The Development of Hindu Iconography c13.41

c13.41

Pictorial representations of divinities were also much in vogue in ancient and mediæval India; this custom still persists in present times, but the background on which the image is now painted mainly consists of paper. When it is found inconvenient and expensive to worship his god in stone, bronze or even clay icons, a sectary would often worship him in ‘ghaṭa’ and ‘paṭa,’ i.e., in a water-vessel with vermilion and sandal or other paints on it and in a picture of the deity painted (and nowadays printed) on paper and encased in a wooden frame (this custom is mostly in vogue in Bengal, where it is called in local dialect—‘ghaṭe paṭe pūjā’). In earlier times, cloth or canvas was the principal medium and the word paṭa which originally signified cloth acquired the sense of pictorial representation of a deity or of some mythology connected with it. This is citra in a more restricted sense of the term, one of its wider significance being sculpture fully in the round. It is used in the former sense in many of the texts dealing with iconographic matter, and when the Matsyapurāṇa refers to the first of the four different kinds of images it undoubtedly uses the word in the former sense. But the scope of these citrajā images, as we have seen, is much wider, for it refers to divine images painted not only on cloth but also on walls and vessels (Paṭe kūḍye ca pātre ca citrajā pratimā smṛtā). Not only colour drawings on the bare surface of mud walls, but also frescoes that are painted in variegated colour on some kind of plaster fixed to the surface of stone walls as in those of the rock-cut caves of Ajanta are included in this group of icons. The pātras are evidently water-vessels, e.g., ghaṭas mentioned above, made of clay or metal and these were painted in colour on their outer surface with the figures of divinities. The Viṣṇudharmottara gives a detailed account of the rules of painting, which is of unique interest and importance for a thorough appreciation of the great advance that the Indian artists of ancient and mediæval times made in the art of painting.¹