repre-
sentation be shown? How is the image seen and used? These questions demon-
strate how necessary it is to analyse the image and take into consideration various
aspects of the transmission from the production of the image to its reception.
Scholars of the Study of religions, who have included the study of visuality
in their analysis and understanding of religious movements, take especially into
consideration the modalities of interaction between the image and the viewer. As
David Morgan defines:

The study of religious visual culture is therefore the study of images, but
also the practices and habits that rely on images as well as the attitudes and
preconceptions that inform vision as a cultural act.13

From this perspective, it is suggested to read images not as inert objects but as
practices which produce meaning, allowing a clearer perception of their role.14
Consequently, with this approach, the attention of the analysis is paid to the
modes of seeing, encompassing various aspects which enhance an understanding
of how images are interpreted and lived in religious contexts. David Morgan calls
‘the particular configuration of ideas, attitudes, and customs that informs a reli-
gious act of seeing as it occurs within a given cultural and historical setting’ the
‘sacred gaze’. This ‘gaze consists of several parts: a viewer, fellow viewers, the
subject of their viewing, the context or setting of the subject, and the rules that
govern the particular relationship between viewers and subject.’15
In the visual religious practices of South Asia, we are familiar with the con-
cept of darśana, but this concept covers various aspects and can take distinctive
forms16 which gives the occasion to study this specific practice from different

13  Morgan (2005), p. 3.

14  Knauss and Pezzoli-Olgiati (2015b), p. 2.
15  Morgan (2005), p. 3.
16  Ibid., p. 48.
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 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

angles. Also, other aspects can be the focus of research,17 even more when con-
sidering that in the act of seeing other senses are implied:

The gaze, as Belting (2001) also underlined, is not an abstract concept,

but—individually or socially—embodied and connected to the other sens-
es through which we perceive the world, as well as emotional and cognitive
ways of meaning making: Bredekamp names feeling, thinking, touching
and listening as fundamental dimensions of perception.18

This opens up a dynamic study of images, involving a wide range of elements

and questioning the function of images in early modern religious circles. What
do these images tell us about how religious practices were lived? What are their
functions in a specific context?
To this can be added a gender perspective since the use of feminine figures
in religious images produces its own significations and generates new questions
for specific approaches.19 To take the example discussed by Pauwels, what does
it mean for the audience of Kishangarh that the mistress of the king and poet,
Banī-ṭhanī, is inserted in the paintings? What is her role? How is she perceived
by the viewers? Interestingly, Pauwels notes that in one of the paintings she is
represented in ‘her real-life role as a performer’. What are the various roles she
could take or not take?

From images to texts?

I would like to end this introduction with an attempt to trace visual influences in
poetry. In the early modern world, borders were porous and constantly in flux,
the norm was fixed through exchanges rather than through fixed strategies: lan-
guages used for literary purposes were numerous and the authors’s lexicon was
large, religious traditions shared ideas and concepts, literary motives were found
in various genres. These exchanges can be studied through the analysis of texts
but also through orality and visuality since cultural deeds are produced by the

17  See, for example, Burger (2010).

18  Knauss and Pezzoli-Olgiati (2015b), p. 8. Hans Belting has adopted a perspective from
anthropology in his work on images; see his Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bild-
wissenschaft (2001). Horst Bredekamp a perspective from art history; see his Theorie
des Bildakts (2010), recently translated in English with the title Image Acts: A Systematic
Approach to Visual Agency (2018). See also The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture
and the Social Life of Feeling by David Morgan (2012).
19  See the special issue of Religion and Gender entitled The Normative Power of Images:
Religion, Gender, Visuality edited by Knauss and Pezzoli-Olgiati (2015a). Two articles
present examples from India: Jakobsh (2015) and Cattoni (2015).
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 Nadia Cattoni

