A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 3/Chapter 1
SECTION III
PAINTING
CHAPTER I
THE PRINCIPLES OF INDIAN PAINTING, AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRINCIPAL SCHOOLS
The principles of the art of painting were summarised by a Sanskrit writer, Vatsyāyana, of the third century a.d., under six categories:
1. Rūpu-bheda—the distinction of forms and appearances.
2. Pramānam—measurement, scale, and proportion.[1]
3. Bhāva—sentiment and expression.
4. Lāvanya Yojanam—the realisation of grace or beauty.
5. Sādriçyam—likeness or resemblance.
6. Varnikabhanga—the use of materials and implements.
The references in early Pāli and Sanskrit literature to "picture-halls" (chitra-sālas) in royal palaces, and to the skill of Indian kings, and of the lords and ladies of their court, in drawing and painting,[2] are very numerous, but no visible evidence of the works of the Indian court painters has come to light before the days of the Mogul Empire. A few rough drawings and paintings of prehistoric times have been recently discovered in the Raigarh State, Central Provinces, and in the Mirzapur district of the United Provinces. Some few but very precious fragments of classic Indian painting have survived in the ancient monasteries of Ajantā and elsewhere, but with these exceptions the record of Indian painting before Muhammadan times seems to be a blank.
The chief reason for this striking contrast in the history of pictorial and plastic art in India is probably this, that from the time when Asoka determined to build the funeral monuments of Buddhist saints solidly in brick and stone instead of in impermanent materials, lasting at most for three generations, the art of the sculptor gradually took the foremost place in all religious works. The walls of the "picture-halls" in palaces and mansions were of wood, clay, or brick. Tempera or fresco paintings on these foundations, under the best conditions, would rarely last more than a few centuries in India. The banners painted with religious subjects hung up in temples and monasteries were still more liable to decay. So, although painting flourished, more especially in the chitra-sālas of princes, during the whole period of Buddhist and Hindu political supremacy in India, natural destructive agencies had obliterated most of the earlier works of Indian painters long before Muhammadan iconoclasts wreaked their fury upon the sculptures of temples and monasteries.
The court architect in these early times was perhaps also the court painter, and joined with the court poet and chronicler in recording the deeds of the royal house. But the builders employed by the great religious foundations usually combined sculpture with painting, as painted reliefs gradually superseded the fresco and tempera paintings which decorated the procession paths and assembly-halls of temples, relic-shrines and monasteries; for the artist-devotee who followed Plate LXXI
SIVA AND PARVATI, AJANTĀ
Painting on a grand scale, therefore, tended to become entirely subsidiary to sculpture; but nevertheless an indispensable art, for without the final intonaco of plaster, thinner than an egg-shell and highly polished, and the due performance of the eye-painting ceremony with its appropriate mantras which gave it the breath of life divine, a stone image was an inert block unfit for worship. The intonaco also protected the surface of the sculpture from exposure to weather. It could easily be renewed when necessary. The painting of temple banners and icons belonged to the calligrapher's art which was also the parent of the later schools of Indian miniature painters.
This very ancient art practice still survives among the traditions of the temple craftsmen of India. Hindu temples now built in Northern India, in the districts where red sandstone is mostly used, are still covered with this fine polished intonaco, and sometimes decorated with frescoes. In the days of the old John Company the interior walls and columns of Anglo-Indian mansions in Calcutta and Madras were often finished with this beautiful white polish; but the fresco-painting for which it was intended to be the ground was held to be inconsistent with the correct classic taste of those days, and in modern times patent paints of European brand and unwholesome wallpapers have been substituted for it. About fifteen years ago I brought some temple craftsmen from Jaipur to teach the Indian process of fresco-painting in the Calcutta School of Art.[3] A panel in fresco executed at this time by Mr. Abanindro Nath Tagore, CIE., illustrating the story of Kacha and Devajānī in the Mahabhāratā[4] is reproduced in Pl. LXXIX. These Jaipur craftsmen also renewed the polished plaster in the ballroom of Government House, Calcutta, by Lord Curzon's orders.
