Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s7.t2.1

c8.s7.t2.1

The Pictorial art, ālekhyam, was one of the foremost of the sixty-four kalās cultivated during this period. Every cultured man had in his house a drawing board, citraphalaka, and a vessel (samudgaka) for holding brushes and other requisites of painting.² Pictures, citrakarma, appear to have been drawn, as the commentator of Vātsyāyana explains, both on the walls (*bhitti*) as well as on panels or boards (*phalaka*); Vātsyāyana advises a lover who wants to attract the attention of the lady whose charms have captivated him, to put in places frequented by her, paintings (probably representing himself) done on panels¹; in another place we read of a kiss imprinted on a picture (*citrakarma*),² most probably on a wall. For *citrakarma* or painting, the surface of the wall appears to have been most ordinarily used in ancient India, as appears from a passage in the *Mudrā-rākṣasa* where the futility of the earnest efforts of a statesman is compared to "the composition of a picture (*citrakarma*) without the wall."³ The same idea is found in the *Lalitavistara* where the daughters of Māra declare that it was easier to paint pictures on the sky than to tempt Bodhisattva.⁴ Bharata clearly refers to fresco-painting by the phrase *citrakarma*; he says that the walls of the theatre-hall were to be decorated with *citrakarma* after they had been carefully plastered, coated with lime and nicely polished, the paintings consisting of the representation of male and female figures, of creeper-patterns and a record of great deeds.⁵ It is fortunate that in our country where we have so few pictorial records of the past, the caves at Ajanta have preserved a few frescoes, the solitary survivals of this age of prolific artistic production.