India Painting
The
story of Indian painting begins with The of primitive man which
has sui vived in rock shelters and caves in places tike Hoshangabad,
Mirzapur and Bhimbetka.
Stone Age paintings belonging to the Magdaienian phase (15,000
B.C.) have been discovered elsewhere. The chances are that the
paintings in India do not go that far back. But it is accepted
that the primitive intellect and vision can survive for long when
communities are isolated. Thus these paintings share the vivid
realism of primitive art that has been discovered in many places
like Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France.
The Indus epoch may have had extensive mural painting, for the
painting on the pottery that has come down to us in abundance
shows maturity and range, from vigorous realism througbrhythmic
stylizationto strikingly expressive abstraction.
The earliest paintings of Ajanta date back to the first century
B.C. and the latest to the eighth century. The spirit of the compassionate
Buddha is their inspiration. Perhaps Hinayana or early Buddhism
did not understand that spirit correctly, for it remembered only
the transience of things, the pervasiveness "of pain. Siddhartha
rejected Nirvana for hilitself and was born again and aKain tohelphumanity
in its travails, not only in many hu rt~n roles, but as a deer,
an elephant, a swan. The Jataka tales elaborated the vicissitudes
of these incarnations and the Ajantan artists painted them in
sinuous line and sensitive colour. City, countryside and forest,
men and women of every type, fauna and flora, all are mentioned
in these murals.
Since the brush and the chisel accompanied the message of peace
when Buddhism radiated to the rest of Asia, Ajanta became a fountainhead
of Asian painting and murals with the clear stamp of its style.
In India itself the mural tradition continued, though with less
momentum, in Chalukyan Badami (sixth century). Pallava Panamalai
(seventh century), Pandyan Sittannavasal (ninth century), Chola
Tanjore (twelfth century), Lepakshi of Vijayanagar (sixteenth
century) and the murals of Kerala of various dates reaching to
the middle of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, painting had come down from the extended mural surface
to the miniature dimension of the maftuscript, originally on palm-leaf,
later on paper. The miniatures of Pala period Bengal (tenth and
eleventh centuries) conserve the sensuous line of Ajanta.
But there is a rapid decline now and the line becomes brittle
and angular.lt is this style that spread to western India and
is seen in numerous illuminated manuscripts.
In
response to the lyricism of poems like the Vasanta VUasa (Dalliance
in Spring), in Bilhana's Chaura Panchasika (Fifty Stanzas on Stolen
Love) and Laur-Chanda (the Romance of Lorik and Chanda), line
again be comes supple, colour lustrous. The Indian miniature stabilizes
a fine pictorial style even before the advent of the Moghuls.
Though the imperial court of Akbar was headed by artists from
Persia, Moghul painting is not a provincial school of Persian
painting. The latter retreats into a paradisiacal world of romance,
while Akbar recruited a very large number of Indian artists. Each
painting was most often a co-operative effort of Indian and Persian
artists, one man doing the drawinghanother the colouring, a third
the details, lhe indigenisation received further momentum when
Akbar commissioned the translation and illustration of Indian
texts like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. It is mostly artists
trained in the Moghul atelier who became the court painters of
the Rajput princes. But while Moghul painting was elitist, reflecting
imperial pomp and circum stance, Rajput painting presented in
line and colour the great myths and legends of the land, the story
of Rama, of Krishna, of the Bhagavata and the Gita Govinda. Of
the many states in the plains of Rajasthan, two need special mention.
The style of Kotah painting anticipates by nearly eighty years
the primitive vision and virility of European fauvists like Douanier
Rousseau. That of Kishangarh painting manages the perfect pictorialisation
of the poetry of the Radha-Krishna story.
In the small principalities of the Himalayan valleys set up by
intrepid Rajput warriors from the plains, many. centres came up
of which Basohli is unique for its intensity of expression, Kulu
for its closeness to the folk style and Kangra for both its romanticism
and large output.
A decline followed the close of the Rajput phase. With the strong
presence of the west in the British era, western academism became
popular, mostly self-taught in the case of a pioneerlike RaviVarma,
through institutional training in the case of others. The revivalist
school, headed by Abanindranath Tagore, was nationalist in inspiration,
but its pictorial achievement was weak and sentimental.
The four pioneers of modern painting in India are Gaganendranath
Tagore who tried out every technique and style, Arnrita Shergil
who integrated the pictorial idiom of the west and an Indian vision,
Jamini Roy who discovered the virility of the folk tradition and
modulated it in many ways and Rabindranath Tagore who demanded
for paintings music's autonomy and independence from factuality
and thus gave a charter for free variations on naturalism, abstraction
and expressionism.
