Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, c. 1560–70

ABSTRACT Examining the visual tactics of framing flowing water in landscape painting and riparian architecture in Braj, a pilgrimage centre in North India where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his youth, the essay foregrounds a new conception of hydroaesthetics that emerged with the onset of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550–1850), a climatic period marked by catastrophic droughts and famines in South Asia. An engagement with the hydroaesthetics of beholding the river Yamuna's passage through Braj, the essay argues, brings to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between artistic practices based on a theological aesthetic of venerating the natural environment and ecological calamities. In doing so, the essay attempts to delineate a possible methodology for an ecological art history. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

Certainly, the artists' deliberate transgression of the bounded borders of the folio has not gone unnoticed by art history. 5 The paintings in the c. 1560À70 manuscript, now known as the Isarda Bhagavata Purana, have become, for scholars, exemplary of a new visual language that had emerged in response to pictorial conventions developed by the imperial atelier under the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542À1605). As scholars have noted, the innovative use of white delicate lines to demarcate the turbulent waves of flowing water, and the disregard for pictorial margins in the manuscript, also appear in contemporaneous paintings produced at the Mughal court. 6 The Isarda Bhagavata, then, becomes decisive for mapping the sweeping transformations in painting traditions in South Asia that ensued in the sixteenth century with the establishment of the Mughal Empire. Indeed, a number of folios from this manuscript seem to have used an analogous visual strategy, one that is organised around highlighting the aqueous dynamism of flowing water, while accentuating the river within the picture plane. 7 Yet the act of reading this new imaginative technique of representing water solely as an outcome of Central Asian Timurid aesthetic regimes introduced by the Mughals in North India also serves to idealise the landscape in a manner that occludes linkages between the natural environment and human action upon it. Thus, rather than positing the Isarda Bhagavata as a closed discourse, significant only to the internal history of the art of the Indian subcontinent, this essay places imaginative acts of seeing water in an expanded field that encompassed aesthetic practices, natural resource management and environmental catastrophes that occurred with the formation of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550À1850), an epoch that also saw the emergence of a new Vaishnava (the worship of Vishnu/Krishna as the supreme godhead) theological aesthetics in Braj based on venerating the natural environment. Flowing beyond the confines of paper, the river Yamuna in the Isarda folio thus allowed for the formation of a moral horizon that highlighted seeing the fluid materiality of water as an aesthetic experience. Certainly, the rendering of the river in the manuscript had its visual genealogies in the painterly cultures of the Mughal court. But, at the same time, the manuscript offers critical perspectives on an incipient sixteenth-century opticality that underscored the act of seeing water. Moving from the depiction of the flowing river in a single folio in the Isarda Bhagavata Purana to monumental riparian architecture that emerged in response to global droughts, this essay places hydroaesthetics in intrinsically interconnected fields that link localised aesthetic practices to the expanded non-human trans-territorial arena of water scarcity and famine. Doing so opens up new paths in art history, ecological passages that bring to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between artistic practices and the natural environment.
Theological Aesthetics: Seeing in the Little Ice Age The aesthetic, economic and cultural significance of water has, undoubtedly, received significant attention in recent years. From Fernand Braudel's foundational La Mediterranee to more recent histories that have emphasised the inherent connectedness that constituted the early modern period, the fluidity of water as liquid space that links land masses through trade and migration has become fundamental in shaping the global horizons of political and cultural histories. 8 At the same time, scholars have studied riparian architecture, canals, port cities, drainage systems, aqueducts, fountains and scientific experiments that harnessed the force of water. 9 Scholars have also explored the representation of water in the visual arts. 10 Expanding on this line of enquiry by bringing together the ocular and the natural environment, this essay asks, what did it mean to see water in sixteenthcentury Braj?
In sixteenth-century North India, the act of seeing was of great consequence. Theoretical developments and experimentations in the field of vision had led to the growing popularisation of spectacles, while encyclopaedic treatises composed at the Mughal court, for instance Muhammad Fazil Miskin Samarqandi's Jawahir ul-'Ulum-i-Humayuni (c. 1539), deliberated on optics and alchemy. 11 Within the sixteenth-century ecumenical worlds of Vaishnava piety, the act of seeing had accrued further philosophical and theological density. Moving away from earlier orthodox practices of venerating Krishna as a supreme godhead, this new liturgy of Bhakti allowed for the articulation of a more intense emotional devotion centred on seeing Krishna.
