Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/366

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"RAJPUT" PAINTINGS

When the Mogul school, in the middle of the seventeenth century, resolved into its original constituent elements through Aurangzīb's banishment of Hindu painters from his court, the latter continued to find patronage at the Hindu courts and among the higher classes of the people. But the designation of "Rajput" which Dr. Coomaraswamy and other writers have applied to the extant works of the later Hindu painters is far too narrow and apt to be very misleading, for, although the traditions of Hindu painting had more vitality in Rajputana than elsewhere, they were by no means exclusively Rajput. The classifications of "Mogul," "Buddhist," and "Hindu" which I adopted in the original collection made for the Calcutta Art Gallery are more correct.

In Mogul times and later there were Hindu schools at Benares, in the Panjab and Kashmir, in Bengal, in Gujerat, in the Dekhan, and in South India, besides the Buddhist schools of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Tibet, and Burma, which were unaffected by Muhammadan influence and are still alive. Burma, as regards painting, is still a terra incognita to Anglo-Indian and Indian connoisseurs, though, even in the present day, it has a very interesting traditional school.

At present our knowledge of the later Hindu schools is almost entirely confined to examples painted on paper, as the painters in the service of Hindu rajas imitated the fashions of the Mogul court in the same way as they now imitate the art fashions of Europe. But nearly all Hindu painters, when painting on paper, followed closely the traditional technique of mural painting, and their paintings are exact reproductions of the frescoes of the Hindu chitra-sāla, or picture-hall. It is not unlikely that further investigation of the subject by Indians who can gain access to the