Ragamala Paintings
About this collection
This digital collection consists of almost 4,000 digitized slides that are part of Cornell's Rāgamālā collection. Klaus Ebeling took the original photographs between 1967 and 1972 as he visited museums and private collections all over the world working on Ragamala Painting. Fifty years later, the slides were gifted to Cornell by musicologist Joep Bor. The Ebeling collection is among the world’s great assemblages of images in this genre. There have been numerous subsequent studies of regional traditions of rāgamālā painting — Ebeling’s collection includes them all.
Faculty in Cornell’s Department of Art History, Department of Asian Studies, and South Asia Program worked closely with Cornell University Library’s South Asia Curator and Digital Consulting and Production Services to reformat this collection from slide photographs to digital images. The goal of the project was to make these vibrant images more accessible for teaching and research at Cornell and beyond. One significant attraction of these materials is that they are visually compelling—lively, lush, bold or delicate compositions.
Historical context
Rāgamālā is a unique form of Indian painting that flourished in the regional courts of the Indic world from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The term translates as a garland, mālā, of rāgas, meaning melodic types or tonal frameworks. Rāgamālā painting combines iconography, musical codes, and poetry to indicate the time of day or season appropriate to the raga and its mood.
The rāgamālā systematizes rāgas by conceiving of them as families, headed by a male deity, and populated with his wives and their sons, in orderly groups. This is the principal finding of Klaus Ebeling in his seminal work Ragamala Painting, published in 1973.
Using the collection
For questions about this collection, please contact Kroch Asia Library reference staff at asiaref@cornell.edu.
Sets
More information
- Collection steward
- Kelsey Utne, South Asia Librarian
- Metadata creation
- Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, 2013, awarded to Iftikhar Dadi, History of Art and Visual Studies and Bronwen Bledsoe, Cornell University Library
- Credits
- This collection overview was last reviewed by Gregory Green, collection steward, in 2025.
- Collection sources