The preparation of the lime requires great care and patience, and its application to the surface of the walls is an art in itself, just as was the wax coating (ganōsis) applied to ancient Greek statuary. The degenerate practice followed in many old Hindu temples of frequently smearing all the building with whitewash is doubtless derived from the same tradition: but it is now done so unintelligently and unskilfully that the masterly technique of the original sculpture is obliterated by the plastering. In the temples which were desecrated by the Muhammadans and abandoned as places of worship the last painted intonaco put upon the stone would in most cases eventually disappear through natural causes, even when unscientific antiquarians have not assisted them in ignorance of the Indian sculptor-painter's technical methods. In favourable circumstances the astonishing permanence of Indian mural painting has been proved by the frescoes of Ajantā and Sīgirīya.
When these technical conditions are understood, it will be evident that the record of Indian religious painting in pre-Muhammadan times is not really so fragmentary as might appear at first sight, for in a complete history of the art the painted reliefs of Bharhut, Sānchī, Amarāvatī, Borobudūr, and many other works of the temple sculptor-painters ought to be included. It will not, however, be possible in this work to do more than draw attention to this important point. It should also be noted that the traditions of the secular school of court miniature painters established under the Muhammadan emperors were partly derived from the painters of the chitra-sālas under the patronage of Hindu royalty, and partly from the monastic schools which produced painted icons and hieratical scrolls—the prototypes of the Japanese kakemono.
The first of the six artistic principles enunciated by Vatsyāyana—the distinction of forms and appearances—sums up the whole philosophy of Oriental painting, the systematic teaching of which at Nālanda and other universities of Mahāyāna Buddhism must have profoundly influenced the whole art of Asia. The theory applied to all branches of education, and the Mahabhāratā gives a striking illustration of its application in the martial training of the Pāndava war-chiefs. They were trained to arms not by a military expert of their own class, but by a wise Brahman, Drona, who by profound meditation had acquired a perfect knowledge of divine science. When their training was finished, he called them together and pointed out to the eldest a bird perched on a distant tree. "Do you see the bird on the top of that tree?" he asked. "Yes," said the pupil. "What do you see?" the master demanded, "myself, your brothers, or the tree?" The youth replied at once, "I see yourself, sir, my brothers, the tree and the bird." Drona then put him aside, and called up the others one by one. He asked the same question and received the same answer until it came to the turn of his favourite pupil, Arjuna. "Now, Arjuna, take aim and tell me what you see—the bird, the tree, myself and your brothers?" "No," said Arjuna, "I see the bird alone, neither yourself, sir, nor the tree." "Describe the bird," said the Master. "I see only a bird's head," Arjuna replied. "Then shoot," cried Drona, and in an instant the arrow sped, the bird fell shot through the eye, and the teacher embraced his pupil with delight.
It is the same way in Indian art and in all Oriental art inspired by Indian idealism. The artist, through a process of severe mental discipline, is taught to discriminate the essentials in forms and appearances, and to see clearly with his mind's eye before he takes up brush or chisel. Once the image is firmly fixed in the mirror of his mind by intense concentration, or when the daemon residing in the object to be depicted has been made to manifest itself by the power of yoga, the realisation of it, facilitated by the technical traditions of the school taught under the other five categories, was swift and sure. Rūpa-bheda is sruti—the revelation of the divine. The science of art—the rules of proportion, expression, beauty, likeness, and the use of tools—is of the kind of knowledge described as smriti—that which is remembered, or handed down by tradition.
Beneath the transcendental conceptions of Indian religious art as we see them at Ajantā and elsewhere, there is, however, an undertone of intense realism. Nothing could be more real and alive than the figures with which Buddhist artists peopled what Europeans call the unseen world. To them it was the real world in which their lives were spent; only the immortals were made not of common clay. There is abundant evidence of the most careful study of nature in the Plate LXXII
HEAD OF BODHISATTVA, AJANTĀ
The jewellery in Indian painting and sculpture plays the same part as the grace-notes or microtones in Indian music. The artist unfolds his main scheme with the simplest and most direct methods, a simplicity not impelled by weakness, but by the urgent desire to get to the heart of the matter at once. The contours and modelling of the main forms are thus treated with the greatest boldness and breadth, and at the same time with a firmness and decision which are the exact opposites of the halting rhythm of many Western experimentalists of modern times, who, without an age-long tradition of culture to guide them, try to invoke the spirit of the East. By way of contrast to these broad effects, the jewellery and other accessories are used as sparkling points of interest which are elaborated with the minutest finish and delicacy of touch. By these contrasting methods the best Indian painters achieved a perfectly balanced rhythm and fullness of contents without overcrowding.
