English: Balinese Panting of Mpu Monaguṇa’s Sumanasāntaka.

Mpu Monaguṇa's early thirteenth century epic poem Sumanasāntaka is a vernacular rendering of Kālidāsa's story of Prince Aja and Princess Indumatī told in the Raghuvaṃśa. In it the poet exploits his source narrative to describe and comment on the Javanese world of his times. In Mpu Monaguṇa's Sumanasāntaka the authors offer an edited text and translation of Mpu Monaguṇa's epic kakawin and extensive commentary on the editing of the manuscripts and history of the poem and its story, the relationship between the Old Javanese poem and Kālidāsa's Raghuvaṃśa, the way in which the poem imagines the lived environment of ancient Java in the early thirteenth century and Balinese painted representations of the story of Prince Aja and Princess Indumatī.

In format it is a langse or ulon-ulon, 1.212cm in length and 75cm wide, and painted on some indigenous Balinese cotton cloth.

The painting depicts three important moments in the marriage of Princess Indumatī and Prince Aja, a major event in the kakawin Sumanasāntaka’s account of the life stories of the prince and princess: the swayambara during which Princess Indumatī chooses a husband from among a number of royal suitors, the temple ritual during which a Śaiwa priest leads the couple seven times around the sacred fire, and two moments in the consummation of the marriage of the royal couple.

(excerpt from Peter Worsley's "Mpu Monaguṇa’s Sumanasāntaka")