![]() They had, I found, never been exhibited, since the volumes were too large to fit into the department’s then exhibition cases they had never been lent to be exhibited elsewhere, not even to the great exhibition of Indian art at Burlington House in 1947, since the British Museum did not then lend at all and I could find only one brief reference to them in the art historical literature, in Douglas Barrett and Basil Gray’s Indian Painting of 1963. On further investigation, one of the volumes, the Bala Kanda or first book, with over 200 paintings, turned out to have been written in 1712 in Udaipur under Maharana Sangram Singh (Add.15295), but the other four books containing 286 full page paintings were prepared in Udaipur for Rana Jagat Singh between 16, as well as in the first year of his successor Rana Raj Singh in 1653 (Add.152396-7). The folios being in landscape format, the volumes had to be turned on their sides to be read. Each of the volumes had had all its folios, the unillustrated ones as well as the full page paintings, let into heavy guard papers which were then bound up in these elaborate bindings. On hauling them off the shelf and opening them I found them crammed with paintings. I soon found three massive bound volumes which announced themselves on the spines as five volumes of the Ramayana, books 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7. I was vaguely aware of the great Mughal manuscripts in the collections, the subject of British Library exhibitions in 19, but was there I wondered anything comparable from the Hindu world?Ĭovers and doublure of a volume of the Ramayana as bound in the British Museum bindery in 1844. The bound manuscripts were kept in so far as possible in strict numerical sequence in the main runs of Additional and Oriental manuscripts, so that Arabic, Persian, Hebrew or Sanskrit manuscripts could be found side by side, encouraging a serendipitous tendency to explore other cultures. ![]() I spent a lot of time exploring the oriental select manuscripts lobby, pulling the manuscripts off the shelf one by one for a brief examination. For the complete digital version of the manuscript together with descriptions of the paintings and essays on its various aspects, see My own involvement with the manuscript goes back to 1971 when as a young Sanskritist straight from Oxford I first joined the British Museum, before the collections were transferred to the British Library in 1973. ![]() The digital version of the complete Valmiki Ramayana prepared for Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar in 1649-53 was launched on 21 March at the CSMVS, Mumbai, making freely available to the world one of the greatest achievements of Indian art.
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