Shiva seated on Mount Kailasa with his leg upright - deep in a meditative trance.  Intoxicated by bhang his favorite liquor, his head leans into the crook of his right arm.  Parvati seated next to him, gently offering yet another tiny cup of the powerfully intoxicating drink.  Her tiger curled-up, like a giant bolster, quietly licking his paws.  Shiva's many snakes writhe about his body and through his matted hair - standing upright and alert - attentively awaiting his eventual movement.  The River Ganges flows in a small stream from his piled topknot.

This unusual subject was described by Dr. Stella Kramrisch as Shiva's Slumber of Surfeit  in the ground-breaking 1981 exhibition "Manifestations of Shiva".  Our present painting being an imaginative version of that subject - likely from the small Deccani provincial center of Shorapur, near Hyderabad.  The district was home to ateliers of miniature painters, working for aristocratic Hindu families living in the Southern Deccan, who created devotional paintings employing a distinctive facial type and color palette.  The present work, of an intoxicated or sleeping Shiva, remains quite unusual in Deccani painting except for the very closely related example from Shorapur, likely from the same atelier, previously in the Edwin Binney 3rd Collection and presently in the San Diego Museum of Art (accessi💃on no. 1990.862). 

For a very similar painting of the same subject see Edwin Binney 3rd, Indian Miniature Painting from the Collection of Edwin Binney 3rd, Portland Art Museum, 1973, cat 174, p.187.  Also refer to Stella Kramrisch, Manifestations of Shiva, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981, cat. P-36, pps. 202-203 and Mark Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, London, 1983, pp. 274-275.