Vedic Art Print – Kushtha, The Violet-Headed Herb

Provenance

'Kushtha' is composed as a botanical plate: a sturdy herb with three violet flower heads rises from a thick root across a parchment-toned ground, with a floret, a bud, a halved flower head, a leaf, a seed and a root cross-section set around it. The Devanagari word 'कुष्ठ' is lettered below with a reference to the Atharvaveda, 5.4, a hymn that praises Kushtha as a mountain-born healing plant sought out by the gods. The print lets the three bristling flower heads draw the eye to the top of the sheet.

Rounded flower heads of purple filaments sit in spiny, olive-green bracts at the tips of purple-tinged stems, above large, deeply toothed leaves. A knotted, ridged root with a tangle of fine rootlets anchors the plant at lower left. At the edges sit a single tubular floret at upper left, a bud on a leafy stem at upper right, a halved flower head at right, a single leaf below it, a feathered seed at lower right and a cross-section of the root beside it.

Violet and plum flower heads sit against olive and moss-green leaves, with roots in golden brown, on ochre-cream parchment. Fine pen lines describe each tooth of the leaf and each rootlet, and the faint mottling of the ground is visible in the image itself.