This painting shows an incident in the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic telling of the great battle between the Pandava brothers and their cousins the Kaurava brothers. Though the incident illustrated here was minor, it had profound repercussions for the outcome of the war. Karna uses a weapon given to him by Indra to kill the powerful Ghatotkacha, who falls from atop an elephant. Ghatotkacha’ s death is a blow to the Pandavas, but Indra’ s powerful weapon could only be used once; it was meant to destroy the hero Arjuna. Therefore, Arjuna lives— and he later kills Karna.

The Razmnama is a Persian translation of the Mahabharata (the epic is widely revered in parts of Asia beyond its origins and was much translated). The important government official ‘ Abd al-Rahim (1556– 1626), known by the title Khan-i Khanan, commissioned this translation and manuscript as well as Persian versions of other Indian stories.

Had we not known the manuscript from which this painting came, in examining its style we might take it to be decades earlier in date. It lacks the delicate refinement of the contemporaneous painting to the left, which was an imperial commission.