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FOREWORD
It is a bit difficult to write an introduction to a book of which one has seen none of the text, only a portion of the illustrations, and a table of con. tents that is frankly tentative. In the circumstances my comments can hardly extend beyond the general. AIN painting, in Mr. Nawab's illustrations, is confined to Svetambara
manuscript painting. It covers the Early Western Indian style, sometimes called "Gujarat" or specifically "Jain", and the later styles of the great Rajput-Mughal complex, as these were utilized by that division of the Jains. For some reason which I do not know the Digambara Jains do not seem to have enriched their manuscripts with paintings until about the 18th century, although from as much as a thousand years earlier they had been using painting to decorate the walls and ceilings of their cave and structural temples.
The motivation of Mr. Nawab's book is primarily religious, yet the facts about miniature painting in India differ so much from those about architecture and sculpture that this book is a good album of the entire school of Early Western Indian miniatures from the 12th to the 16th century A.D. During the time when palun-leaf was the material for books there, only Svetambara Jains, so far as our preserved and known documents reveal, illustrated their manuscripts with paintings. After paper displaced palm-leaf, that same community still executed the bulk of the existing miniatures so long as the "Early Western Indian" style continued, and only a handful of manuscripts illustrated in that style are known to come from non-Jain sources. It was not until the Rajput" painting developed that the Jains lost their pre-eminence. Yet even then they used the Rajput and Mughal styles, employing in one case a wellknown Mughal artist. These later developments of Jain paintings are, like the older, illustrated in Mr. Nawab's book, which indeed brings the story down almost to our own day.
