Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c9.s4.13

c9.s4.13

In the palm-leaf period of Western Indian painting (circa 1200—1400 A.D.), ultramarine blue was not used. But in a palm-leaf manuscript of the *Kalpasūtra*, owned by the Sheth Anandjī Mangaljīnī Peḍhīnā Jñāna Bhaṇḍār at Iḍar, which Prof. Norman Brown dates at the close of the 14th century,³⁷ there is a miniature depicting the birth of Śrī Mahāvīra (Fig. 59) in which the border of the *oṛhanī* of the queen, lying on a couch, is outlined with a thick streak of ultramarine blue. As the miniatures in this manuscript have also gold in their colour scheme, and to which we will have to refer later on, it seems possible that the ultramarine blue was reintroduced in India by the Persians, sometimes in the 14th century. In Western Indian miniatures on paper, however, ultramarine is the favourite blue.