PAINTING

Temple Murals

The first major cycle of painting appears in the Buddhist cave and temples of Ajanta and Bagh. The earliest Ajanta paintings exemplify mature basic concepts of the nature of painting in India. Within a socially accepted mode of expression, no individual idiosyncrasies could obtrude. Legendary figuration is in perfect accord with a profuse and precise representation of abundant life. In the repertoire of forms, the idealized human figure is pre-eminent. The painters reconstruct life as total experience, and the development of the Ajanta paintings (lst-7th centuries) depicts the progressive enriching of this experience. The world of Ajanta is peopled with earnest, sensitive characters from the various former lives of the Enlightened One, the Buddha. Tropical vegetation, insects, birds, animals, human and angelic forms, textile, jewellery and architecture, the world of nature and the man-made world are delineated with sympathy and understanding. Sweeping, continuous, accented lines and luminous modulated colours create firmly modelled forms of great subtlety and refined vitality. The themes are presented on the walls as a continuous narrative without division of space. The stream of shapes, as if encompassing the manifest world, frequently congeals into groups held together with the tension of inner relationship of being to being. An elaborately perfected language of gestures intensifies the expression. Evolved collectively by anonymous painters, these serene and profound murals remain an apogee of attainment hardly equalled again. Closely related to Ajanta and Bagh are murals from Badami in western India (5th century), Sittanavasal in the South (7th century) and Sigiria in Ceylon (6th century). In the Jain caves of Sittanavasal may be observed the beginnings of a new assertion of the drawn line. Linear, angular forms with slight shading, characterise drawings filled in with colours, from Kailasanatha temple, Ellora (8th century).

Manuscript Paintings

In the 11th century manuscripts from Bengal and Nepal the old mural form in colour and treatment is maintained even though physically scaled down to the width of the palm leaf strip. Western Indian manuscript painting (mainly illustrations of Jain texts) of the 13th century onward, develops to logical conclusions all the tendencies incipient in the murals from Ellora, and more. Form is attenuated into a codified system of iconography. These diagrammatic, hieratic, repetitive little pictures-reduced murals in technique- are, nevertheless, often rich with a metallic scintillation of abrupt juxtapositions of unmitigated colours. Between the 12th and the 18th centuries, a large number of paintings from Tanjore, Kanchipuram, Cochin, etc., reveal directions of development already noted. Perhaps, the Cochin murals mark the completion of the cycle that commenced with the early paintings at Ajanta. Conventional shading is applied rather mechanically to inflated forms, and all available space is filled with intricate coloured embellishment. There is sufficient evidence from the earliest times to indicate that apart from the complex, the sophisticated and the hieratic, there has always existed a simple, direct, largely indigenous folk expression in the arts.