Theologians proposed that faith (sraddha) and ritualistic practice (sadhana) would eventually allow the devotee to directly (saksat) perceive Krishna to attain transcendental bliss. As a religious aesthete, the devotee of Krishna was thus expected to inculcate the sringara (the erotic rasa) of the cowherd women through play with Krishna in the groves and forests of Braj. It is only after attaining bliss in the worldly Braj that the devotee could access transcendent Braj as a partaker in perpetual play or lila with the Supreme Being. Vaishnava theologians delineated four forms through which the Supreme Being appears in this world as embodied: in scriptural texts such as the Bhagavata Purana; through the aural presence of Krishna's name uttered; in the geographic space of Braj; and in the icon worshipped in the temple. 15 It is certainly not a coincidence that the sudden development of pilgrimage practices, as well as a theology of place, occurred in Braj in the mid sixteenth century, a period also marked by droughts and famines of unprecedented intensity. expanding glaciers. 16 While the flow of polar continental air masses extended over large parts of Europe, farmlands were destroyed in Norway and Iceland. In other parts of the world, the climatic phenomenon of the Little Ice Age caused greater frequency of droughts. In West Africa, the Sahel, that is the dry frontier of the Saharan fringe, pushed southward in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, causing a series of calamitous droughts. 17 In Mexico, catastrophic droughts of great intensity occurred between 1545 and 1580. 18 From 1554 onwards, the frequency of droughts increased in South Asia as well. 19 It appears that the development of a new Vaishnava theology in Braj from the mid sixteenth century onwards, alongside the production of remarkable illustrated manuscripts narrating Krishna's life and large-scale riparian religious architecture that delineated the materiality of water, paralleled the increasing frequency of El Nino-induced droughts. Lasting between 1554 and 1556, the first of these droughts, which would continue well into the eighteenth century, ensued with the failure of the monsoon. 20 Writing on the drought of 1556, Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's panegyrist and close companion, noted: '[T]here was a terrible famine in many parts, and especially in the province of Delhi. Though they were finding signs of gold, they could see no trace of corn. Men took to eating one another; some would join together and carry off a solitary man, and make him their food'. 21 Describing the famine as Khashm-i-izad, divine wrath, Abd-al-Qadir Badauni, an eyewitness to the devastation in the DelhiÀAgra region, likewise wrote that the 'scarcity of rain, and shortness of grain' led to 'man eating his fellow-man'. 22 While apocryphal accounts of cannibalism during climatic catastrophes abound in early modern narratives, the droughts between 1554 and 1556 had certainly led to a crisis in terms of agrarian production and the availability of food crops. That the elite of North India, too, were affected by the drought becomes apparent in the Mughal courtier Abu'l Fazl's complaint that during the scarcity, his family of seventy could only obtain a seer (two pounds) of grain, 'which was set to boil in earthenware vessels, and the warm water distributed'. 23 Within four years of the 1556 drought, we see the artists of the Isarda Bhagavata visualising a system of representing the materiality of the river Yamuna that exceeded a hydrology that disciplines, measures and subordinates water's geological force. The natural undoubtedly shaped the aesthetic. But such a reading would also have to proceed with caution. As products of very different dynamisms, the linkages between painting practices and drought should not offer either a deterministic history of the environment's agency or a reductionist non-anthropocentric history of art. Rather, a transversal movement from the optical sensibility made visible in the Isarda Bhagavata to the natural environment, and vice versa, could, perhaps, offer a relational field that makes visible the political, social, theological and aesthetic imperatives of water. 24 Both these episodes, I suggest, led to a new hydroaesthetics centred on water systems.