The Ajantā paintings now extant cover a period of about six centuries, from circ. a.d. 100 to circ. 628. They were first satisfactorily photographed about eight years ago, through the enterprise of Lieut.-Colonel Victor Goloubeff, the editor of Ars Asiatica, who presented a set of his splendid photographs to the Musée Cernuschi in Paris, which gives a much clearer impression of the spirit and wonderful technique of these masterpieces of the classic art of India than the copies made by the students of the Bombay School of Art, which provided the material for Mr. John Griffiths' well-known volume on Ajantā (1897). The more sympathetic copies subsequently made by Lady Herringham, assisted by the pupils of Mr. Abanindro Nath Tagore, are exhibited in the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and were published by the India Society in 1915.
Two of Lieut.-Colonel Goloubeff's photographs, typical of the best work of the Ajantā school, are given in Pls. LXXI, LXXII. The first, from a ceiling panel in Cave I, shows Parvati sitting on Siva's lap and receiving instruction from the great Guru. The subject occurs more than once in the later paintings of Ajantā, for Mahāyāna Buddhism allowed to all Brahmanical deities a place in its pantheon. Parvati is drawn with a few sweeping brush-strokes which sum up in perfect rhythm the sweetness and purity of the Lady of the snows listening attentively to her lord's teaching. Siva's figure is less searchingly drawn: the painter has concentrated most upon the pose and expression of the two heads—Siva's a noble god-like type, and Parvati's with the surpassing grace of pure saintly womanhood. Behind the figures is a background of conventional clouds; the two deities are poised in the heavenly regions like birds resting on their wings, an idea which Indian artists always expressed finely without giving to the Devas any bird-like attributes. The practice of yoga made them familiar with the idea of levitation and demonstrated to them its possibilities even for mortal flesh and blood.
The head of the Bodhisattva (Pl. LXXII), with the royal crown and his long hair braided with jessamine flowers, belongs to the central figure in the wall-painting of the same monastic hall, which probably represents the marriage of Prince Siddhartha—a subject in which the Ajantā painters have drawn Plate LXXIIIa
PAINTING FROM SIGIRĪYA
Plate LXXIIIb
PAINTING FROM SIGIRĪYA
The frescoes of Sigirīya in Ceylon are painted in two recesses of the rock on the hill which was the retreat of the parricide King Kasyapa I at the end of the fifth century. Owing to their almost inaccessible position, they are in a better state of preservation, and thus more suitable for reproduction, than any of the Ajantā paintings. They are closely related to the Ajantā school. The subject is a procession of royal ladies, supposed to be Kasyapa's queens, with attendants bringing floral offerings, to a shrine which seems to be located in the Tusitā heavens, for the figures appear as if half immersed in clouds—the usual convention for the heavenly spheres.
The finest of the figures (Pl. LXXIII) are drawn by a master's hand, swift and sure, but swayed by the impulse of the moment, as one can see by the rapid alteration of the pose of an arm or hand visible in some of the paintings. These exhibit the best qualities of the Ajantā paintings and of the great masters of China and Japan. Others are less subtle in the drawing and more laboured in the modelling—evidently the work of pupils.
The Sigirīya paintings, if they may be attributed correctly to Kasyapa's court painters, are the only extant works of the secular schools of Indian painting before Muhammadan times. But possibly they were painted by the monks of the neighbouring Buddhist monastery. In any case, no line of demarcation can be drawn between secular and religious painting in the Buddhist and Hindu period except as regards the choice of subject. Kings and queens, as sons and daughters of the gods, were endowed with all the physical and spiritual graces of divinity, and found easy access to the heavenly regions even in their lifetime.
