Ibtida

Painting in India is ancient, and of two kinds. It was used to decorate the interiors of both palaces and places of worship, and it was employed to illustrate texts in manuscripts. Early in their development, all Indian religions experienced the precariousness of relying exclusively on oral transmission and became aware of the necessity of a written tradition. Books, written on birchbark and palm-leaf, are assumed to have come into existence around this time. The other major stream of early Indian painting—again, of which almost nothing survives— was that of mural painting. All these traditions of painting—for temple, palace, and dramatic arts alike—share a common ancestry. This can be termed the Pan-Indian style. Painting in medieval India was increasingly linked to the art of the book. The watershed is the beginning of the second millennium, when palm-leaf manuscripts began to appear with pictorial elements. By 1500, painting styles in India were on the cusp of a revolution, triggered by the Sultanate kingdoms of northern India. The workshops of the Sultanate courts of Delhi and Bengal provided imported models for their artists, but these ateliers were obliged to largely recruit Indian artists. We are witnessing the appearance of the independent painting, unshackled from the text to which it was traditionally bound. The coalescing of these styles in variant forms shaped the regional schools that evolved over the next three centuries. Indian painting was entering a new age.