Materialising the Riverscape
Discovered in the collection of the landed estate of Isarda, eighty miles south of the city of Jaipur, the now dispersed c. 1560À70 Bhagavata Purana is, undeniably, a significant manuscript in the history of painting in South Asia. Produced in the DelhiÀAgra region, the 23 extant folios from the manuscript depict events from Krishna's life, as narrated in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana. 25 Crucially for us, paintings in the manuscript, when read alongside contemporaneous riparian architecture, provide a deeper history of seeing water as a form of beholding that foregrounds the riverscape within a world of affective aesthetics and the large-scale rearrangement of the natural environment that ensued in 1554.
Although coeval, there is, however, no evidence to bring these two moments-one environmental and the other artistic-together. But certainly, it was water as affect-the connections between droughts in South Asia and the institutional responses to it-that intimately bound them. Indeed, in the wake of a succession of extensive droughts that emerged with the Little Ice Age, the Vishram Ghat in Mathura, the principal ghat for pilgrimage in Braj, became the locus of a number of architectural endeavours that made seeing the flowing Yamuna central to an appreciation of water ( Figure 2). Especially in pilgrimage sites such as Braj, ghats (platforms beside water bodies with steps that provide access to the water) are typically used for liturgical purposes. 26 Given the powerful symbolism of the river Yamuna as the daughter of the sun god Surya, the Vishram Ghat in Mathura, a town that had become the epicentre of pilgrimage in Braj, had already functioned as a site for solar worship prior to the thirteenth century. 27 Sixteenth-century liturgical texts, however, assert that this ghat was the precise location where Krishna had rested after killing his evil uncle Kamsa. 28 Hence, the name Vishram Ghat or the Ghat of Rest.
From other accounts, we learn that Sikandar Lodi, the Afghan ruler of Delhi between 1489 and 1517, had allegedly erected a mechanical contraption to prevent pilgrims from performing customary rituals at the Vishram Ghat. 29 Sectarian literature tells us that the contraption would result in pilgrims sprouting a beard when they attempted to perform rituals there. 30 Other narratives suggest that Sikandar Lodi had assembled a machine at the Vishram Ghat that automatically circumcised Hindus who went there. In retaliation, the Vaishnava reformer Vallabhacharya (1479À1531) wrote an incantation on a piece of paper and gave it to his followers, asking them to hang it above one of the main gates at Sikandar Lodi's capital in Delhi; as a result, Muslims who passed under the gate lost their beards. A repentant Sikandar Lodi then removed the contraption. Indeed, strategically poised at the entrance to the fertile Gangetic plains, the control of Mathura had become vital for control over the riverine system which had, by this time, become crucial for the trade route connecting North India to coastal Bengal and beyond. Thus, as it flowed through Mathura, the river Yamuna also became an important symbolic space within the moral economies of sixteenth-century North India.
It was during the reign of Sikandar Lodi that Vaishnava reformers such as Chaitanya (1486À1533) and Vallabhacharya arrived in Mathura to preach a new Krishna devotion based on venerating the natural environment of Braj. 31 Sectarian literature informs us that, after arriving in Braj in 1515, Chaitanya embarked on a mission to discover the sacred sites of Braj, starting with the Vishram Ghat. He embraced trees and creepers, collapsed in ecstasy on seeing embodied land, and leaped into the dark blue waters of the Yamuna, imagining Krishna perpetually playing in the river. 32 The performative piety of Chaitanya's pilgrimage was thus centred on a bodily experience of natural phenomena. This mode of experiencing the topos, however, had resonances in the tenth-century Bhagavata Purana where Uddhava, Krishna's closest companion, took aesthetic pleasure in seeing the Yamuna, the forests and the blossoming trees of Braj. 33 Uddhava then wished to be reborn as a creeper in Braj so that the feet of devotees and the dust of Braj would cover him in rapturous love. In this sense, the sixteenth century reclaiming of the Vishram Ghat during Sikandar Lodi's reign was grounded on a moral claim to space as embodied. Very soon, Chaitanya's devotees, especially members of the Kachhwaha dynasty that ruled from the kingdom of Amber in contemporary Rajasthan from the eleventh century onwards, built a series of structures at the Vishram Ghat. 34 The only extant structure from this period, the Sati Burj, is a 55-foot-tall quadrangular tower constructed in 1570 by Bhagwantdas (r. 1574À89), the ruler of Amber (Figure 3). Bhagwantdas was not only one of Akbar's closest allies, but had also patronised a number of temples in Braj after being initiated into Chaitanya's Gaudiya Vaishnavism. 35 Constructed in red sandstone, the same material concurrently being used by Akbar to build the Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri (c. 1571À85), the monumental verticality of the Sati Burj in Mathura, along with its Mughal materiality, would certainly have visually charged the spatial fabric of the Vishram Ghat.
