Rama addressing the villagers; Lakshmana enquiring about the way

Description: This is folio 51 from the Ayodhyakanda chapter of the Ramcharit Manas manuscript. The illustration shows Rama addressing the villagers (top); Lakshmana enquiring about the way (bottom).
Contents note: The Ramcharit Manas manuscript was housed at the All-India Kashiraja Trust, Ramnagar Fort, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India at the time of photography in 1977. Ramcharit Manas translates to "Sacred Manas Lake of Ram's Deeds" and is an epic poem of nearly 13,000 lines, composed in the Avadhi dialect of pre-modern Hindi by the poet-saint Tulsidas. This manuscript was produced in Ramnagar, Varanasi between 1796 and 1808 under the patronage of its royal court and particularly the ruler Udit Narayan Singh (r.1795-1835). The manuscript showcases a synthesis of multiple painting schools from Jaipur, Murshidabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Datia etc. The manuscript is now dispersed and its present location is unknown.

Genre: color slides
Subject Geographic: Ramnagar (Varanasi), Uttar Pradesh (India)
Resource type: still image
Subjects: valmiki
illuminated manuscripts
ayodhyākāṇḍa
ramayan
rāmāyaṇa
tulasidasa
rāmacaritamānasa
miniature painting

Repository: American Institute of Indian Studies, Center for Art and Archaeology, Gurugram, Haryana, India
Local Identifier: SL_002889
ARK: ark:/21198/z1rn8xcd
Archival Collection: Box 2889
Manifest url

Rights statement: public domain
Rights Holder: caa.archives@aiis.edu.in
Funding Note: Digitization for the AIIS Center for Art & Archaeology Negatives & Slides Collection was sponsored by the Modern Endangered Archives Program with funding from Arcadia.