Indian painting traditions: murals to miniatures
Indian painting from the Ajanta murals to Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and Deccani miniatures, plus folk schools — the high-yield GS-1 art history for UPSC.
The cave-mural inheritance
Indian painting begins in the rock shelters of Bhimbetka (Madhya Pradesh), a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where Mesolithic ochre figures of hunts and dances survive. The classical tradition, however, is defined by the Ajanta caves (Aurangabad, Maharashtra), excavated in two phases — Hinayana (2nd–1st century BCE) and Mahayana (5th century CE, under Vakataka patronage). Ajanta's painters used the fresco-secco (tempera on dry plaster) technique, not true buon fresco. Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 carry the masterpieces: the Padmapani and Vajrapani Bodhisattvas (Cave 1), the Mahajanaka Jataka, and the dying princess. The narratives are drawn from the Jatakas (previous lives of the Buddha). Ajanta technique is codified in the Vishnudharmottara Purana, whose section Chitrasutra lays out the Shadanga (six limbs) of painting.
From Ajanta to the regional murals
The contemporaneous Bagh caves (Madhya Pradesh) and Badami Chalukyan paintings (6th century CE) extend the idiom. In the south, the Sittanavasal Jain cave (Tamil Nadu, Pallava–Pandya, 7th–9th century) preserves the Samavasarana and lotus-pond ceiling. The Brihadisvara (Rajarajesvara) temple at Thanjavur, built by Rajaraja Chola I (consecrated 1010 CE), contains Chola murals of Shiva as Tripurantaka and Dakshinamurti, later overlaid by Nayaka work. The Lepakshi Veerabhadra temple (Andhra Pradesh, Vijayanagara, 16th century) shows mature mural narrative with the largest fresco of Veerabhadra. In Kerala, temple and palace murals at Mattancherry Palace and Padmanabhapuram continue the tradition into the 17th–18th centuries with the distinctive red-and-ochre Kerala mural style governed by the Tantrasamuchaya.
The palm-leaf and cloth interlude
Between monumental murals and courtly miniatures lies the Pala school (Bengal–Bihar, 8th–12th century), Buddhist manuscript illumination on palm leaf, associated with Nalanda and the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita. The Apabhramsha/Western Indian (Jain) school (Gujarat–Rajasthan, 11th–15th century) illustrated the Kalpasutra and Kalakacharyakatha, marked by the angular projecting farther eye, wiry line, and the shift from palm leaf to paper after the 14th century, plus lavish use of gold and ultramarine. These manuscript traditions supplied the formal vocabulary that the imperial Mughal atelier would later transform. The transitional Chaurapanchasika group and Caurapancasika style of c. 1450–1550 — bold primary colours, monochrome backgrounds — bridges Jain austerity and Rajput lyricism, and is the immediate antecedent of early Mewar painting.