Indian Painting Through Ages

We shall now pass on to a consideration of Indian Painting. Much of what we have said about the motive and significance of Indian sculpture applies to this art also. But owing to the perishable nature of the materials employed by the painter of old,very few specimens of his work have come down to us. This has led some shallow thinkers to infer that the art of painting had never had a firm footing in ancient India,that it was pursued but fitfull till the Moghul period. When Sri aurobindo wrote his book,there were only three caves known where old frescoes were to be seen-some splendid but fragmentary specimens of decorative painting in the Bagh cave, some female figures in the rock cut chambers at Siguria and, lastly, the gorgeous range of pictures on the walls, and ceilings of the Ajantha caves. Since then a few other pictures of the Ajantha type have been found in some southern temple. It was the discovered by a British military officer who copied in oil twelve selected pictures and exhibited them in England. They received high appreciation from understanding critics,but were unfortunately destroyed by fire. A fate over took another set of copies two decades later. At that time there were frescoes extent in almost all the twenty-seven caves. During the last quarter of the century,however,

when Groffiths of the Bombay School of Art worked at these pictures with his students,they were to be seen only in sixteen of the caves. In another few years,they underwent rapid decay till there were no longer any frescoes to be seen in as many as twenty-one caves. The paintings were peeling off the ground work crumbling rapidly when we went over the caves in 1961. They could not stand human attention. For some few decades now,the Hyderabad State has taken up the work of preserving these mural pictures,but we do not know that they have been able to do much. A few points about these pictures might interest the reader.

Our Indian painting are still jow alive and famous through the world. Our paintings gives the life ,it says a complete story about the past.

Hats off to the artist of the Moughal period.