Jaina Monuments and Places First Class Importance

Author(s): T N Ramchandran
Publisher: Veer Shasan Sangh Calcutta

Page 59

JAINA ICONOGRAPHY
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popular art expression of the people. It was a distinctive forin into wluch that. ait expression had been moulded by hieratic tradition. Hence the conservatism of Jaina art - the conventionalized forms of the men and women and the sameness in the composition-fcatuies which repeat themselves in every manuscript so that the illustrations of one manuscript are closely identical with those of another to an extent which is without parallel. The popular art expression when thus diverted to the exclusive use of illustrating episodes in the lives of the Jaina saints is what we have come to know as Jaina art. It was a formal and frigid art in which convention had become supreme and had excluded freedom of design and cramped the unfettered movement of the artist's imagination and of his brush. It was as much an artistic formula as Byzantine art and it would not be correct to say as has becn said recently that the Jainas had no art of their own. While Jaina art was not an art of independent growth it was a very real and special form of the art of the times which on account of its distinctiveness is entitled to be known as Jaina art. On the other hand what has been loosely called “Jaina secular art" is not distinctively Jaina art at all and there is no reason for calling it secular in opposition to the religious art of Jainism. This so-called Jaina secular art or secular art of Guzerat by whatever name it might be miscalled, is in reality as we have said before the art expression of the common people, the genuine popular art of the country. Examples of it are the Vasanta vilās roll and the Lor and Chanda illustrations.
JAINA ICONOGRAPHY
Jainism is accused of being atheistic which is however not true. The numerous gods Tīrthankaras, Yakshas, Yakshiņīs