Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c6.155

c6.155

5. Rai Krishnadasa in his *Bhāratkī Chitra Kalā* (Indian Painting) examines afresh the question of the designation of the so-called Jain school.⁹ He disagrees with the designation Jain, as art at no time in India bore religious labels. According to Rai Krishnadasa it was possible that different religious systems in India gave some distinguishing feature to art based on their individual conception of life, but on the whole there was unity of purpose and technique in Indian art. The finding of the majority of the documents of medieval painting from the Jain Bhaṇḍārs, depicting Jain religious subjects, does not prove anything, except that the Jains were a rich community financially strong enough to spend money in getting innumerable copies of their sacred books as acts of religious merit, and, fortunately enough, many of such copies have survived. He objects to designate the school as Jain on the assumption that the style originated from the monk painters. There is every possibility that the work was carried out by illiterate artists who followed the sketches in the margin as their guide. He objects to the designation ‘Gujarāt’, because it smells of provincialism for which there is no justification as many illustrated manuscripts and wall-paintings in the so-called Gujarāt style were executed in places far away from Gujarāt. Examining the view of Dr. Norman Brown that the school could perhaps be designated as Western Indian on the information of Tārānātha, he holds that its geographical connotation is not right as, according to Tārānātha himself, the style reached Kashmīr and Nepāl. Supporting his contention that the so-called Western Indian school was not only confined to Rājputānā and Gujarāt, he quotes as evidence the manuscripts of the Kalpasūtra illustrated at Garh Māndū, twenty-three miles from Dhār in Mālwā and Jaunpur in eastern U. P., written in 1465 A.D. by Venīdāsa Gauḍa, some illustrations from an unknown Avadhī poem in the Bhārat Kalā Bhavan, the illustrated manuscript of Laur and Chandā, a folk-tale of Panjāb in the Lahore Museum, the illustrated book-covers of Orissa, the folk paintings of Bengal and the wall-paintings of Ellura and Pagan. Elucidating his arguments in favour of discarding the designation Western Indian school, he says that there is validity in the argument that this style is devoid of all positive qualities, and that its outstanding characteristics are not due to progress. These features are not new, but owe their presence to the degeneration of ancient art conventions. The only truth in Tārānātha’s mention of Western school is that this decadence started in Mārwār in the 7th century.