Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c13.37

c13.37

As already indicated, the meagre amount of material provided by these somewhat disconnected facts and isolated examples makes the story of the progress of Indian painting largely one of conjecture. The condition of the art at the time of Babur’s invasion of Hindustan is also a matter of surmise. To summarize, it seems probable that the tradition of the Buddhist frescoes was still maintained, but hardly in its original form. The painting, instead of being applied to the living rock, as at Ajanta and other sites, was adapted to the surface of structural edifices, and so perished when these buildings decayed. Moreover, some alterations in the technical process employed in painting these pictures on prepared masonry may have taken place, and the more permanent method of fresco have given way to a less reliable form of *tempera*, which, under the climatic conditions prevailing in most parts of India, would readily deteriorate. Most of the large buildings, both religious and secular, were decorated in this manner, and the art found employment for a considerable number of people. In the embellishment of the sacred edifices, selections from the holy books of the Hindus were illustrated, extensive compositions comprising many figures and much symbolism. Of the painting in the palaces of the ruling princes it appears that portraiture was most popular, as it is recorded that Firoz Shah in the fourteenth century, while holding that it ‘was right among monarchs to have painted chambers to gratify their eyes in retirement, . . . prohibited the painting of portraits, as contrary to the Law, and directed that garden scenes should be painted instead’.¹ When the Mughals therefore began, as we shall see, in the sixteenth century, to turn their attention to the revival of painting in India, they found that, while the indigenous art was from political reasons in a state of atrophy, there still survived a strong living tradition among the people of the country on which the movement that they had in contemplation might be most surely founded.