Indian Miniature Painting
"Drawing
the likeness of anything is called tasveer. Since it is an excellent source, both of study and
entertainment, His Majesty ... has taken a deep interest in painting and sought
its spread and development. Consequently this magical art has gained in beauty.
A very large number of painters has been set to work.
"From
the Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abu] FazI in the reign of Emperor Akbar
(r.1556-1605).
For a
period of over two hundred and fifty years, from the mid-sixteenth to the early
nineteenth centuries, there was a glorious flowering of painting in India. In
the Imperial atelier at Agra, the Emperor Akbar a man of taste as well as the
power and wealth with which to indulge it oversaw his artists as they created
the works he had commissioned. It was a busy place, this atelier of Akbar's,
where the great portfolios of the Hamza Nama and the Tuti Nama were painted and
masters like Basawan, Daswanth, Kesho, Miskin and Lal put brush to paper. They
were following in the traditions set by the Persian master painters, Mir Sayyid
Ali and Abdus Samad, brought to India by Akbar's father Humayun.
But
Akbar's artists were more than just copyists of the Persian style. They created
the synthesis between India and Persia, between the formally-structured and decorative
idiom of the Persians with its distinctive concept of perspective, and the
vital, colourful but somewhat two-dimensional ouvre then prevalent in India. In
the great kitabkhana at Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's capital, they worked in teams
and their output was prolific. Lesser accomplished artists undertook the
arduous tasks of grinding the mineral pigments blue came from lapis lazuli,
Indian red from oxide of iron, a more brilliant red from cinnabar, yellow from orpiment
and gold from gold leaf. Thick handmade paper was repeatedly burnished on the
reverse side with an agate to make the surface glossy, and after the primer
coat of paint was laid, the master artist designed the scene and its colouring.
To traditional Indian colours like indigo and deep madder, were now added the
softer hues of delicate pistachio green and old rose. From this synthesis of
form, of colour and content, was born the first truly enduring Indian style,
one that was to spread to ateliers across the country, and influence artists elsewhere.
It was a seminal moment in the history of Indian painting. 
Seminal
though it was, Akbar's atelier was part of a much earlier and longer tradition
of Indian. Painting, a tradition that had spanned the course of more than a
thousand years and seen cave paintings, and paintings on palm leaves, wood and
cloth. The most famous examples, and deservedly so, of the art of ancient
Indian painting are the cave paintings at Ajanta. So much has been written
about them, about their supple and fluid lines, about their spatial and
volumetric richness, about their naturalism. But in the end, nothing prepares
you for their feeling of intense humanism, immediacy, and, yes, great joy. The
images are densely packed, but in the unmistakable and universal grace of their
contours and the warmth of the earth colours, there is a feeling of living,
breathing presences.
Echoes
of Ajanta are evident in the Buddhist palm leaf paintings of the
eleventh-twelfth century Pala kings of eastern India. The threads are next
picked up with Jain manuscripts, illustrated religious texts, a tradition which
flourished between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. During the Sultanate
period of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries came the Indo-Islamic
confluence; but because of the disparate styles Afghan, Turkish, Persian there
is no stylistic continuity. An outstanding work of this era is the Nimat Nama,
commissoned by Ghiyasuddin Khilji of Malwa. The vitality of this work, perhaps
the first illustrated cookbook in the world, draws equally from the spare
elegance of line, a Persian characteristic, interspersed with the warmth of
Indian textiles and poses. But the culmination of what could be called the
indigenous style is found in the paintings of the Chaurapanchasika group and
the folios of the Bhagavata Purana, among other examples, where the strong
contrasting colours of religious manuscript illustrations were combined with a
greater sophistication.
This
then was the backdrop of Indian painting at the time of Akbar, the platform from
which the next great impetus was to take place. Among the major contributions
of Akbar and his artists to the development of Indian art was the introduction
of portrait painting, a trend that was to be followed in later generations with
great enthusiasm by miniature painters, and more especially by their patrons.
But for the most part the paintings of that period, as of earlier periods, were
illustrations for books and text illuminations, and the art of painting was
closely associated with the art of the book. This was to change with Jahangir,
Akbar's son, already an active patron of the arts when he ascended the throne;
for his preference was for albums of single paintings. Jahangir had a deep and
abiding love for the beauties of nature; flowers, plants, birds and animals
fascinated him; and he commissioned his artists to paint them. Mansur was the
most talented of these painters, whose superb executions of birds and flowers
are intense and observant and have a grace and delicacy of touch.
These
studies of nature were fresh and lyrical, but increasingly Jahangir turned to
more formal compositions, and court paintings, and this direction was followed
by his son and heir, Shah Jahan. There are now more portraits, scenes of
audience (durbar) and processions, almost as if the weight of empire made its
presence known in the pages of art. Nonetheless, many works of great artistic
merit were executed in this period, including hunt and battle scenes painted
with imagination and skill. A refinement of line and shading shows itself in
the miniatures of this time.
