Painting

Story hook

It is 1571. The Mughal emperor Akbar, only twenty-eight, has just commissioned the largest illustrated manuscript in Asia: a 14-volume Persian-language translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata called the Razmnama (Book of War). To illustrate it, he convenes an atelier (tasvir-khana) of over a hundred painters — Persian-trained masters under Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad brought from Tabriz, working shoulder-to-shoulder with Indian artists like Daswanth and Basawan. Over fifteen years, the team produces 169 miniature paintings depicting scenes from the epic. The first Razmnama copy went to Akbar's library; subsequent copies were gifted to vassals. The Hindu epic, in Persian, illustrated by mixed Indo-Persian hands — three civilisations meeting in a single book.

This was the birth of the Mughal school of painting — Persian safavid refinement married to Indian iconographic literacy. It set off a chain reaction. The Rajput courts of Rajasthan (Mewar, Bundi, Bikaner, Kishangarh) developed their own response — Hindu devotional themes in Mughal-influenced technique. The Pahari hill kingdoms of Himachal Pradesh (Basohli, Guler, Kangra) carried the tradition further, into Krishna-bhakti landscapes of extraordinary lyricism. Across three centuries (16th-19th), India produced one of the greatest miniature-painting traditions in world art.

But Indian painting is far older than the Mughals. The Ajanta murals (2nd c. BCE - 6th c. CE) are its foundational mountain. The Bagh caves, the Sittannavasal Jain murals, the Lepakshi Vijayanagar paintings — all are wall paintings in the mural tradition. The shift from wall (mural) to page (miniature) happens around the 11th-12th c. CE, when Jain pothis (palm-leaf manuscripts) and Buddhist Pala manuscripts begin the page-illustration tradition that Mughals would industrialise. Mural and miniature are the two architectures of Indian painting.

Why this matters for UPSC

Indian painting appears in Prelims most years — Mughal-Rajput- Pahari school identification, miniature-painter attribution, mural-site dating. Mains uses it for "Indo-Persian synthesis," "bhakti expression in art," or "evolution of Indian painting traditions." Interview boards probe it for cultural diplomacy (Mughal manuscripts in foreign museums) and the question of defining "Indian" art.