It is worth noting that the Sati Burj in Mathura and the Isarda Bhagavata Purana manuscript from Agra were contemporaneous. Both the sandstone structure and the painted folios in the Isarda manuscript reveal an attempt to engage with the visual form of the river Yamuna, particularly as it could be seen from the ghats of Braj. Indeed, a door-like opening on the upper level of the tower may have functioned as a viewing portal to see the Yamuna as it flows past the Vishram Ghat (Figure 4). Bhagwantdas' predecessor, Ratan Singh (r. 1537À48), had also built a 'ten-pillared' palace for royal pilgrimage beside the Vishram Ghat. 36 Given the dense urban build-up in the vicinity of the ghat over time, traces of the palace have entirely disappeared. However, descriptions of the palace certainly suggest that the structure provided a suitable viewing gallery for the Amber court.
The role of the ocular in engendering spatial perception was key to the tower's iconographic programme. One enters the Sati Burj through a doorway flanked by talismanic diagrams (yantras) carved in stone. Frequently depicted on temple walls, magicoritualistic diagrams were characteristically used as visual aids for meditation or believed to possess astrological and magical benefits. 37 On the right side of the gateway is the fivepointed star (pancakona yantra) that symbolises the five material elements (mahabhuta) of ether, air, fire, water and earth ( Figure 5). In the heart of the diagram is a schematic lotus symbolising the pilgrimage centre of Braj. According to Gaudiya Vaishnava literature, Krishna and his consort Radha occupy the epicentre of the lotus, and devotees use illustrations of this celestial landscape as a device for concentration during meditative practices. 38 Hagiographic accounts inform us that Chaitanya had brought liturgical manuscripts to Braj that discussed talismanic diagrams as meditative devices. 39 Thus, the depiction of such ritualised diagrams on architectural surfaces in Braj would certainly not be out of place. Framed by a miniature gateway and two elephants, the diagram as an apotropaic schema was unquestionably intended to be seen ritualistically.
The architectural language of the tower itself had two distinct sources. The decoration, especially the use of archways as an architectural motif, as well as its vertical emphasis, had its source in pre-Mughal architecture. We see repeating archways, for instance, on the façade of the c. 1500 Gwalior fort in central India, built by the Tomar ruler Man Singh (r. 1486À1516) (Figure 6). The well-known Chittor tower, a nine-storeyed structure completed by the Sisodia dynasty in Rajasthan in the fifteenth century, is, likewise, an easily recognisable visual source.
At the same time, the use of imperial Mughal red sandstone, projecting eaves, and the limited use of anthropomorphic imagery suggests that the Sati Burj was designed using similar architectural typologies to those being incorporated into Fatehpur Sikri, thirty miles south of Mathura (Figure 7). 40 Indeed, the constructions in Mathura and Fatehpur Sikri commenced in 1570 and 1571, respectively, making these two architectural projects contemporaneous. The persistent evocation of red sandstone, the stone used to build Akbar's fort-palaces, within the soteriological space of sixteenth-century Braj then suggests that practices of imagining the pilgrimage centre involved seeing space, not only through a metaphysical order, but also as construed through contemporaneous expressions of political power. The homology between the Mughal capital in Fatehpur Sikri and the Amber court's Sati Burj in Mathura persists throughout the tower's architectural programme. Indeed, Akbar had also used a viewing window (jharoka) in his palace complex in Sikri. The imperial jharoka, the public viewing window in the records office (daftarkhana) from where the emperor ceremonially presented himself to his subjects, was likewise constructed in the 1570s. It has been suggested that Akbar had derived this custom of displaying the imperial body from Hindu liturgical practices that prescribed the act of seeing the divine body (darsan), that is ritually glancing at the icon in a temple, as a form of gaining merit. 