An Ecology of Picture‐Rhythms (Tālamālā) in Western India, circa 1800

Abstract

This essay analyses a unique instance in western India around 1800 in which artists attempted to visualize rhythm (tālamālā) by co‐ordinating artistic with natural measures. While they looked to earlier templates of picturing music, such as of melody in rāgamālā, the artists sought forms of inspiration specific to rhythm. In particular, they turned to the workings of time, from a composition's tempo to a person's mental activity, to an animal's gait and to the moon's wax and wane. These intersecting temporal and rhythmic concepts, however, were abstract. To draw them into a visible realm, the painters relied on analogy as a method of comparison. They affiliated human‐made rhythms in texts, pictures, and dance with those produced in the natural world, by the sun and moon, termites and snakes, the earth and rivers. By mobilizing their understanding of the environment, and people's place within it, the artists of these paintings managed to picture rhythm through a rare turn to ecology in the history of South Asian painting.