Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c12.22

c12.22

The high compliments which Dr. Coomaraswamy has paid to Western Indian painting seem to be exaggerated. We have gone through a very large number of Jain documents, and, except in the 12th century painted wooden covers, and a few brilliantly executed paintings on cloth, we have been unable to see any outstanding spiritual or æsthetic merit in the 14th or 15th century miniatures. Dr. Coomaraswamy talks of the brilliant draughtsmanship, spontaneous in execution, of the miniatures, but we are unable to follow him when he says that the drawings are meant to be as clearly read as the scripts accompanying them. Surely, there is a degree of sophistication in the drawings which mars direct expression in painting. Then we are unable to agree with his remarks that there is no preoccupation with pattern, colour or texture, for their own sake. After all, if there is no preoccupation with colours, then why simple colours are repeated in almost every manuscript, and take exactly the same places they are intended to take. In the patterns as well, a definite attempt is seen in the 14th and 15th century manuscripts towards elaboration, and the careful border decoration of a few *Kalpasūtra* manuscripts belonging to the 15th century certainly disprove the assertion that the decoration is not deliberate. To assert that the paintings are "the brilliant statement of facts" of Mahāvīra's life, or the loveliness of spring in the *Vasanta Vilāsa*, is to give a value to these painting which they do not rightfully deserve. In the estimation of Dr. Coomaraswamy, even the physical peculiarities are incidents of local colour, but we have already tried to show elsewhere that these physical peculiarities are the signs of decadence, palpable in the contemporary paintings in South India and places as far as Orissa and Burma. Surely, decadence could never become primitive. Then, Dr. Coomaraswamy talks of the perfect equilibrium of a mathematical equation in drawing. If he means thereby that the drawing has a mathematical sense, we have nothing to say. Equitable results accrue in the field of mathematics, but in the field of true art, if the same principle were to hold good, then the result will be a constant repetition, a feature of commercial art.