41 While, in the Mughal context, Akbar could be seen as adopting the ocular-centric practices intrinsic to Hindu liturgy to enunciate the idealised sovereign body, the use of the same architectural device at the Vishram Ghat presents a wholly different sensibility of vision and the gaze. For unlike the imperial jharoka in Fatehpur Sikri, designed to be looked into from outside, the positioning of the viewing window on the upper level of the Sati Burj suggests that it functioned as an optical apparatus to look out of, to behold the Yamuna flowing past the Vishram Ghat. Indeed, located almost fifty feet above ground level, the viewing window of the Sati Burj could not have served as a framing device for viewing the members of the Amber court from the streets of Mathura. Instead, it provided an unhindered view of flowing water, underscoring the role of beholding the Yamuna as fundamental to pilgrimage practices at the Vishram Ghat. It is within this larger ocular culture that we could place the Isarda Bhagavata Purana manuscript. The Isarda manuscript was only one in a series of illustrated manuscripts produced in this region in the sixteenth century. A c. 1520À40 Bhagavata Purana with over two hundred extant folios that comes from Palam, now a suburb in southwest Delhi, signals towards the larger artistic cultures that had developed in the cosmopolitan worlds of sixteenth-century Delhi and Agra (Figure 8). 42 Largely independent of the Mughal court, these artistic cultures had evolved alongside new Vaishnava devotional and pilgrimage practices that profoundly transformed the North Indian ecumene in this period. Moving away from earlier orthodox practices of seeing the divine as a supreme godhead, the symbolism of Bhakti or divine love, where the devotee imagined herself/himself as Radha, Krishna's consort, consequently shaped new forms of poetic traditions and artistic practices. 43 Commissioned by two Vaishnava merchants, the 1520À40 Palam Bhagavata provides us with an apposite point of comparison with the Isarda manuscript that had been produced only a few decades later. As one of the earliest known illustrations of the Bhagavata Purana, the Palam manuscript can be placed within a specific fifteenthand early sixteenth-century painting tradition that had evolved in the DelhiÀAgra region. Indeed, along with the Palam Bhagavata, a number of contemporaneous manuscripts produced in and around the mercantile urban centres of Delhi and Agra shared an aesthetic sensibility characterised by the use of flat monochromatic bands to delineate the background, angular figures in silhouette profile, and compartmentalised units bordered by solid lines. 44 Scholars have provisionally identified this new artistic sensibility as the early Rajput School. 45 Water occupies a significant place in a number of folios in the 1520À40 Palam Bhagavata. Thus, in a folio depicting water sport or jal krida, we see Krishna with the cowherd women of Braj in the river Yamuna. Working with a limited palette of colours, the artist has carefully contrasted bands of intense reds and blues to draw the viewer's attention towards the river, which occupies central place within the picture plane. Crucially, colour is also effectively used to delineate spatial division between the worldly prakata Braj and the divine realm, the aprakata, from where celestial beings shower Krishna with floral wreaths. Unlike the painting illustrating the same verse in the 1560À70 Isarda Bhagavata folio, the folio with which our discussion on water ensued, the Palam artist seems to have maintained veracity in his visual translation of the verse. Consequently, along with the presence of celestial beings, Krishna, in a moment of amorous impulse, reaches out to his devotee. As the Bhagavata Purana states, Krishna 'was like the king of the elephants who had lost all inhibitions with his female elephants' during water sport. 46 In the Palam folio, the river Yamuna is depicted in a characteristic fifteenthand early sixteenth-century basketwork pattern with clearly marked white parallel lines against deep blue water. Undoubtedly, the technique of mobilising parallel lines to suggest flowing water has a long history in South Asia, one that can be traced back to as early as the first century BCE. A narrative relief on the eastern gateway of the Great Stupa from the cluster of Buddhist funerary structures at Sanchi, for instance, depicts the miracle of the Buddha walking on water (Figure 9). The turbulent waves of the flooded river on the c. 50 BCE gateway are also represented by repeating parallel lines. A first-century CE relief sculpture from Mathura, ninety miles south of Palam where the manuscript under discussion was produced, depicts the child Krishna being carried by his father to the house of his foster parents. Once again, we find the use of parallel lines to visualise the overflowing river Yamuna (Figure 10).
