Ce texte est publié en anglais. Le musée ne l'a pas traduit et préfère vous le dire plutôt que de vous présenter une traduction automatique.
What is a Karni Bharni manuscript?
Karni Bharni means, roughly, 'as you do, so you receive'. It is an illustrated Jain didactic form which lays out actions and the consequences that follow from them as a sequence of scenes, so that a viewer who cannot read the text can still follow the argument. It belongs to a manuscript culture that Jain communities maintained, and copied, with exceptional continuity.
Jain libraries — the bhandars — are among the reasons Indian painting before 1500 can be studied at all. They were built to preserve, they were catalogued, and they were not dispersed. Illustrated manuscripts of the kind held in the Jainism gallery survive because a community decided several centuries ago that they should.
In this entry
- The phrase. What Karni Bharni means and where it is used.
- The form. Folio size, support, the relation of image to text.
- Reading a sequence. How a scene of action is paired with a scene of consequence.
- The manuscripts here. Folio by folio, with what is legible and what is not.
- Pigment and support. Materials, and what they tell us about date.
- Bhandars. Why Jain manuscript survival rates are what they are.
Didactic, not decorative
It is easy to look at a Jain illustrated folio as a painting and miss that it is an argument. The compositions are schematic on purpose: a figure is placed to be identified, not to be admired, and the repetition from folio to folio is what makes the moral structure visible. Judged as pictures they can look stiff. Judged as what they are — a proof set out in images — the economy is the skill.
The painting traditions that grew out of and alongside this manuscript culture fill the paintings and manuscripts gallery.