Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c6.131

c6.131

While such changes in art concepts were going on in Burma, analogous changes were being effected in Eastern Indian painting in the 11th and 12th centuries. This gradual transformation from the plastic conception to the linear was perhaps due to the new Western Indian standpoint in art. To quote Dr. Ray,⁶⁶ “The beginning of the linear conception can be traced back to Ellura paintings; but it was perhaps in Western India that the conception found its wide expression though in a twelfth century example from the Sundarbans, Bengal, we have one of its earlier versions (D. P. Ghosh, *J. I. S. O. A.*, II, No. 2), and even earlier than this in certain Pāla examples already cited. It now appears that this linear conception, wherever it might have originated, must have become an all-India property by about 10th or 11th century. Pāla sculpture, however, kept itself almost free from this tendency, but Pāla painting could not, painting being itself two dimensional. Eastern India transformed the tendency to Nepāl, and as we now see, to Burma as well, in the trail of her missionaries and her colonial adventurers.”