While it would be difficult to ascertain whether the artists of the Palam Bhagavata were aware of this particular convention of depicting water, the passage from stone to paper had certainly already occurred in Vaishnava aesthetic cultures by the fifteenth century. A late fifteenth-century manuscript illustrating the poet Bilvamangala's Balagopalastuti (Praise for the Young Lord of the Cowherds) shows Krishna, attended by cowherd women, lifting the Govardhan mountain ( Figure 11). As one of the earliest representations of narratives from Krishna's life in painting, fifteenth-century illustrated manuscripts of the Balagopalastuti from western India had foreshadowed the new aesthetic cultures of what is now tentatively designated as the early Rajput School. 47 Notably, the river Yamuna in the folio flows across the lower edge of the painting. The river mirrors the contours of the Govardhan mountain that the young Krishna lifts with one finger to protect the inhabitants of Braj from the torrential rain sent by Indra, the king of gods. The undulating lines of the river and the mountain operate as a powerful framing device to allow the viewer-devotee to contemplate Krishna's miraculous act. Water, simultaneously threatening and life-saving, is central to the narrative. On the one hand, Krishna shelters Braj from torrential rain that threatens to flood the riverbanks, potentially inundating the villages in the region; on the other, it is the river Yamuna, marked by rapid parallel lines, which is the primary water source sustaining the agricultural and pastoral communities of Braj. This hydrosocial imaginary played an equally important role in structuring the folio of the Isarda Bhagavata manuscript. The prominence of the river and its role in governing the visual narrative, however, distinguishes the 1560À70 Isarda folio. The vital role of water in supporting the ecologies of life may have made the Yamuna central to the aesthetic, religious and cultural practices of sixteenth-century North India. Yet, even as the central theme of the narrative is Krishna's water sport, it seems that the Isarda artist has deliberately used pictorial configurations to draw the viewer's attention to the blue river with lotuses, blooming creepers facing the waterfront, and frolicking cattle. The blue of   Krishna's body blends into the liquescent blue of the river, making it difficult to discern the separation between the river and the divine body. Carefully tilting the pictorial plane to create a sense of spatial recession, the artist draws the viewer's attention to the Yamuna flowing diagonally in a wide swath along a central axis and across the surface of the painting.
The implication of this visual innovation becomes legible if we compare the 1560À70 Isarda folio with the 1520À40 Palam folio. Following pre-sixteenth-century conventions, the river in the Palam folio functions like a flat decorative background or a theatrical backdrop in front of which the narrative is played out. While poetic tropes such as the presence of waterfowl and blooming lotuses point towards a shared vocabulary of imagining the natural environment, the Yamuna's movement from the background to the very centre of the picture plane in the Isarda manuscript, it appears, transpired only in a matter of thirty years. As we will see, a dense cluster of philosophical ruminations, theological aesthetics and pilgrimage practices arranges the optical cognisance that directed this visual restructuring.
The Isarda manuscript's significance in art history, however, has primarily rested on the artist's attempt to bridge pre-Mughal aesthetic conventions and the emerging repertoire of the Mughal atelier under Akbar. Scholars have associated the artist's use of delicate white lines to demarcate the turbulent waves of the Yamuna as emerging in negotiation with the growing prominence of Mughal painting in the mid sixteenth century. 48 One certainly sees a similar mode of depicting the swirling fluidity of flowing water in the Hamzanama (Story of Hamza), a manuscript commissioned by Akbar around 1562. The imperial manuscript was completed over the next fifteen years. A folio from the manuscript depicting the prophet Elias rescuing Hamza's nephew, Nur al-Dahr, from the sea makes perceptible both the formal and psychological potential of water as it was imagined in the Mughal atelier ( Figure 12). Writing on this particular folio, John Seyller notes that the 'sea imperils many a figure in the Hamzanama, most often when a storm overwhelms the ship in which they have taken passage'. 49 It is the ungovernable power and menace of water that the Mughal artist apprehends through curved lines indicating the tempestuous waves of the sea. The delicate strokes of white paint seem to denote the translucence of the cresting wind-driven waves, while sea monsters threaten the doomed Nur al-Dahr. This fluid vitality of turbulent water was also central to the imagination of the river Yamuna flowing through Braj in the Isarda Bhagavata, a manuscript that was produced within a decade of Akbar's commissioning of the imperial Hamzanama.
