The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic, the Mewar Ramayana Manuscripts

The illustrated Ramayana commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar in Rajasthan between 1649 and 1653 and now mostly in the British Library is among the greatest of seventeenth-century Indian manuscripts. The huge scale of the project, with over 400 paintings, allowed the artists to focus on telling the epic story on the grandest scale. Nearly 130 of the paintings are here presented in the book form for the first time, allowing the reader to follow the story through the paintings, while the detailed introduction puts this epic manuscript into its historical and cultural context.