The Cleveland Museum of Art has unveiled "Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings from the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana," an exhibition reuniting a widely dispersed 18th-century pictorial series. The show features 40 physical paintings alongside digital animations that reconstruct the original episodic sequences of the Hindu epic. This presentation is part of a larger collaborative initiative involving the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art to study and display works from the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection.
The exhibition is significant for presenting new scholarship that challenges previous understandings of the "Shangri" Ramayana, revealing the series to be three times larger than once thought. By identifying a collaborative production model involving artists across the Pahari region, the research highlights the complex patronage and painting systems of the Himalayan valley kingdoms. The project also demonstrates a modern institutional shift toward collaborative research and digital integration to contextualize fragmented historical collections.