In sixteenth-century Vaishnava texts, however, the river Yamuna had a very specific connotation. In Braj, Yamuna was the sensual drops of sweat that emerge during Krishna's lovemaking with his devotees, 50 ecstatic love in liquid form. The moral, aesthetic and environmental affect of the river Yamuna was thus eulogised in contemporaneous Vaishnava liturgical texts such as the Yamunastakam, a sixteenth-century Sanskrit hymn  The river's internal form (adhidaivika svarupa) was, on the other hand, the divine goddess who steered souls into the mystical world of bhakti.
Depicting the Yamuna, paintings in the Isarda Bhagavata consequently appear to valorise beholding water as a theological aesthetic, a form of non-anthropomorphic hydrolatry that does not disentangle nature from culture. The act of seeing the sacred river in the Isarda Bhagavata thus encompasses the riparian ecosystem to include the plant life that rendered the river fragrant, the cows that gathered by the water, and the monsoon clouds as dark as the water itself. At a remove from Krishna's divine sport, a woman carries water from the Yamuna in earthenware pots, perhaps for domestic use. Unlike the dramaturgical staging of the riverscape in the Palam manuscript, the Isarda Bhagavata makes visible the everyday life that surrounds river systems. The image of expansive water in the Isarda manuscript was, one could contend, materialised and shaped by both its theological manifestation and an ensemble of hydrosocial practices played out in, and by, the river that flowed around 860 miles from the glacial formations of the Himalayas to its confluence with the river Ganga and the fabled river Sarasvati in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. The manuscript then conceives of a moral horizon that highlights seeing the materiality of water as an aesthetic experience that allowed for the advent of an imaginative topography in sixteenth-century North India.

The Topography of Hydroaesthetics
The vision-centric ideation of the river Yamuna in the Isarda Bhagavata Purana and the architectonics of the river-facing Sati Burj tower paralleled the emergence of a new theology based on the veneration of natural phenomena in sixteenth-century Braj. Hagiographic accounts narrate how Vaishnava reformers such as Chaitanya and Vallabhacharya had been responsible for rediscovering the lost sites in Braj associated with Krishna's life. For instance, during his 1514 pilgrimage to Braj, Chaitanya had found in the topography of the region geographic markers that allowed him to claim Braj as that primordial space inhabited by the divine Krishna. Scriptural descriptions of sacred spaces were marshalled as 51. Ibid., p. 107. 52. Ibid., p. 105. evidence. Thus, a grove on the east bank of the Yamuna became the legendary site of Bhandirban, where Krishna had brought forth water from the ground. 53 Composed by Narayan Bhatt, a disciple of Chaitanya, the 1552 Vrajabhaktivilasa was one of the most elaborate texts ever written on the sacred geography of Braj. 54 The seventh chapter of the text prescribed the route of the journey through the forests of Braj, a circumambulation of the important pilgrimage sites in the region. Arising out of the larger practice of the circumambulation of temples and shrines, the circular journey through Braj allowed pilgrims to gain merit. Given the significance of forests, rivers and lakes in sixteenth-century constructions of piety, the landscape of Braj was transformed into an iconic space that embodied the structural and conceptual symbolism of a temple. Sixteenth-century texts thus repeatedly reiterate the celestial beauty of the sacred sites in the region, describing in detail the leaves and fruits of trees that gleam like divine jewels. The corporeal topophilia inherent in such sensuous imaginings of the natural ecosystem thus drew the devotee into a bodily relationship with the environment.
Certainly, by the mid sixteenth century, Braj had become an important pilgrimage site in North India, as Antonio Monserrate, a Portuguese Jesuit who visited the region in 1580, attested: 'Temples dedicated to Viznu (Vishnu) are to be found in many places in the neighbourhood [of Braj], built in spots where the silly old-wives-fables declare that he performed some action'. 55 Monserrate's account suggests that Chaitanya's attempts at constructing a sacred landscape in Braj, a landscape of the gods, had become increasingly popular, with temples built to Krishna's corporeal presence in the region. It is at this very juncture that a devout family of Krishna worshippers from Agra-thirty miles south of Mathura, the epicentre of Braj pilgrimage-had commissioned the Isarda Bhagavata Purana manuscript. The Sati Burj too was being built around the same time.
