Battle at Lanka, from the Mewar Ramayana

The page and the manuscript

The website's image is a manuscript illustration, identified in its image record as folio 91r of Add MS 15297(1). Its broad filename date, 1649–1653, describes the larger undertaking. British Library descriptions date the Yuddha Kanda volume itself to 1652. The narrower date helps distinguish this particular war book from the whole seven-book project.^[1][6]

A manuscript leaf belongs to a reading sequence. The British Library's catalogue describes the larger copy as a Sanskrit text written in Devanagari on paper; an exact-image caption records ink and colour on paper. The painting belongs alongside text, adjacent episodes and the physical folio. Reading those connections can reveal narrative choices that disappear when the page circulates as an isolated battle picture.^[7][9]

How to read the fighting

Begin with the upper-left pair, where Rama's blue figure creates a quiet visual anchor. The rest of the field is crowded with diagonal weapons, raised arms and overlapping bodies. White elephants and dark shields punctuate the green ground; fallen fighters and broken chariot forms bring the eye toward the lower edge. These observations describe the visible image rather than establish the historical appearance of any army.^[1]

The three-headed figure appears at different moments, including a violent conclusion near the lower left. Repetition is the clue to the painting's handling of time: the reader follows a character through successive actions in a shared landscape. The whole page remains a single composition, even as the viewer reconstructs a sequence within it.^[1]

The epic episode

The wider story concerns Rama's effort to recover Sita after her abduction by Ravana, ruler of Lanka. The battle brings his animal allies against the rakshasa forces. In the epic's war book, Hanuman kills the three-headed Trisiras, one of Ravana's sons. A scholarly translation distinguishes this warrior from another Trisiras who fights Rama in the forest book: sharing a name does not make them the same narrative figure.^[8][5]

The combat is one stage of a longer epic, rather than a complete account of Rama's victory in a single scene. The subsequent killing of Ravana and the return from exile belong to other episodes. Describing the subject as an epic illustration preserves its religious and literary significance without presenting the painted action as evidence that a datable historical battle occurred.^[8]

Why a Mewar ruler commissioned it

CSMVS curator Vandana Prapanna describes the manuscript as Jagat Singh's most ambitious court-studio project, begun in 1649 and finished during Raj Singh's reign in 1653. Its surviving portions include hundreds of text and illustrated leaves held in Britain and India. Its scale reflects sustained patronage, coordinated labour and considerable resources.^[2]

Scholar John Brockington places the commission within the rebuilding of Mewar's royal library after the Mughal sack of Chittaur in 1568. He interprets it as part of a Sisodiya campaign to strengthen dynastic standing after recognising Mughal sovereignty in 1615. In that reading, illustrating Rama also reinforced the dynasty's asserted ancestral connection to him. This is an interpretation of royal self-presentation, not proof of the ancestry itself.^[3]

A shared workshop and several traditions

Although this image is credited to Sahib Din, the full manuscript was a collective production. Brockington identifies Sahib Din's principal contributions to the Ayodhya and Yuddha books, Manohar's work in other sections, and another group influenced by Deccani painting. The Sanskrit text was copied by the Jain scribe Mahatma Hirananda. The project crossed artistic and religious boundaries within court employment.^[3]

Brockington's wider study also cautions against treating every Ramayana image as an illustration of one uniform text. Oral performance, manuscript recensions and regional adaptations shaped how episodes were narrated and pictured. For this folio, the identified episode should be tied to the Mewar manuscript; an attractive anecdote from a different Ramayana tradition should carry its own attribution.^[3]

From Udaipur to a dispersed digital manuscript

Curator J. P. Losty traces the British Library volumes from Maharana Bhim Singh's gift to James Tod in 1820, through Tod's presentation to the Duke of Sussex in 1823, to purchase at the duke's library sale in 1844. They entered the British Museum before becoming part of the British Library. Several other portions remained in Indian collections.^[4]

The nineteenth-century bindings became a conservation problem: turning large guarded leaves flexed the painted surfaces and risked pigment loss. Losty describes their eventual dismantling and individual mounting, followed by a digital reunion launched in Mumbai in March 2014. CSMVS coordinated work on the Indian holdings. Digital reunion reconnects the dispersed text and pictures while the physical leaves remain in separate collections.^[4][2]

Stories and their evidence

Tradition, interpretation and remaining questions

Rama's divine identity and the Sisodiya claim to descend from him belong to religious and dynastic traditions. They should be named respectfully as such. No independently documented curse, hidden-message story or supernatural incident attached to this exact folio emerged from the consulted sources. Its most compelling storytelling device is already visible: time unfolds through repeated figures.^[2]

The exact leaf's dimensions and pigment composition still need a folio-level technical record. Measurements of other Mewar pages cannot safely fill that gap. The image file is a reproduction of one surface, so it also cannot establish the condition of the verso, prove an individual brush hand throughout the page, or reveal every stage of workshop production.^[7]