Name: Sarita Singh
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume-11, Issue-1, January-June 2026
Page Number: 999-1005
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22895768

One of the most sacred, populist, prosperous and historically religious centers of North India, the aesthetic traditions of Ayodhya were shaped by local rulers, nawabs, merchants and religious leaders. Although its archaeological excavations and multi-layered religious narratives have been extensively studied, the city's murals present an untouched repository of visual emotions, a unique synthesis of classical aesthetics, indigenous artistic traditions and external cultural exchanges.
The aim of this paper is to unravel the aesthetics of Rasavada, classicism and symbolism prevalent in the murals of Nawabi and colonial periods of Ayodhya through art-historical analysis and explore how these murals evolve from the aesthetic traditions of Rasavada to create a visual poetry or world of emotions that combines devotion, love, narrative and artistic expression. By critically examining and analyzing the murals preserved in various shrines and temples of Ayodhya, this study examines the stylistic and thematic aspects of the murals and situates them in the context of other regional artistic and cultural traditions, within the broader painting traditions of North India. Underlining local folk traditions and regional specificity, this paper examines how the depiction of episodes from sacred narratives such as Ramayana, Bhagavata Purana, Ramcharitmanas and Krishna Lila reflect emotional experiences, local and regional aesthetic traditions.
Through ornate creepers, decorative motifs, pairs of animals and birds, divine colours, bhava-bhangima (body language) and compositional rhythms, these murals depict the divine love of Rama, Sita and Radha, the heroic rasa in the scenes of exile and suffering and the devotional rasa in the acts of devotion, transforming the walls of the temple into an aesthetic realm with multi-layered emotions. By incorporating Dr. B. N. Goswamy's legacy of studying miniature painting, mural painting and aesthetics in the study of mural paintings of Ayodhya, this essay extends his methodological insights and art historical analysis. It argues that the murals of Ayodhya exhibit a distinct advanced form of classicism as a hybrid visual language, which should be recognized as concrete visual texts rather than as decorations, where the language of rasa mediates between the soul and the divine, man and nature and devotee and God. Thus, this paper highlights the role of rasaism and aesthetics as a reading of visual traditions and shaping sacred emotional experiences.

Keywords: Ayodhya, mural painting, rasa, bhakti, visual culture