use of various communication media. Literary historians generally study these

exchanges through intertextuality, but as it is shown in this part, the study of
visual sources crossed with textual sources is a great contribution (as has already
been shown for orality) to the making of history. Due to our textocentric perspec-
tive and to the sources at our disposal, much of our focus is on visual material
from illustrated manuscripts, that is, materials linked to a text. But we know that
paintings are not always connected with a specific text and that some of them
circulated independently.20 Even if an image was at an initial stage connected to a
text and produced or influenced by it, it sometimes separated from it and pursued
its own life. In such cases, the image was transmitted from one hand to another
without any textual link.
Connected to a text or not, visual representations were part of the early mod-
ern culture as well as literary texts. From such a starting point is it possible to
read a text in order to identify traces of visual influences? For such an approach,
we need a motif largely diffused through visuality and textuality. The description
of the nāyikā is one of them. Indeed, the beautiful heroine is represented in a
large number of images.21 Some of them are directly related to illustrated texts as
famous rīti works, specialized in the description of the feminine figure through
nāyikābheda (for example, Keśavdās’s Rasikapriyā22 or Bihārī’s Satasaī23). Oth-
ers are not related to any texts. In addition, paintings representing other genres
such as Ragamala or bārahmāsā also depict feminine heroines, sharing with the
literary nāyikā common features related to female beauty and eroticism.24 Also,
a large number of independent images portraying female figures are understood
as representations of nāyikās.
In the example developed below, I suggest using this corpus of images to read
a description of a nāyikā written by the poet Dev (c. 1675–1767?) in the first half
of the eighteenth century in a work called Rasavilāsa (1726?).25 This text is made
up of almost exclusively nāyikābhedas, some of them being quite innovative for

20 On the circulation of paintings, painters, patrons and viewers, see Aitken (2010),
pp. 48–49.
21 See A Celebration of Love. The Romantic Heroine in the Indian Arts edited by Dehejia
(2004), which compiles articles on the nāyikā figure and its multiple representations
through the iconography of various schools. See also Aitken (1997) on the representation
of femininity in Kangra style painting, Garimella (1998) on the figure of the sakhī in
Rajput painting and the forthcoming book by Aitken and Busch on their project ‘Aesthetic
Worlds of the Indian Heroine’.
22  See Desai (1995).
23  See Randhawa (1966).
24  For exchanges between the literary nāyikā portraiture and Ragamala paintings, see
Aitken (2013), especially pp. 48–51.
25  For a complete analysis of this work, see Cattoni (2019). A chapter is dedicated to the
nāyikābheda discussed here with an intertextual perspective.
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 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

a genre deeply established in eighteenth-century Braj literature. One of these

nāyikābhedas, developed in the three first chapters of the Rasavilāsa, is elaborat-
ed on the base of the jāti of the nāyikā. In it, the poet divides the description of the
heroine in six groups depending on where she lives (in the city, in the village, in
the forest, and so on), enumerating then the nāyikās and the jāti they embody. One
of this group depicts the nāyikās who live on the road (pathikavadhū). According
to Dev, they are four: the vanijārī (travelling merchant), the joginī (yogini, female
ascetic),26 the naṭī (itinerant artist), and the kañjarini (member of the kañjar com-
munity). I am interested here in the yogini ( joginī), described as such by the poet:

Here is the yogini:

The female beggar wanders from one forest to another with the power of her youth;
the residents of the forest remain stuck by her mastery of the raga.

She plays cikārā,27 she sings sweet melodies;

having heard this sound, the sages remain irritated with this sound in their head.

She charms the great serpent, many trees, snakes and birds;
having listened, how many Kolas and Bhīlas28 keep complaining?

The lion, the jackal and the leopard stand near, looking at her;
the spotted deer, the monkey and the dark-coated antelope remain delighted.29

The yogini is not a common figure of nāyikābhedas. In fact, the entire bheda is
very uncommon for the genre, which leaves free space for the poet’s creativity
and new influences. Unlike other descriptions of the nāyikā, the poem describing
the yogini does not give many indications about her physical appearance, except

