Jain Journal 1970 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 19

APRIL 1970
213
ping links of mail, and on their heads they wear pointed helmets with long neck pieces. In some paintings they wear the turban wound around a pointed cap, like that at present in vogue among Pathans 34. Still more, the bodily poses are sometimes unlike any used with Indians.
It may not be without point to draw attention to the fact that the Mongolian cast of countenance of the Sahis, their costume, and their bodily poses, although foreign to the rest of this Western Indian style of painting, are similar to elements in Mongol-Persian painting35
Possibly in these miniatures of the Kālakācāryakathā we should be justified in seeing the first small intrusion into Indian painting of Persian elements. As time went on the Persian encroached increasingly upon the native Indian style, until the combination of the two brought into existence the Rajput and Mughal schools. The Western Indian style was ultimately extinguished. By the middle of the seventeenth century it was about done; the few examples I have seen from after that time are degenerate and of no value aesthetically. Jaina, Hindu, and lay artists alike employ Rajput styles 36.
Reprinted from The Story of Kalaka, Washington, 1933.
The pointed cap remainds us of the fact that among the ancient Sakas there was a division known as the Tigrakhauda, "Pointed-Caps". See illustrations in Blochet, op. cit., pls. 46, 62. Coomaraswamy (2); Ghose.
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