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With a view to verifying the researches undertaken by my uncle, to having a second look at the temples he had visited and to making necessary changes and additions, I visited all the places once again. I too made notes as I moved on from temple to temple and passed through my uncle's process of documentation and re-creations. Writer-critic Dr. Shirish Panchal and poet-critic Shri Jaydev Shukla joined me in this task and helped me a lot in organizing, recasting and rewriting the text of book. I am grateful to them for extending kind help even under unfavourable circumstances. I am also grateful to Prof. Sanat Bhatt for preparing within a very short period of time, an almost creative translation of the monograph for the publication of its version in English. I thank Dr. Mohan Meghani for checking, correcting and adding historical references in this work.
My task as an editor was rendered all the more difficult by the absence of my dear uncle. He had noted the minute details and characteristic features of the pat paintings. But a few of the developments facilifated by the social and economic changes in the last few decades must be noted here. Naive enthusiasm and unthoughtful haste have taken a great toll. Pat paintings in some of the temples of Surat have been retoruched by inadvertent hands in recent times. This has resulted into a great loss of the beauty and the charm of the oringinal paintings. Some of the pats have been heavily damaged because of termites or because of the lack of proper care.
Besides the wooden pat paintings, there are two wall paintings done in Frescoe style. Shri Vasudeo Smart made copies of these frescoes too. The painting of Nandishwar dwip' in the temple of Adishwarnath at Rander is a frescoe. The second is Dhai dwip in a temple at Ankleshwar. Both these frescoes have been accomodated in this book; for both of them are in a highly damaged condition and on the verge of being lost soon.
I may note here a new trend that has been emerging in the field of pat painting. As the society gets more ostentatious, the sensibility of the artist gets more blunt. The monograph contains photographs of two pat paintings under the title Amod. The pats prepared nearly seventy years ago incorporate more of carvings in wood than real painting. The change is crucially signficant for it involves a change of the medium. The pats in this case are carved in low-relief. Themes and motifs, no doubt, continue to be the same; but trees and mountains tend to multiply and human figures tend to become less in number. The delineation lacks fine details. Motor-cars and men in western dresses begin to figure on the pathways to the centres of pilgrimages. Fewer colours tend to be used now. The atmoshphere is getting more urban. In the last fifty years or so a number of old Jain temples were either radically renovated or completely demolished and new temples were
10: Jain Kashthapar Chitra
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