It was different with the Muhammadan rulers, who patronised painting as a court accomplishment. The law of the Prophet condemned painting as a fine art, and a strict Musalman only indulged his artistic taste in calligraphy, transcribing the texts of the Kuran, verses of his favourite poets, or Persian quatrains of his own composition. Calligraphy was therefore the means of acquiring religious merit, and was valued higher as an art than picture-painting, even by the Shiahs, who had no puritan scruples. Some of the best Muhammadan painters were those who combined book illustration with calligraphy. But Muhammadan pictures, as distinguished from illuminated manuscripts, very rarely had a religious character, though scenes from the life of Muhammad and of Musalman saints are sometimes found. Muhammadan painting on the whole is realistic and matter-of-fact in its outlook, secular in subject, and wholly devoid of the spiritual emotion which inspired the work of the Buddhist and Hindu artist. Abul Fayl, Akbar's biographer, felt the difference when he noted that "Hindu pictures surpass our conception of things."
Before Akbar brought the Indian painter and the Persian and Arabian calligraphist together, there had been a great Muhammadan school of miniaturists, led by Bihzad, a famous master who flourished at the end of the fifteenth century at the court of Khurasan. Plate LXXIVa
PORTRAIT OF SURĀJ MALL, BY NANHA
Plate LXXIVb
MĪĀN SHAH MIR AND MULLA SHAH
Mogul painting, or the school which flourished most under the patronage of Akbar, Jahāngir, and Shah Jahān, was, like Urdu, the language of the Mogul court and camp, composed of heterogeneous elements—but they never completely coalesced. It is always easy to distinguish the native Indian tradition from that of the Muhammadan artist-penman, for the Hindu knew how to combine the art of line and form as the great masters of Ajantā had done, and there is a subtle vein of idealism in his conceptions which reveals his introspective bent of mind. The Musalman painter of the Persian school rarely shook off the technique of the calligraphist: very often, in the Mogul miniatures, the brush outline is the work of one artist and the colouring of another. This artificial division of labour was foreign to the indigenous Indian school.
A typical painting of the Hindu school, and one of the finest of the great gallery of portraits with which the Mogul court painters illuminated the history of the period, is shown in Pl. LXXIV, a. It belongs to a series of pictures from Jahāngīr's own collection discovered by me in Calcutta and purchased for the Government Art Gallery. The Emperor, who was justly proud of his court painters' skill, stamped it with his seal and wrote a note in Persian on the right lower corner which shows that it is a portrait of Surāj Mal, the son of Amar Singh, painted by an artist named Nanha. Amar Singh was the Rānā of Mewār, who in 1614 submitted to the imperial army, much to Jahāngīr's satisfaction; for Akbar, though he captured Chitor, could never force the Rānā himself to his knees. Jahāngīr attempted to conciliate the Rajputs in the same way as his father had done, and had marble statues of the Rānā and his son Karan put up in the imperial palace at Agra. The other son, whose portrait was added to Jahāngīr's collection, is not mentioned by name in his memoirs.[5]
There are no traces of the calligraphist's technique in this painting—it is a real painter's picture. The contours are sharply defined, but the original outline is wholly merged in the subsequent painting. It is possible that European pictures, which Jahāngīr admired and gave to his painters to copy, may have influenced the artist's manner. But it is more likely that the natural development of the indigenous Indian school since the time of Ajantā produced this result. In the broad but subtle modelling of the forms, and the minute finish of the gold brocade and other ornamental accessories, the painter's technique is closely allied to the later style of the Ajantā school.
Another great master of Jahāngīr's court early in the seventeenth century, and afterwards in the service of Shah Jahān, was Manohar Dās, a Hindu painter whose work is well represented in the collection of Lady Wantage lately exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum. "A royal keeper leading a decoy antelope" by Manohar (Pl. LXXV) is perhaps Plate LXXV
A ROYAL KEEPER AND DECOY ANTELOPE
Plate LXXVI
SHAH JAHĀN HOLDING A DURBAR
Pl. LXXIV, b, is by one of Shah Jahān's court painters. It can be correctly described as Indo-Persian, a name often indiscriminately applied to all Indian miniature paintings. This is distinctly of the calligraphic school. It is a coloured drawing rather than a painting. There is little surface modelling; the forms are expressed almost entirely by the clearly marked outlines, by flat washes of colour, and fine stippling of the details. The subject is Mīān Shah Mīr of Lahore, Dārā Shikōh's spiritual guide, conversing with his disciple, Mulla Shah of Badakshan.