The ocular emphasis in architecture and painting found reflection in contemporaneous liturgical texts. Attributed to Gopala Bhatta (1503À78) and Sanatana Goswami (1488À1558), both direct disciples of Chaitanya, the c. 1541 Haribhaktivilasa, the most authoritative source for Gaudiya ritualistic practices, describes the function of the river Yamuna in Braj thus: 'Yamuna purifies one who beholds it'. 56 While immersing oneself in rivers such as the Ganga allowed the devotee to purify herself/himself, the act of absorbing the goddess Yamuna's theophanic presence through ritualistic beholding, that is taking darsan of the river as it flows through Braj, was sufficient to attain purity. Even as established pre-sixteenth-century sacramental norms mandated haptic and gustatory absorption-that is bathing at pilgrimage sites (snana) or drinking the water with which an icon is washed (charanamrita)-as primary forms of ritual engagement with sacred water, the c. 1541 text clearly demarcated a hierarchy of sacred rivers centred on the privileging of vision, of seeing sacrosanct water.
Given that foundational Vaishnava texts such as the Haribhaktivilasa were being composed in Braj in the mid sixteenth century, one could link the vision of the river Yamuna in text, painting and architecture in decisive ways. beholding the Yamuna, in the c. 1541 Haribhaktivilasa, the 1560À70 Isarda Bhagavata and the 1570 Sati Burj was thus not coincidental. Indeed, read together, Vaishnava texts, painting and architecture reveal an incisive attempt to develop a technique of seeing.

Seeing Transversally
Undeniably, the sweeping rearrangement of both the natural and the human environment in sixteenth-century South Asia provides a perspective on the reciprocal relationship between climate change and artistic production that emerged from the interstices of aesthetic practices, theological economies and widespread environmental transformation. The material culture of water in Braj also presents us with an exemplary site that produces an alternative ideation of an ecological art history articulated from within an early modern world of artistic improvisation, affective aesthetics and political governance. In such an ideation, the act of seeing water becomes the crucial link that connects localised liturgical aesthetics with an expanded non-human trans-territorial arena of water scarcity and drought. In this experience of seeing, natural form-rising water, moving banks, changing flows, water currents and riparian habitat-was not just a system of the environment, but an affective text performing a theological and aesthetic function. The riverscape was thus neither a natural given, nor purely a construction of human experience. Rather, as nondifferent from the unmanifest world where Krishna plays eternally, the river was a liminal arena that was simultaneously manifest (prakata, worldly) and unmanifest (aprakata, transcendent). Conceivably, it is this theological coterminity of the manifest and the unmanifest, the visible and the invisible, that also led the artists of the Isarda Bhagavata to trace the journey of the river Yamuna diagonally across the picture plane to a place elsewhere, the aprakata beyond presence and representation.
The fundamental transformation in visualising water that occurred across painting and architecture practices in this period, I suggest, emerged from concurrent philosophical ruminations on the irreducibility of the landscape, as well as on large-scale transformations in the natural environment that occurred as a result of non-human and human pressure on the habitat. Moving transversally from the depiction of the flowing river in a single folio in the Isarda Bhagavata Purana to monumental riparian architecture, this act of visualising connected opticality, ecological awareness and theological philosophy in the early moments of the Little Ice Age, a geological epoch marked by massive droughts on a global scale. Rather than maintaining distinctions between the political, the environmental and the aesthetic, transversality, as Felix Guattari stresses, may, then, allow us to comprehend the interconnectedness between the ecologies of the natural environment, human subjectivity and social relationships. 57 Or, as Tim Ingold puts it, 'Ecology, in short, is the study of the life of lines'. 58 am grateful to many who raised thoughtful questions. I am also grateful to the two anonymous South Asia readers of the manuscript for their extremely helpful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.