The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.45

v1.c33.45

It remains to consider the paintings and minor antiquities of the Early Indian school. Of the former our knowledge is the scantiest; for though many of the buildings described above, both rock-cut and structural, must have been adorned with frescoes, only one specimen of such frescoes is known to exist, and this one, unhappily, is too fragmentary and obscured to afford a criterion of what the painters of that age were capable. The fresco referred to is in the Jogīmārā cave of the Rāmgarh hill within the confines of the small and remotely situated State of Surgujā. At first sight, it appears a mere medley of crudely painted figures, destitute alike of coherent composition and intelligible meaning; but a closer examination reveals here and there a few drawings, from which the colour has vanished, but the line work of which is tolerably dexterous and bold, and it reveals others also quite vigorously outlined, but spoilt by the colours roughly daubed upon them. Evidently, the fresco has been repainted and added to by some untutored hand at a time when most of its colouring had faded, and these few linear drawings are all that is left of the original work. It is to the later period that belong not only the existing pigments—red and crimson and black—with which the older figures have been restored, but the bands of monochrome yellow and red which divide and subdivide the panels, as well as the numerous ill-drawn and primitivelooking figures applied indiscriminately on the fresco, wherever the older paintings had been obliterated. Of the earlier work, all that can now be made out is that it was disposed in a series of concentric panels separated from one another by narrow bands; that the bands were adorned with rows of fishes, *makaras*, and other aquatic monsters; and that in the panels were various subjects depicted in a very haphazard fashion, among which are the familiar *chaitya* halls with pinnacled roofs, two-horse chariots, and groups of figures seated and standing, manifestly analogous to those found in the early reliefs, but too much effaced to admit of a detailed comparison. That the fresco appertains to the Early School is sufficiently apparent from these features, but its more exact date must remain conjectural. The late Dr Bloch, who visited the cave in 1904, failed to perceive the repainting which the fresco had undergone and assigned the whole as it stood to the third century b.c. This was on the assumption that it was contemporary with a short inscription in the early Brāhmī character engraved on the wall of the cave. It is very doubtful, however, if the record in question is so ancient, and equally doubtful if the fresco has any connexion with it. More probably the latter was executed in the first century before our era.