Many of the Mogul miniatures of the calligraphic school are only highly finished drawings, differing generally from the style of the Persian school by the cameo-like precision of the delicate brush outline. This is a characteristic which exactly expresses the technical distinction between all Indian scripts and the easy flowing curves of Persian and Arabic—the former being derived from the use of the stilus, and the later from a flexible pen or brush writing.
An interesting historical example of the calligraphic artist's work is shown in Pl. LXXVI, representing Shah Jahān in Durbar. The original is in the National Art Museum, Copenhagen.
When the Mogul school, in the middle of the seventeenth century, resolved into its original constituent elements through Aurangzīb's banishment of Hindu painters from his court, the latter continued to find patronage at the Hindu courts and among the higher classes of the people. But the designation of "Rajput" which Dr. Coomaraswamy and other writers have applied to the extant works of the later Hindu painters is far too narrow and apt to be very misleading, for, although the traditions of Hindu painting had more vitality in Rajputana than elsewhere, they were by no means exclusively Rajput. The classifications of "Mogul," "Buddhist," and "Hindu" which I adopted in the original collection made for the Calcutta Art Gallery are more correct.
In Mogul times and later there were Hindu schools at Benares, in the Panjab and Kashmir, in Bengal, in Gujerat, in the Dekhan, and in South India, besides the Buddhist schools of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Tibet, and Burma, which were unaffected by Muhammadan influence and are still alive. Burma, as regards painting, is still a terra incognita to Anglo-Indian and Indian connoisseurs, though, even in the present day, it has a very interesting traditional school.
At present our knowledge of the later Hindu schools is almost entirely confined to examples painted on paper, as the painters in the service of Hindu rajas imitated the fashions of the Mogul court in the same way as they now imitate the art fashions of Europe. But nearly all Hindu painters, when painting on paper, followed closely the traditional technique of mural painting, and their paintings are exact reproductions of the frescoes of the Hindu chitra-sāla, or picture-hall. It is not unlikely that further investigation of the subject by Indians who can gain access to the Plate LXXVIIa
SIVA WORSHIPPERS
Plate LXXVIIb
HUNTING BY LAMPLIGHT
It is not possible in this brief summary to attempt to define the different local styles recognised by Indian connoisseurs, but a few illustrations will serve to bring out some of the main distinctions between Hindu and Musalman painting. The choice of subject shows the difference as clearly as anything else. The Muhammadan painter was almost exclusively concerned with court and camp life, its pageantry and history. But as a courtier he never revealed its inner secrets or told unpleasant truths. Except when he illustrated the mysticism of Sūfi poetry, religion hardly entered into his ideas of art; he reconciled his religious and artistic conscience by leaving it alone.
The Hindu artist, on the other hand, was both a court chronicler and a religious teacher. Vaishnava and Saiva legends, in which the gods descended to earth, lived the life of the people, and performed wondrous miracles, were their favourite themes, treated with all the reverence of the earnest devotee. But though the Hindu painter imbues such subjects with a sensitiveness and artistic charm which are peculiarly his own, the appeal which he makes to the Indian mind is not purely æsthetic. His is no art for art's sake: for the Hindu draws no distinctions between what is sacred and profane. The deepest mysteries are clothed by him in the most familiar garb. So in the intimate scenes of ordinary village life he constantly brings before the spectator the esoteric teaching of his religious cult, knowing that the mysticism of the picture will find a ready response even from the unlettered peasant. That which seems to the modern Western onlooker to be strange and unreal, often indeed gross, is to the Hindu mystic quite natural and obviously true.
We are often reminded of the ancient Chandra cult and of India's name as the Land of the Moon by the frequent choice of night scenes—women praying at Siva's shrine under the crescent moon; Rādha seeking her beloved Krishna in the dark forest at midnight; two lovers riding by torchlight through a mountain pass; hunting by lamplight on the banks of a moonlit river; pilgrims sitting round a camp fire listening to the tales of a village Kathak.
