A History of Indian Painting Rajasthani Traditions

A History Of Indian Painting: Rajasthani Traditions 

By Krishna Chaitanya

Indian painting is one of the greatest cultural traditions of the world. If the sustained joy that created it and gave it richly varied forms of expression through the ages has not so far been matched by a widely shared joy in appreciation, it is because art has been long mixed up with archaeology in India and has intimidated the layman.

Abhinav’s History of Indian Painting has been designed as a project which will take into account all the relevant research data and match the most scholarly work in its references, but will melt the material in a fluent and engaging narration, the images reflected in it being always the varied visions of beauty in the tradition.

The first volume dealt with mural painting from prehistoric and protohistoric times onwards. The second volume covered the great transition from the mural to the miniature and also studied in detail Moghul and Deccani painting.

This is the third volume and it deals with a phase which is perhaps most the complex and fascinating in the whole tradition —the origins and evolution of Rajput painting. Like underground rivers, streams from the main medieval current flowed beneath the Moghul presence to nourish mutant strains which later evolved into distinctive schools in Malwa, Mewar, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Bundi, Kotah and Kishengarh. The interaction of developing lines, meeting at various points in time and at different evolutionary levels, has made the historical reconstruction a challenging task for the author and an absorbing experience for the reader.

About The Author

Krishna Chaitanya, whom a national periodical has described as “one of the most original and stimulating minds writing in the subcontinent today “and as” our nearest approximation to the Renaissance man.” has made contributions in a wide variety of fields which, incidentally, earned for him an invitation from the Institute of International Education, New York, for a study and lecture tour of the United States and Japan as a “Critic of Ideas.” He has retold Sanskrit classics for children and won the Federation of Indian Publishers’ Award for the best children’s book published in 1978 and 1979. He is the author of a ten-volume history of world literature in English and several Indian languages and recipient of a Special Award from the Kerala Sahitya Academy. He was given a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship for his pentalogy on the philosophy of freedom which critics have compared to the works of Thomas Aquinas, the French Encyclopedists, Herbert Spencer, Bergson, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin.

He is Chairman of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society; Editor of Roopa-Lekha, India’s oldest extant art journal; Art Critic of Hindustan Times; member of International Association of Art Critics, Paris; Governing Council, Sahitya Kala Parishad, Delhi; Publications Committee, Indian Council for Cultural Relations. Earlier, he has been member of the Publication Committees of the National Museum, National Gallery of Modern Art, National Book Trust and Sangeet Natak Akademi.