Reviewing the various paintings on Artstor, I was surprised to see that I had envisioned the characters completely differently. I think this because of film and picture that I am used to. The drawings are very crude when compared to modern day realist art, but it gives off an interesting homey feeling. The images seems to depict when Ahalya was turned from stone back into human form by Rama. I think that the two left characters are Ahalya because of how similar their appearances are, they seem to have inverted colors (the black body white dress being stone form and the the white body black dress being human form). But after longer analysis I realized that they might be the brothers and the person on the right is Ahalya since the two people on the left are both carrying bow and arrows. Using my hypothesis, I googled an image of Rama and Lakshama and both appeared as the men on the left. I think not having an original image of Rama to put in my mind hindered my ability to piece together this situation, since I had no idea what he looked like he could’ve either been dark skinned or contained feminine features. Another clue was that Rama is in the middle of the picture! I figured that the person in the middle may hold more importance and that pushed me to investigate further (by googling images).
After realizing Rama could be a different skin color and this photo could represent a scene post un-stoning Ahalya I understood the picture better. I think it would be interesting to read the story as a picture book and look at the characters and their characteristics from the beginning and to see them evolve throughout the book. In the picture there seems to be emphasis on the bows that the brothers are holding (possibly to make a viewer like me understand that they are actually the brothers) where as in the book they make no mention of them in this scene because it would be unnecessary clutter. Also in the book they make no mention of Ahalya’s thanks but in this picture it is obviously noted. In Ramayana the author only writes, “Your wife is restored to her normal form […] Go and take her back.” and immediately continue on with the rest of the story, “All this accomplished, they moved on …”. This examples show how the illustration needs to depict things that aren’t described in the story in order to tell it’s story without words.