The two illustrations given in Pl. LXXVII will show with what rare intuition the Hindu painter interpreted the religious feelings of the people, and the penetrative insight of his communings with the spirits of river, wood, and sky. In the first a mother with her son and daughter-in-law are worshipping at a wayside shrine under a tamarind-tree. The draperies have suffered from unskilful restoration, but the power and feeling with which the effect of night is given makes us understand Rembrandt's interest in Indian painting.[6] In the same spirit the great Dutch master illustrated Biblical stories.
The hunting scene, fortunately in a perfect state of preservation, is perhaps intended to illustrate Rāma's life in exile on the banks of the Godaveri. There is much in it, especially in the group of deer startled by the fall of their leader, to suggest a connection with the traditions of the classic Indian school, as we know them from Ajantā.
Specially characteristic of the Hindu artist's spiritual Plate LXXVIIIa
RĀG-MĀLA PAINTING
Plate LXXVIIIb
RĀG-MĀLA PAINTING
The systems of Rāgas, or principal modes, vary somewhat. According to one of them there are six, appropriate to the six seasons with which the Hindu year is divided. Each Rāga is subdivided into five Rāginīs, which, again, have each eight subdivisions, or pūtras. The Rāgas and their subdivisions give the dominant idea of the musician's theme, the season and hour of the day or night appropriate for it, and by their magic create a suitable atmosphere. The musician, by the incantations of his song or lute, can, like Orpheus, conjure with the spirits of earth and sky and flood and bring his hearers into touch with the harmonies of nature. The painter translates these melodic patterns into his own language by forming a mental image of the impression the music makes upon him—it may be the apparition of the special muse or divinity who presides over each Rāga or Rāginī, or the activity of the elemental forces which the magic of the music invokes.
Pl. LXXVIII gives two typical Rāg-mālas. In the first, Fig. A, the lady seated under a flowering tree is pouring out her soul in song to the accompaniment of her vīna, while the pet gazelle by her side, the birds and even the tree seem to be attentive listeners. The next probably belongs to one of a Vaishnava series of musical modes—Rādha is wandering over the moonlit fields of Brindāban asking the peafowl where her beloved Krishna can be found.
The old traditions of Hindu painting still linger among the temple craftsmen of India, in the ritual of the Hindu womenfolk, and but rarely at the courts of the Hindu princes, though a few descendants of the old court painters still practise their art. A systematic investigation of these living traditions would certainly yield material of the highest artistic and archæological interest, and help the technical development of the important new school of Indian painting which has arisen in the last twenty years at Calcutta under the leadership of Mr. Abanindro Nath Tagore, C.I.E. The genesis of the school was described by me in two numbers of the Studio magazine.[8] The annual exhibitions of its works in Calcutta, and those which were held in Paris and in London in recent years, have demonstrated its further development much more completely than it would be possible to attempt in this handbook, which will, however, serve to explain the historical foundation upon which Mr. Tagore and his pupils are trying to build, and some of the artistic ideals which inspire their work.
Plate LXXIX
KĀCHA AND DEVAJĀNI
(From a Fresco Painting by Mr. Abanindro Nath Tagore, C.I.E.)
- ↑ This was a system as exact as the rules for the Vedic sacrificial altars. Its canons are embodied in the Silpa-Sāstrās.
- ↑ See Indian Sculpture and Painting, by the Author, pp. 156-63.
- ↑ A detailed description of the process is given in Indian Sculpture and Painting, pp. 267-72.
- ↑ Adi-Parva, I. 76-7. Rory's translation, pp. 232-40.
- ↑ Jahāngīr in his memoirs refers only to Surāj Mal (or Surāj Singh), the son of Rājā Bāsu of Kangra, who was alternately in favour and in disgrace at the court. Possibly he was the subject of the painting, for Jahāngīr, in his frequent drunken carouses, might easily have made a mistake in a detail of this kind.
- ↑ See Indian Sculpture and Painting, by the Author, pp. 202-4.
- ↑ Literally "Garlands of Rāgas."
- ↑ October 1902 and July 1908.