Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c6.445

c6.445

In our opinion, such controversies as to whether the author of the *Vasanta Vilāsa* was a Jain or a follower of Vedic religion are utterly futile, and smack of religious partisanship, which is deplorable. There is nothing to show that the Jain authors of the 13th and 14th centuries followed the strict tenets of early Jainism, which forbid any kind of sensuous pleasure. The mediæval Jain authors were in a sense the torch-bearers of Indian civilization in the dark middle ages, and, if they were to keep the torch burning, they could not afford to be squeamish about certain literary forms in which love and sensual pleasures play an important part, but which the literary taste of the age appreciated. The outstanding point about the *Vasanta Vilāsa* is not whether its author is a Jain or Vedic, but that it is the first dated document recovered which has, for its pictorial theme, a purely secular subject. It cannot be asserted that such class of painting did not exist, as we know of the illustrated *Ratirahasya* and some illustrated leaves from an Avadhī poem, preserved in the Bhārat Kalā Bhawan, of practically the same time. It is, however, safe to say that such class of documents are extremely rare, and hence their importance.