Mitter, Partha. Oxford History of Indian Art. London: Oxford University Press, 2001.

In Rajput KingdomIn the eighteenth century, as political turmoil followed the dismemberment of the Mughal empire, the Hill States, nestling deep in the Himalayan valleys, developed into a cloistered fairly-tale world, where men were imagined as perpetually elegant and women eternally enchanting, poised, and aristocratically aloof. As suggested by the conventions used in an illustrated Devi Mahatmya text from Kangra (1552), the Caurapancasika style had arrived in the hills by the sixteenth century. From this evolved the recognizable Pahari style in Basohli during the reign of Kirpal Pal (1678-95). Bhanudatta’s Rasamanjari, a Caurapancasika tradition of depicting open pavilions and figures with ‘staring eyes’, but now the range of colours has become richer and ‘hotter’. (Partha Mitter 2001: 151)

PAINTINGhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radha_and_Krishna_in_Rasamanjari_by_Bhanudatta,_Basohli,_c1670.jpg

Rajasthani PaintingRajasthani and Pahari artists started absorbing Mughal innovations from the seventeenth century but their art was very different in temperament and outlook. The best-known example of the art of Rajput Kingdom of Mewar on the eve of Mughal conquest is the Caurapancasika series. This tradition was continued at Mewar by the influenctial Muslim painter Sahibdin, who illustrated the epic Ramayana and other Hindu classics. Sahibdin continued the traditional Gujarat figure style, while adopting the rocks and ridges from Mughal art. The employment of Sahibdin and other Muslim artists by this state reminds us that Mewar-Mughal conflict was political rather than rather than religious and that the Indian artist was prepared to serve any patron regardless of personal belief. The Mughal style was first introduced in the region through the works brought back by Rajput rulers, later augmented by the arrival of Mughal artists at Rajput courts when the empire was in decline in the eighteenth century. (Partha Mitter 2001: 146-147)

Painting during Sultanate Period: Secular PaintingIllustrated texts, many of them secular, and of quite different genre, were commissioned by the Muslim and Hindu aristocracy of the sixteenth century: ‘Even now, / I remember her eyes / trembling, closed after love, / her slender body limp, / fine clothes and heavy hair loose / a wild goose / in a thicket of lotuses of passion’. Thus rhapsodized the eight-century Kashmiri poet Bilhana about his beloved Campavati in the Caurapancasika (Fifty Verses of a Love Thief). The gentle eroticism of Bilhana’s Caurapancasika marks a turning point in Indian culture, as the formal elegance of high Sanskrit yields to the intimate atmosphere of vernacular literature in Hindi, Bengali, and other provincial languages.

The Caurapancasika inspired a major series of paintings that became the benchmark for pre-Mughal art, not least because this set was the first to be discovered by modern scholars. Over the years many more have come into light that give us an ever clearer idea about painting in North India on the eve of Mughal conquest. A ‘transparent’ narrative device in the Caurapancasika, which tells the story by placing the aristocratic hero and heroine in an everyday architectural interior, becomes a long-lasting convention. These paintings essentially belong to romantic world of Rajasthan that was foreign to Jain piety. Since most Hindu kingdoms were on the defensive in the sixteenth century, it is likely that they were produced in the independent Rajput Kingdom of Mewar. (Partha Mitter 2001: 102)

Painting: http://www.harekrsna.com/sun/features/12-11/miniatures18.jpg

description: the heroine’s triangular torso, dilated pupils (the Sanskrit poetic metaphor of fish-shaped eyes as a mark of beauty) grey-blue patterned skirt, and chequered bedspread follow Jain conventions but the new element is the division of the picture into several planes by the use of Sultanate architecture: an open roof-top pavilion, projecting eaves with brackets, and crenellations in profile, the pavilion itself surrounded by flowering trees. (Partha Mitter 2001: 103)

FIGHTO!!!