26  Joginī is a polysemic term referring to various categories of human or divine beings.
Here, we can assume that the poet is talking of an itinerant female ascetic. For definitions
of the yogini and analyses in different contexts, see the articles collected in the book ed-
ited by Keul (2013).
27  A two-stringed, bowed instrument similar in type to the sarangi.
28  Tribes living in the forest.
29  My translation.
jogini yathā//
ḍolai vana vana jora jovana ke jācakani
rāga vasa kīne vanavāsī vījhi rahe hai/
kīgirī vajāvati madhura sura gāvati su
dhuni suni sīsa dhuni muni ṣījhi rahe hai/
mohe mahāpannaga aneka aga naga ṣaga
kāna dai dai kola bhīla kete jhījhi rahe hai/
ṭhāḍhe ḍhiga vāgha viga cīte citavata draga
jhāṣamṛga sāṣamṛga rojha rījhi rahe hai//
RV 3.33, as edited by Malviya (2002).
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 Nadia Cattoni

that she is young. But three elements seem important here: first, the context of
the forest; second, the fact that the nāyikā plays music; and third, that she charms
all the beings living in the forest. For the description of the yogini, the poet Dev
has designed a scene in which a young woman is charming all the inhabitants
of the forest (human beings, animals, and plants) with her music. We know that
she is a yogini only by the title at the beginning of the poem ( jogini yathā)30 and
by the use of jācakani (female beggar) in the first line. If we think of a yogini,
we could imagine another kind of description. For example, Dev could have de-
scribed the specific colour of her clothes, how her hair is arranged, her gait, and
so on. Also, as she is categorized as a nāyikā living on the roads, she could have
been described as walking in a middle of a lane and not in the specific context of
the forest—even if the forest is the place for ascetics and seers.
Looking at images portraying the female ascetic, I found two sets of paintings
sharing common features with Dev’s description of the yogini, helping us to un-
derstand the choices made by the poet for his portrait. I recall here that a direct
influence is not implied between the images discussed here and Dev’s poem as
there is no evidence of direct contact between the poet and those paintings (peri-
ods of time and places being also different). But if we assume that cultural deeds,
artists, and patrons are all in circulation, if they move from one place to another,
this means that literary and visual motives developed inside these works move
too. Since all, in most likelihood, move on the same roads, they cross each other.
In the eighteenth century, typologies of women and of men (understood in a broad
sense and not in the restrictive sense of nāyaka-nāyikā-bheda) were well known
in literature (in different literary genres) as well as in painting (in various schools
of painting). Visual representations circulating around could also have been a
source of inspiration for the poet of this period, even more if that poet was depart-
ing from traditional ways of writing, as was the case for Dev in his Rasavilāsa.
The first set of paintings, discussed by Deborah Hutton, is made of a col-
lection of type portraits of yoginis,31 who are represented on a single page and
alone.32 Except for one painting, they all show the yogini in a landscape with pal-
aces in the background and for two of them, the yogini holds a musical instrument
on her shoulder. One is called ‘Yogini with veena’ (c. 1590, Bijapur) and the other

30  The term jogini also appear when the poet lists the nāyikās of this bheda (RV 3.31).
31  Hutton (2006), pp. 83–96. The paintings discussed are linked to the court of Bijapur
and are dated from the early 1590s to 1640. Hutton mentions later paintings, from the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, also from the Deccan and from Lucknow (see note 33,
p. 183). Hutton defines these yogini paintings as type portraits because ‘they represent the
female ascetic as a type, rather than portraying actual, individual as-cetics.’ (p. 89)
32  These paintings are not folios from illustrated manuscripts. ‘Most likely, at some point
in their histories, the pages were part of albums exhibiting examples of painting, poetry,
and calligraphy.’ (Ibid., p. 89)
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 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

