The Silent Support: Materiality and Leather in a Nineteenth-Century South Indian Krishna Painting

The history of Indian painting has conventionally privileged what is visible: image, iconography, style, patronage and region. The surface on which an image appears is often treated as technical information, secondary to the work’s meaning. Yet a painting does not begin with pigment. Before an image can be made, a material body must be selected, prepared and transformed into a surface capable of receiving it.

Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged the separation of medium from meaning. Jinah Kim’s material history of Indian painting, for instance, demonstrates how attention to medium and materiality can open new ways of understanding visual knowledge in South Asia. Such an approach provides a productive point of departure for reading a nineteenth-century South Indian painting of Krishna’s Gopi Vastraharana, whose most striking feature may lie not only in what it depicts, but in what carries the depiction: leather.

The painting, now in the DAG collection, depicts the familiar episode from the Bhagavata Purana in which Krishna hides the garments of the Gopis while they bathe and places them in a tree. The Telugu inscription reads: ‘The Gopis came to bathe, leaving their clothes on the bank, and were bathing in the river. Sri Krishna took their clothes and placed them on a tree. The Gopis pleads with Sri Krishna to return their clothes’--accompanying the image, situating it within a South Indian linguistic and devotional milieu. Yet the work presents an additional historical problem. It is painted on leather. The precise animal species has not been identified, and no claim should be made beyond the evidence presently available. But leather itself is unmistakably an animal-derived material, transformed through skilled processes into a support for painting. This fact invites a different set of questions. What histories enter an image when its support is not treated as passive ground but as part of the object’s material biography?

Leather is not an inert surface. It begins as skin and is subsequently altered through processes that remove, clean, stretch, dry and stabilise the organic material. The devotional image of Krishna is therefore carried by a substance with a history preceding the moment of representation. This does not mean that the support was chosen for a specific theological reason. To infer such an intention without documentary evidence would be speculative. The significance of the material lies elsewhere: it reveals that the history of the image cannot be fully separated from the history of the substance that made the image possible.

Animal skin, moreover, was not external to South Asian religious and ascetic worlds. Sanskrit sources employ terms such as Ajina for animal skin, while Krishnajina refers, in particular textual contexts, to a kind of animal skin associated with ascetic and ritual practice. Dharmasutra traditions discuss prescribed skins in relation to forms of discipline, studentship and ritual observance. These references cannot identify the support of the present painting as Krishnajina, nor do they establish a direct symbolic connection between Krishna and the leather. Their value is more precise: they demonstrate that animal-derived materials could occupy regulated and meaningful positions within religious life. The opposition between the sacred image and animal skin is therefore historically less straightforward than modern assumptions might suggest.

This produces an intriguing tension in the present work. Krishna’s Gopi Vastraharana belongs to one of the most widely circulated devotional narratives in the Bhagavata tradition, yet its painted image rests upon transformed animal skin. Rather than attempting to resolve this relationship into a single symbolic meaning, it may be more productive, or layered to retain the question. The iconographic surface and the material support belong to different but intersecting histories: one concerns narrative, devotion and representation; the other concerns animality, labour and technology. Their conjunction in a single object makes visible the multiple histories contained within an image.

The South Indian context gives this material question a further dimension. Andhra Pradesh possesses a long and sophisticated tradition of leather shadow puppetry, widely known as Tholu Bommalata. The tradition has been the subject of dedicated scholarship, including M. Nagabhushana Sarma’s study published by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Documentary accounts of the craft describe specialised processes through which animal hide is prepared and transformed into translucent, painted and perforated figures. Government documentation records the use of goat hide and sheepskin and notes earlier use of deer leather. The importance of this tradition here is not to claim that the painting emerged from a puppet-making workshop. No such evidence presently exists. Rather, it establishes a regional history of material knowledge in which animal skin could be deliberately prepared as a complex visual surface.

That distinction is essential. The painting should not be absorbed into the category of puppetry simply because both involve leather. At the same time, the material history of leather cannot be neatly divided according to the modern categories of painting, craft and performance. A material may circulate across different forms of making, while the knowledge required to prepare it may exceed the boundaries by which museums and art histories later classify objects. Tholu Bommalata therefore provides a context of material possibility rather than direct genealogy.

The leather support also exposes a historiographical problem. Indian paintings are commonly catalogued through subject, school, date, region or artist. Their supports are often reduced to a line of technical description. This classificatory habit may affect what is recognised as historically significant. An object can be extensively studied as a representation of Krishna while the material body supporting that representation remains virtually unexamined. The question then arises: are paintings on leather genuinely rare, or do they merely appear rare because supports have not been consistently treated as categories of historical enquiry? The present evidence does not permit a definitive answer. But the question itself reveals a limitation in approaches that privilege the image while relegating matter to the margins.

This is where the study of materiality becomes more than a technical supplement to art history. Scientific and technical examination can reveal information unavailable through iconography alone: the species of animal, the presence of a preparatory layer, the sequence of paint application, evidence of repair or alteration, and possible histories of trade and material supply. Such investigation does not replace visual interpretation. It expands the field within which interpretation can occur. The support may answer questions that the painted surface cannot, while the image gives cultural and historical meaning to the material evidence.

The painting consequently invites a mode of looking in which iconography and materiality are studied together. Its Telugu inscriptions may contribute to questions of language and regional circulation. The Gopi Vastraharana narrative connects it to the textual and visual worlds of Krishna devotion. The leather support opens another set of enquiries: What animal was used? How was the hide processed? Was a ground layer applied before painting? Was the support locally sourced, traded or adapted from another material practice? At present, these questions remain open. Their openness, however, should not be mistaken for weakness. It identifies precisely where further research is required.

Unidentified Artist (Miniature Painting), Untitled (Krishna at a Ceremony), Natural pigment highlighted with gold pigment on board 9.5 x 13.5 in. Collection: DAG

The most productive next step would be technical examination of the object itself. Close study of its edges and verso, combined where appropriate with microscopic and non-destructive analysis, could clarify the nature and preparation of the leather. Such work would move the discussion from interpretative possibility towards material evidence. It may also reveal whether the object belongs to a broader, presently under-documented history of leather as a support for painting or whether it represents a more exceptional instance of material adaptation.

The significance of this painting ultimately lies in the fact that it resists a clean separation between image and matter. Krishna’s familiar narrative does not exist here independently of the material body that bears it. Beneath the painted scene lies another history: an animal body transformed into leather, the labour and knowledge required to prepare that surface, and the regional histories of working with animal skin that make such an object historically intelligible. The support is not silent; it has simply remained below the threshold of art-historical attention.

Detail from the painting

To take the leather seriously is therefore not to diminish the iconography of Krishna, nor to impose an unverified symbolic meaning upon the material. It is to recognize that meaning may reside not only in what an artwork represents but also in the conditions that enabled its existence. This object suggests that the history of Indian painting may sometimes begin before the image—within the material transformations, human labour and non-human bodies that lie beneath its surface.

Further Reading

Jinah Kim, Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).

Bhagavata Purana 10.22.

Patrick Olivelle, trans., Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

M. Nagabhushana Sarma, Tolu Bommalata: The Shadow Puppet Theatre of Andhra Pradesh (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1985).

Office of the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts), Government of India, Craft Processes and Other Details of 32 Crafts, section on Tholu Bommalata.