However,
active interest in art and its patronage went through ups and downs with
succeeding rulers, and indeed Aurangzeb, who ruled in the second half of the
seventeenth century, went so far as to dismiss his artists. Their dispersal led
to a wave of Mughal influence in the courts to which they now flocked. A
revival took place during the reign of Bahadur Shah; and a few years later, Muhammad
Shah known to history as a pleasure loving monarch who preferred the company of
women and buffoons to the more serious business of ruling also encouraged the
arts. The paintings of his period depict moonlight revels, music parties and
lovely concubines, themes executed in a mellow and graceful manner. But over
the years the absolute centrifugal power of the Mughal dynasty had declined,
and in 1738-39 the Persian invader Nadir Shah laid siege to Delhi and proceeded
to strip it of its riches. This caused another exodus of painters, who fled to
Lucknow, Patna, Hyderabad, the Punjab Hills and Rajasthan, and the future
history of miniature painting was to take place in these provincial courts.
Meanwhile,
far to the south in the Deccan, a parallel and contemporaneous development in
painting had taken place in the Islamic Sultanates of Bijapur, Golconda and
Ahmednagar. Here, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, works
of great mastery and unmistakably Deccani identity had been created, an
interaction between Hindu traditions and the Muslim art of Persia, elegant
Iranian line and earthy Indian colour. It was a world apart; as Stella
Kramrisch writes "a kingdom of sated nostalgia, abandoned to scents and
dreams, lingering in flowers, glowing in colours, calm and deep..." When
the Deccan finally became subordinate to the Mughals, at the end of the
seventeenth century, the style adapted itself to new conventions, combining
Mughal, Rajput and Deccani elements.
The
painters who had moved to Rajasthan settled themselves in the Rajput kingdoms
of the area. Under the benign gaze of their new patrons, they gave fresh
impetus to an existing tradition, a tradition rooted in the pre-Mughal style,
strong of line and bold of colour. Local idioms were now combined with the
supple refinement of the Mughal School to produce works of vibrant tenderness
and intensity, each area having a distinct style and identity of its own. If
Mewar (Udaipur) had austere lines and bold, burning colours, then Bundi was
gentler, more lyrical, as seen in the famous Ragamala paintings. The soft colours
and melting forms of Bikaner found a counterpoint in the elegance of
Kishangarh. In the palaces of Kotah, of Jaipur, of Marwar (Jodhpur), and in the
thikanas or estates of the local aristocracy, painters put brush to paper to
record a variety of subjects and themes. .
The
pre-occupations of the artist were naturally those of his patron. Court and
hunt scenes abounded, a display of the mighty and valour of kings, who were
also depicted leading their armies atop splendidly canopied elephants, astride
magnificent horses or on camel-back. Individual portraits and illustrations
from legends and epics were also painted; but one of the most remarkable themes
was that of Ragamala, literally, the Garland of Ragas or musical modes. In
Indian raga, the aural experience of heard music arouses certain moods and
emotions, different ragas evoking different nuances ranging from the romantic
to the deeply religious. The visual expression of these emotions, these
feelings, richly delineated in colour and form, are the Ragamala paintings,
which Coomaraswamy has described as "profoundly imagined pictures of human
passion". Here is the ecstasy of love in union, as entwined lovers sway
gently on a swing; here too is the despair and pain of love in separation,
where the heroine pines for her absent lover against the poignant backdrop of
indigo clouds. The passages of seasons, the intensity of sacred devotion, are
all captured in the Ragamala paintings. Very often, the image of love is
symbolised by the figures of Radha and Krishna, whose yearning and seeking is a
metaphor for the soul's longing for God.
But the
zenith of the Radha-Krishna paintings was surely reached in the hills of the
Pahari kingdoms, far to the north, and with a climate and topography altogether
more temperate than that of Rajasthan. Here, amidst verdant slopes and
flowering trees, surrounded by women of beauty and grace, the artists of Guler
and Kangra created those masterpieces of refinement and delicacy that were to
delight and astonish the world. The concept of bhakti, that intensely personal
love between man and his god, found a beautiful visual expression in the Kangra
paintings of Krishna scenes. It is an enchanting luminosity that suffuses the
paintings; now the golden light of day that shimmers on dense foliage, now the
silver of moonlight reflected in river waters. It is a beautiful world of
nature, lyrically reflected in the feathery brush strokes of the artist, with
fine lines and glowing colours. It is also a world of beautiful humans with
chiselled features and large dark eyes, radiant with youth and innocence. For
its admirers, Kangra represents the most romantic form of Indian painting.
In the
nineteenth century, a new milieu was evolving. The nature and character of
patronage changed under the relentless pressure of history and colonialism. New
classes, new tastes were emerging. The Europeans brought in the concept of
realism and an altogether new palette of colours. Styles became precious,
ornamented, or over-heated, and while miniature painting did not die it simply
took different directions it never reached again the sublime heights that it
had attained under its great patrons.
Writer - Asharani Mathur
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