Footnotes

This exceptional ceremonial offering bowl is by far the largest in the Noble Silver Collection. Employing sophisticated narrative registers, an elite silversmith illustrates key events in the Ramayana leading up to Sita's abduction from the Dandaka forest.

In the first scene, Prince Rama travels with his brother Lakshmana and the sage Vishvamitra to Janaka's kingdom and asks to marry Princess Sita. In the second, Rama succeeds in stringing Shiva's bow, thus meeting Janaka's condition for winning Sita's hand. An aghast Ravana seemingly faints before Rama's triumphant stance, foreshadowing the ogre-king's eventual demise from one of Rama's arrows. In the third scene, Rama piously departs from Ayodhya to begin his period of exile. He, Sita, and Lakshmana are then shown settled in the Dandaka forest, with Sita imploring Rama to hunt a golden deer that Ravana's kin, Maricha, has disguised herself as to lure Rama away. In the following scene, Rama and Lakshmana accost Maricha, while Ravana creeps through the forest. The last three scenes show Ravana dragging Sita to his flying chariot and carting her off in the sky, while the monkey-king Sugriva offers to help the prone Rama, and Hanuman is shown chasing after the chariot.

A golden deer is central to the ruse by which Ravana is able to distract Rama and Lakshmana and abduct Sita, thus setting in motion the Ramayana's chief conflict. Through an inspired visual metaphor around the rim of this bowl, the silversmith thus depicts a deer tumbling round and round through foliage, just as it turns our heroes' world upside down. Moreover, the direction in which the deer rolls prompts the viewer to read the bowl's scenes in the correct counterclockwise sequence. With an equally dynamic compositional effect, he also webs together many dome-shaped Burmese rosewood trees (Pterocarpus indicus), bending their gnarled limbs into complex scene dividers that guide the viewer through the story. In addition, the artist vertically stacks the scenes in which Rama and Sita are separated into top and bottom halves, one half featuring heroes and the other villains, both moving in opposing directions. As a result, while Rama and Lakshmana have their attention focused on Maricha in the upper register, Ravana and a small entourage crouch and slip past them below.

Sita's abduction is by far the most popular episode of the Ramayana portrayed in Burmese silver, which might have been the result of innovations in stage design at the royal theater, where Sita's aerial journey in Ravana's chariot was orchestrated with ropes and pulleys by about 1885 (Kaung, "The Ramayana Drama in Myanmar", in Journal of the Siam Society, 90.1 & 2, 2002, p.144). Therefore, the popularity of this subject in silver may not wholly be due to a particular resonance of the content within Burmese culture, but also to the dramatic impact of its spectacle when performed onstage.

Informed by Ramayana literature, this silversmith depicts the scenes leading up to Sita's abduction more comprehensively than is normally represented in silver offering bowls. He has also inserted Sugriva and Hanuman much earlier than they typically appear in the narrative, at least in Valmiki's Ramayana, foreshadowing their eventual involvement in retrieving Sita. These and other didactic elements, like the inclusion of the slighted ogress Sooparanaka watching Maricha distract Rama from afar, demonstrates an intent by the silversmith and patron to utilize the bowl's larger-than-usual surface area to provide as complete a narrative tool as possible.

Meanwhile, the prominent architectural backdrops in the three initial scenes and the accomplished use of competing registers, perspective, and arboreal dividers indicate that the elite silversmith drew inspiration from painted representations of the Rama story in murals or illustrated manuscripts. One such c.1870 Burmese manuscript in the British Library (Or. 14178) with scenes of Sita's abduction illustrates a similar – albeit less sophisticated – use of compositional devices, while its depiction of Ravana's magical chariot in folio 10 is strikingly similar (fig.1).

Bridging dramatic, literary, and pictorial retellings of the Rama story in Burma, this bowl provides a rare insight into the broad array of mediums through which the Ramayana is woven into the tapestry of Burmese culture.

Published:
Owens, Burmese Silver Art, pp.16 & 79-80, no.S106, figs.1.16-21 & 3.62.