In 2010, Eberhard Fischer, the former director of the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, produced a film titled Nainsukh on the eponymous 18th-century Indian miniature painter of the Pahari tradition. The film drew from B.N. Goswamy’s monograph Nainsukh of Guler. Nainsukh has now become the all-encompassing subject of Nainsukh, the Film, the second book by film scholar Srikanth Srinivasan, whose previous book, Modernism by Other Means, dug deep into the filmography of Amit Dutta, Nainsukh‘s director.
Aside from a few initial scenes establishing Nainsukh’s time at his family home in the verdant hills of Guler, much of the film traces his courtly life at Jasrota, under the patronage of Prince Balwant Singh. Nainsukh’s screenplay is reverse-engineered from 42 paintings by the Pahari master, and the bulk of it visualizes the circumstances of their production. Srinivasan acutely analyzes how the motifs of the folios are meticulously preserved in their screen adaptation: details of costumes, jewelry, décor, and regal paraphernalia found in the pictures are recreated with diligence and precision. Shot by cinematographer Mrinal Desai in the ruins of the Jasrota palace, among other locations, the film uses the structure’s contiguous arches and pillars to match the polyptych compositions of Nainsukh’s work.
Fischer and Dutta both make the interesting choice of not recreating the dilapidated palace as a glorious period set, to reflect the chasm between Singh’s actual financial status and the lofty aspirations discernible in his portraits by Nainsukh. But Singh’s affinity for the fine arts led to some extraordinary paintings in which Nainsukh collaborated with his patron, directing him like an actor in elaborate tableaux vivants. Srinivasan asserts that such sequences in the film reinforce the argument that Nainsukh’s art wasn’t just optical, but was founded on imagination, Pahari tradition, and even fantasy.
The scenes are filmed laterally for a planar look, as though they were drawn on paper. The actors, too, are filmed in left or right profile, echoing the way Nainsukh handled his human figures. With Desai, Dutta elaborated a look for the film: daytime images with very few shadows, landscape shots that eliminate the horizon in the manner of Pahari painting. The film’s sudden changes in scale echo the shifting, incompatible perspectives of the Guler painter’s folios, which attest to the influence of Pahari traditions of flattened landscapes over observation.
Srinivasan’s dissection of the film’s use of color is revelatory. He produces graphical figures to highlight the overall muted color palette and average shot duration. Nainsukh is dominated by woody earth tones and uses saturated tones sparingly to provide accent to its images, like the Pahari artist’s oeuvre. Srinivasan’s book is to Nainsukh what Dutta’s film is to the painter: a meticulous and microscopic exploration of an artist’s work and the creative and logistical process behind his art. If Nainsukh was Dutta’s painstaking endeavor to canonize and immortalize the painter, then Srinivasan’s book hopes to achieve the same for its singular subject.
Nainsukh, the Film by Srikanth Srinivasan (2023) is published by Artibus Asiae Publishers and is available internationally from the Museum Rietberg and other online sources.
