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Indian
Visual Arts
India is a land of veritable treasures, at once interesting to the
tourist as well as to an enquiring student of Indian architecture.
India has been the birth place of three major religions of the world-Hinduism,
Buddhism and Jainism; these have inspired most of her art. India's
artistic traditions are ancient and deeply rooted
in religion. While at various times in her long history, foreign races
and cultures exercised
some influence on Indian art forms, the main aesthetic currents remained
predominantly Indian. |
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Lion capital from Ashoka Stambha, Stone, Sarnath,
Uttar Pradesh |
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Sculptured Panels : Female figures and mythical
Animals, Adhinatha Temple, Khajuraho,
Madhya Pradesh |
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The character of Indian art is best described as plastic,
organic and sculptural. This is well symbolized by the nature of
Indian architecture-primarily
a sculptural mass rather than a space enclosure. Though sculpture
is the Indian art par excellence, it is in architecture that the
national genius has shown its most unquestionable originality and
much of the greatest Indian sculpture was produced in connection
with, indeed as an art of, architecture. Broadly speaking, architecture
has been described as an art of organizing space, functionally and
beautifully. A great architect clothes his well spatial structure
with a form of beauty, not an extraneous superimposed beauty but
inherent in all the structure, in every part, making the whole. The dominance of
the sculptural mode in India is due to the Indian propensity, stronger
than that of any other culture, for carving sculptural caves and
temples out of the living rock, of mountain escarpment or outcropping.
Also in ancient India, the arts were not separated as they unfortunately
are today the architect; the sculptor and the painter were often
one man. Sculptures were invariably painted in colour and the sculpture
generally was not free-standing, but formed part of the temple
structure. In this way architecture, sculpture and painting were
in fact, much
more intimately connected than they are today and much of this
was a happy combination. |
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India occupies an exalted position in the realm of art of the ancient
world. If the Greeks excelled in the portrayal of the physical charm
of the human body, the Egyptians in the grandeur of their pyramids
and the Chinese in the beauty of their landscapes, the Indians were
unsurpassed
in transmitting the spiritual contents into their plastic forms embodying
the high ideals and the common beliefs of the people. The Indian artists
visualized the qualities of various gods and goddesses as mentioned
in their scriptures and infused these qualities into their images whose
proportions they based on the idealised figures of man and woman. Indian
art is deeply rooted in religion and it conduces to fulfilling the
ultimate
aim of life, moksha or release from the cycle of birth and death. There
were two qualities about which the Indian artists cared more than about
anything else, namely, a feeling for volume and vivid representation,
even at the risk of sacrificing, at times, anatomical truth or perspective.
A sense of narrative a taste for decoration, keenness of observations
are clearly brought out in each sculpture. Indian art is a wholesome,
youthful and delicate art, a blend of symbolism and reality, spirituality
and sensuality. Indian art may well be said to bear in itself the greatest
lesson an exemplary continuity from pre-historic times to the present
age, together with an exceptional coherence. We said earlier that Indian
art was inspired by religion, for India is the birth place of three
of the world's great religions Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism and these
three faiths have inspired most of our Indian art. We use the word
'most'
purposely for the simple reason that not all Indian art is religious.
The Indian artist was a man of this universe, he lived here, looked
around himself, saw the joys and sorrows of the life and reproduced
them in
whatever medium he happened to be working in at a given time; clay,
wood, paper, metal or stone. The creation of art by the Indian artists
are
not "realistic" representations in the sense we understand the term
on Greek or Roman Art (but they are imagined and are idealised). |
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Surya, Vaital Deul Temple,
Bhubaneswar, Orissa |
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Cave No.1, Badami, Karnataka |
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None had actually seen the major gods like Rama, Krishna, Vishnu
and Shiva, etc., but according to their description in the scriptures the
Indian artists visualised them as shown generally standing erect,
signifying mental, physical and spiritual equilibrium. In form, the males
are virile beings broad shouldered, deep chested and narrow hipped. The
females are precisely contrary to the males narrow shouldered, having full
and fir breasts, and attenuated waist and' broad hips. The females
according to the Indian artists represent Matri or the mother. In the
course of this guide book we proposed to keep the hum form as the peg on
which to hang our story and will venture to see the hum body treated by
different periods according to the changing styles - the like and dislike
of a particular age. Indian art is a treasure house of ancient
contemporary life, its faiths and beliefs, customs and manners. It is
considered by some to be the function or purpose of art of any age to
mirror contemporary society, its customs, manners, habits, modes of dress
and ornamentation etc. Painting is one of the most delicate forms of art giving expression
to human thoughts and feelings through the media of line and colour. Many
thousands of years before the dawn of history, when man was only a cave
dweller, he painted his rock shelters to satisfy his aesthetic sensitivity
and creative urge.
Among Indians, the love of colour and design is so deeply ingrained
that from the earliest times they created paintings and drawings even
during the periods of history for which we have no direct
evidence.
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The earliest examples of miniature painting in India exist in the
form of illustrations to the religious texts on Buddhism executed under
the Palas of the eastern India and the Jain texts executed in western
India during the 11th-12th centuries A.D.
During the 15th century the Persian style of painting started influencing
the Western Indian style of painting as is evident from the Persian
facial types and hunting scenes appearing on the border's of some of
the illustrated manuscripts of the Kalpasutra.
The origin of the Mughal School of Painting is considered to be
a landmark in the history of painting in India. With the establishment
of the Mughal empire, the Mughal School of painting originated in the
reign of Akbar in 1560 A.D. |
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Hamza - Nama, Miniature Mughal School
of Painting |
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Basohli, Miniature Painting, Pahari School of Painting |
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Though no pre-Mughal painting from the Deccan are so far known to
exist, yet it can safely be presumed that sophisticated schools of
painting flourished there, making a significant contribution to the
development of the Mughal style in North India. Early centres of painting
in the Deccan, during the 16th and 17th centuries were Ahmednagar, Bijapur
and Golconda. In the Deccan, painting continued to develop independently
of the Mughal style in the beginning. However, later in the 17th and 18th
centuries it was increasingly influenced by the Mughal style.
Unlike Mughal painting which is primarily secular, the art of
painting in Central India, Rajasthani and the Pahari region etc. is deeply
rooted in the Indian traditions, taking inspiration from Indian epics,
religious texts like the Puranas, love poems in Sanskrit and other Indian
languages, Indian folk-lore and works on musical themes. The cults of
Vaishnavism, Saivism and Sakti exercised tremendous influence on the
pictorial art of these places.
The Pahari region comprises the present State of Himachal Pradesh,
some adjoining areas of the Punjab, the area of Jammu in the Jammu
and
Kashmir State and Garhwal in Uttar Pradesh. The whole of this area was
divided into small States ruled by the Rajput princes and were often
engaged in welfare. These States were centres of great artistic activity
from the latter half of the 17th to nearly the middle of the 19th
century.
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Under
the aegis of Ministry
of Culture,
Government of India
15-A, Sector - 7, Pappankalan, Dwarka,
New Delhi - 110075 |
Centre for Cultural Resources and Training |
Telephone:(011)
25088638,
47151000
Fax: 91-11-25088637,
Gram: CENCULT
E-mail:- dg.ccrt@nic.in |
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