Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c20.16

c20.16

the deceased, which the god forthwith endowed with life, so making an efficient substitute for the youth whom Yama refused to give up. In the *Dwārkā Lilā*, one of the early Indian epics, there is another interesting account of the use of portraiture. The princess Usha dreamt that a beautiful youth appeared to her, and was her companion in her walks abroad. She confided this to one of her maids-of-honour, Chitralekhā (literally, ‘a picture’), who had the natural gift of being able to draw a likeness. The maid offered to relieve the anxiety of her mistress by sketching the portraits of all the great men of the time, so that the person in the dream might be identified. As soon as Usha saw the picture of Aniruddha, the grandson of Krishna, the youth of her vision was revealed to her, and the artistic incident of course subsequently led to their nuptials, so that the story ended happily. The ancient Sanskrit dramas contain several references to portraiture, as for instance the *Svapna Vāsavadattā*, presumed to be the work of Bhāsa, in which a likeness of the heroine was painted on a tablet and sent to the king Vatsarāja. Kalidasa the poet in his *Meghadūta* uses a somewhat similar *motif*, while in the *Raghuvamsa*, also by this writer, Dasaratha was revealed to his son Rama by the same pictorial means. The employment of the painter for such purposes in the literature of the orient seems to suggest that portraiture was much more in the minds of the people of the East than it ever has been in the West.