A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c14.2

c14.2

FEW, very few, people realize that the art of painting in India and Ceylon has a long history, illustrated by extant examples ranging over a period exceeding two thousand years, and that during the so-called Dark Ages the Indian and Ceylonese painters attained a degree of proficiency not matched in Europe before the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Nevertheless such are the facts. In this chapter and the next following the history of the art in India and Ceylon, so far as its practice was dominated by Hindu ideas, will be traced from the earliest times of which there is record until the present day; but, unfortunately, the incompleteness of the record compels the historian to leave many gaps in his narrative. The widest of those gaps lies between the close of the Ajaṇṭā series in the seventh and the introduction of the Indo-Persian style by Akbar in the sixteenth century. During that long period of more than nine hundred years hardly anything definite is known concerning the productions of Indian and Ceylonese painters. Abundant material exists for the history of the Indo-Persian school, which will be discussed in Chapter XIV. That school, although foreign in origin, bears ample indirect testimony to the continuity of the Hindu pictorial tradition. When the relations of Indian art generally to that of foreign countries come to be examined in Chapter XI, we shall find that Hindu painting, while related to the ancient schools of interior Asia, has merits peculiarly its own, and apparently deserves credit for substantial originality.