A Woman Plucks Leaves While Awaiting Her Lover: Gunakali Ragini of Malkos, from the “Chawand Ragamala” (1605): Art, History and Details

A Woman Plucks Leaves While Awaiting Her Lover: Gunakali Ragini of Malkos, from the “Chawand Ragamala” (1605) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

On a terrace outside an open bedchamber, a dark-skinned woman wearing a skirt of peacock feathers plucks leaves from a tree and has filled her basket with flowers. She has made garlands and hung them on the trees, probably in accordance with a vow made in the ardent hope of bringing back her overdue lover. In accordance with the verse, two peacocks stand perched on the roof.

Object facts

• Title: A Woman Plucks Leaves While Awaiting Her Lover: Gunakali Ragini of Malkos, from the “Chawand Ragamala”
• Date: 1605
• Culture: Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Mewar, Chawand
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera and ink on paper
• Dimensions: 20.6 x 18.1 cm (8 1/8 x 7 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2018.136

A detail from the museum

She has lit a six-flame lamp at the foot of the tree in her vigil.

Collection credit

Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Diamond, Debra, and Dipti Khera, eds. A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur. Munich, Germany: Hirmer Publishers; Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.