By Vishnu Makhijani
Somewhere close to 2000, as an informal consultant, renowned art historian
BN Goswami (in picture) was going over the San Diego Museum of Arts’ holdings of Indian paintings, nearly all of which came from the collection of American billionaire Edwin Binney III. Among the things he saw was the manuscript of the Mysore Bhagvata, the 10th book of the Bhagavata Purana and was “charmed”.
Nothing happened for years despite famous corporate strategy guru CK Prahlad donating a fairly large sum of money to the museum and proposing that the manuscript — that had been commissioned by Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1794-1868) — be published in its entirety, and that Goswamy be the one to oversee the project.
Jas Grewal, who heads the support group for Indian art at the museum and was also a close friend of CK, took up the matter with vigour and got the museum to see the publication of the manuscript through.
The outcome: The Great Mysore Bhagavata, jointly published by the San Diego Museum of Arts and Niyogi Books, a fascinating tour de force that impresses with the depth of Goswamy’s scholarship and dazzles with its images.
It focuses on the second half of the 10th book of the Bhagvata Purana and includes over 200 images of the exquisite paintings in the manuscript. It stands out and shines, not only because of the splendour of its illustrations, but also because it engages with an enduring theme — the great and sacred text, the Bhagavata Purana – in a manner that is completely different from almost anything else that one has come across.
“I was by no means the first person to take note of this wonderful manuscript,” a modest Goswami said.
Others, including the art dealer and connoisseur Terry MacInerney, had brought it to attention by briefly writing about it a long time ago. Robert del Bonta, an independent scholar, had also used the material in the manuscript in different essays well before Goswami came into the picture.
“But the idea of publishing the manuscript, virtually in extenso, and giving it the shape that it now has, came from me and in part, from (curator) Caron Smith. Working on the manuscript from a distance was not easy, but it needed to be done,” he said.
“The text, which is from the uttara ardha (the latter half), is written in the old Kannada script, which I do not read. But the problem did not appear insuperable, for I ascertained that the language used in the manuscript was the same as in the original Purana, that is Sanskrit, and it was only the script which was Kannada. That made it simpler,” Goswami explained.
In planning the publication, however, he insisted on the involvement of three experts — Robert del Bonta, “naturally”, Caleb Simmons from the University of Arizona who has done extensive work on the history and culture of Mysore, and Girish Naphade “to help with the Kannada that he knows well”.
The manuscript of the Mysore Bhagavata Purana is quite different from many other illustrated latter Bhagavata Puranas produced in India in that the text is laid out in codex format. (IANS)