Untitled (Draupadi’s Vastraharan)

Many of the early Indian oil paintings were meant to be visual extensions of a religious stotra or mantra—odes and hymns from Sanskrit texts—that would aid the viewer in meditation. The painting of the deity worked like an illustration that accompanied the text which was often inscribed at the bottom of the painting. A secondary category of paintings was made up of narrative storytelling, where the painter (or the studio) would depict a popular mythological tale with its spatial setting typically borrowed from European artists’ engravings. This artwork is one such example. It depicts Draupadi’s Vastraharan, or the disrobing of Draupadi, which is an episode taken from the Mahabharata—one of the two major Sanskrit epics from ancient India.