A woman worshiping at a shrine, symbolizing a musical mode (Kamod Ragini)

The image of a woman worshiping was a popular one in Indian painting. In Indian literature pious or ascetic women were often associated with themes of love and separation. This painting belongs to a ragamala series (garland of musical modes) which illustrates a musical classification system. The woman, whose asceticism can be seen in her meditative posture and bared torso, is the visual personification of a female musical mode (ragini). The earliest literary works classifying musical modes according to male and female personifications were compiled between the seventh and eleventh centuries, while the earliest illustrations of this genre date from about 1475. The exact system followed by the painter in this example is unknown. Depictions of Kamod Ragini vary greatly in appearance, indicating that the iconography of the different musical modes was, in some cases, not entirely fixed. According to a sixteenth-century musical treatise, the sound represented by this Kamod Ragini is that of jingling wrist bangles. In many ragamala paintings there is no literal correspondence between visual imagery and the sound being represented.