But this Saracenic art did not spring ready-made from the brain of a single man of genius. Like early Saracenic architecture, it had its roots in the far older Buddhist culture, in the art of icon and religious picture painters who still carry on their ancient traditions, originally derived from India, in the monasteries of Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, and in all the countries of Asia where Buddhism still survives.
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
