Nearly 120 ancient paintings charting the life, struggles and eventual triumph of the legendary Indian king, Rama, go on show to the public on Friday for the first time at the British Library. The highly detailed and lavishly illustrated pictures which date from the 17th century were formerly bound together in book form and available only for scholarly study.The Ramayana — love and valour in India’s great epic”. The story is still retold regularly in films, dances, songs and puppet shows. The panels, each accompanied by a text explanation of what is happening and its significance to the story, detail each step in the life of Rama who is considered to be the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, the supreme Hindu god. Originally comprising 400 paintings and 24,000 verses of text in Sanskrit, the pictures were bound in seven volumes of which the British Library has four and a half
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