‘Yogini playing a tambur’ (c. 1605–1640, Bijapur).33 Hutton analyses the whole

set of images as ‘intimately relate[d] to the Sufic ideals of the lover and the be-
loved as expressed in literature and poetry’.34 She also shows, drawing on specific
elements such as the jewellery worn by the yoginis, that the portraits are closely
linked to courtly life. The women who are depicted are in fact noble women dis-
guised as yoginis, this motif being also the purpose of a kind of Urdu romance.35
We see here how much these visual representations are linked to literary motives,
the ‘infinite dialogue’ we were talking about above.
Several elements of these paintings are interesting for our discussion of Dev’s
poem, as they are in correlation with the yogini as described by the poet. First, the
representation of the yogini in a landscape in which the vegetation is prominent.
Even if palaces are in the background, the yogini is clearly not in a garden but
more in something similar to a forest.36 Second, the musical instrument held by
two of the yoginis, described as musicians just like Dev’s yogini. Third, the fact
that they are depicted alone. The yogini is in the centre of the painting and is its
main subject; nothing else catches the eye of the viewer, just as the nāyikā is the
central figure of the poem. Fourthly and finally, the treatment of the yogini as a
type of woman instead of a specific individual, which is a basic component of
nāyikābheda.
Beside these paintings specifically dedicated to the depiction of the yogini,
another set of images can be understood as in dialogue with Dev’s poem. These
images come from Ragamala illustrations. Ragamalas share elements with nāyaka-
nāyikā-bhedas, such as the gendered representation of male and female in
rāga and rāginī. The genre was illustrated early in time and circulated very wide-
ly,37 which increases the possibilities of exchanges. A specific rāginī is partic-
ularly stimulating for this discussion; it is the illustration of the āsāvarī rāginī.
In general, she is depicted in a landscape, sometimes seated on a rock or a hill,
sometimes in a cave. She is surrounded by plants and trees. Most of the time, she
looks like an ascetic, with appropriate clothes and her hair tied up on her head.38
She is always shown charming serpents, all crawling in her direction, and some-

33  Ibid., figure 3.5, p. 86 and figure 3.6, p. 88 respectively.

34  Ibid., p. 84.
35  Ibid., p. 93–96.
36  See, in particular, plate 17, ‘Yogini by a stream’, c. 1605–1640, Bijapur (ibid.).
37  Miner (2015), par. 12 of the online version of the article <https://books.openedition.
org/obp/2526?lang=fr>. (Accessed 27 September 2018).
38  A clear example is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales: ‘Asavari
Ragini’, seventeenth century, opaque watercolour on paper, 15.6 × 11.0 cm, 37.2010. Gift
of Dr Nigel and Mrs Norma Hawkins, 2010. Donated through the Australian Govern-
ment Cultural Gifts Program. Online at <https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/
works/37.2010/>. (Accessed 27 September 2018).
13
 Nadia Cattoni

Figure 1  ‘Asavari ragini, from a Ragamala series’ by Nasiruddin, 1605, Chawand,

opaque watercolour on paper, 20.7 × 18.6. Victoria and Albert Museum, IS.38-1953.

times playing the flute.39 In some paintings, she is also shown in the middle of
the forest, with all the elements just described, but also surrounded with several
animals, captivated by her, just as in figure 140.
As in Dev’s poem, the rāginī of the painting ‘charms the great serpent, many
trees, snakes and birds’. They are all attracted by her, even the trees which are
bending in her direction in a movement of attraction and protection. The antelope,
the deer, and the lion described in Dev’s poem are also present. In other illustra-
39  See the example in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: ‘Asavari Ragini,
from a Ragamala series’, late seventeenth century, opaque watercolour and gold on
paper, 29.2 × 20.4 cm, 17.2913. Ross-Coomaraswamy Collection. Online at <https://www.
mfa.org/collections/object/asavari-ragini-from-a-ragamala-series-149430>. (Accessed 28
September 2018).
40  Published in Guy and Swallow (1990), plate 113, p. 132, and in Topsfield (2001), fig-
ure 6, p. 23.
14
 How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts?

tions, the monkeys are represented.41 The āsāvarī rāginī is close to the yogini
described in the previous set of images by several aspects, and she is also very
close to the nāyikā of the Rasavilāsa.
Dev, being himself an itinerant poet, having worked for many patrons in dif-
ferent places, was certainly familiar with this kind of visual material, which prob-
ably inspired his poetry and his description of the yogini. Images have their own
life and may be a source of inspiration for poets. For the researcher they may turn
out to be an essential tool to visualize a text and help to decipher its complexity.

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