Studies in Indian Painting and Sculpture

Style, Connoisseurship, Iconography, Narrative, Representation, and Spectatorship Studies in Indian painting had remained focused initially on the paintings of Ajanta and Mughal paintings.39 The earliest interest in Mughal paintings was with reference to European influence. Ajanta paintings evoked interest for their aesthetic qualities, narrative content, and modes of narration. The diversity of paintings belonging to other styles and regions, notably the South Indian mural paintings and manuscript traditions, Rajasthani and Pahari miniatures, paintings of the Western and Eastern Indian manuscript traditions, and Ladakhi paintings received attention relatively late. Coomaraswamy (1916) had earlier discussed the non-Mughal traditions of northern Indian miniature painting under the head Rajput Painting. While Kramrisch was the first to write on the fragmentary remains of mural paintings at Badami in the Deccan, C. Sivaramamurti (1968) provided a comprehensive analysis of the early medieval and medieval mural painting tradition of southern India. Moti Chandra and Karl Khandalavala (Khandalavala and Chandra 1969), Pramod Chandra (1976), Anand Krishna (1973), and B.N. Goswamy (1992) have contributed immensely to studies in the style, connoisseurship, and context of non-Mughal traditions of Northern Indian miniature paintings. Further approaches to the study of Indian paintings as visual sources of socio-cultural histories and religious and imperial ideologies (Koch 2001), and studies concerned with the means and motivations of the paintings, have followed. Studies in the Paintings of Ajanta: The shifts in perceptions of Ajanta paintings since their accidental discovery by John Smith in 1819 to the present are detailed by Mandira Sharma in her essay, Disquisitions on the Paintings of Ajanta, in this Volume. Given their fragile state of conservation, Robert Gill, John Griffiths, and Lady Herringham had successively engaged artists to prepare detailed copies of the paintings (Asit Kumar Haldar and Nandlal Bose too had participated in this process). The aesthetic qualities of these paintings, their distinctive stylistic traits, pictorial conventions, and content Buddhist jtakas, details about ancient Indian life and customs, decorative patterns, and foreign elements evoked interest. Studies in the narrative art of Ajanta, however, were limited to general identifications of the subject matter and minutiae of dress, costumes, and ornaments. As

concerns the important issue of the modes and devices of narration, this remained confined to a few general observations. Griffiths, for example, had been bewildered by the repeated delineation of the chief protagonists of an episode or story in a sequential narrative, and Lady Herringham, though revealing a better understanding of the method of continuous narration and the use of pictorial conventions to connect one episode with another, did not take the issue much further. The next stage is to be seen in the works of Ghulam Yazdani, which include photographic documentation, inscriptional notices, detailed identification of subject-matter, intricacies of technique and ornamentation, and a concerted effort at evolving a chronological framework for the development of the art of painting at Ajanta. A Ghosh s Ajanta Murals, with contributions by Ingrid Aall, M.N. Deshpande and B.B. Lal, carried these lines of investigation further. The need for a more comprehensive analysis of the style of these paintings in the context of Ajantas sculpture and cave architecture, and in the light of treatises on painting (Citrastra), was felt. M.K. Dhavalikars work focused on material culture as visualized in Ajanta paintings. Dieter Schlingloffs intensive research on Ajanta paintings led to a revision in the identification and interpretation of several jtaka narratives as well as the identity of hitherto unidentified panels and a discussion on modes of narration (Schlingloff 1987). Monika Zin has, in the recent years, also followed Schlingloffs approach and more recently has extended her understanding of the art of Ajanta to an interpretation of some Central Asian paintings on the Silk Route. Walter Spink holds a unique place in Ajantas historiography, having devoted his energies almost completely to an intense research spanning decades, on a detailed and painstaking unravelling of the relative and absolute chronology, the political and historical backdrop, and the inter-related nature of developments in the architecture, sculpture and paintings of the Ajanta caves. Spinks micro-studies on Ajanta reveal the importance of a contextual regional and local focus in Indian art historical research.40