More Documents of Jaina and Gujarati Paintings

Author(s): Umakant P Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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be done with the help of similar miniatures of manuscripts bearing dates and or names of places of copying. With this view, the present writer tried to find out from the collections of the late Muni Sri Punyavijayaji and, through his kind co-operation, from some other collections, illustrated manuscripts which could be definitely assigned to Gujarāt and which could be either accurately dated or could be assigned to a fairly reliable date with the help of the format etc. in which matter, there was no other scholar who had more experience than Muni Sri Punyavijayaji. Such attempts in future are likely to be rewarded with more success and will help us in deciding the provenance of different styles and in rewriting the history of North Indian Painting with a clearer perspective.
Take for example, the Sri-Candra Rāsa painted at Surat in 1716 V. S.- A. D. 1659 (figs. 70-71)48 For the first time we are on firm grounds regarding a Gujarati style (or Surat if one may like to call it so after the discovery of some more evidences of different local sub-styles from Gujarāt) of the seventeenth century. Surat was an important trade centre in the Moghul period and certainly had patronised art and literature. When I showed this new evidence to Dr. Moti Chandra, he showed me a complete Devi-Māhātmya painted some years later (in V. S. 1776) in Surat. 47 The style in both the above manuscripts is related. Further evidence of the art activity at Surat is preserved in a Persian manuscript in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay; it is still unpublished and I hope the Museum will soon publish it. This manuscript, said to have been written in the age of Aurangzeb, is full of paintings in popular Moghul Style. Recently a Šripäla-rāsa painted at Surat in 1831 A. D. has been found.
The Sri-Candra-rāsa of 1659 seems to bave been the work of a mediocre artist, or we might say, it possibly represents (to some extent at least) the popular or the folk-art. Similar paintings on walls of private houses were very popular in Gujarat till the beginning of the twentieth century. We must await future discoveries of better examples of miniatures done by superior artists at Surat. But the Devī Māhātmya of V. S. 1776-A. D. 1719 and the Sri-Candra-Rāsa of 1659 are examples enough to give us an idea of some of the characteristics of Gujarāti-Surat-painting of the latter half of the seventeenth century. Big, heavy, healthy, heads on stunted figures are peculiar to this style. The backgrounds are simple, lines are thick and swiftly drawn, eyes are big, the farther eye is dropped, the squarish jaw-bone is now not popular. Turbans are heavy and typical, they are comparable with the undated ArdrakumāraRāsats and the Upadeśamálā miniatures. It seems that the Ardrakumāra-Rāsa is also a product of the Gujarāti school, but possibly from Northern or North-Eastern Gujarāt, and, if I may hazard a guess, from the Idar region. Treatment of the figure of the Jaina monk in the Ardrakumāra-Rāsa has parallels with similar treatment in a manuscript recently discovered by Mrs. Sarayu Doshi, which according to its colophon was painted for some residents of Idar, by an artist called Nānji.
46. Moti Chandra and U. P. Shah, New Documents of Jaina Paintings, op. cit., pp. 417 ff., 371 ff., fig. 34. 47. Ibid., p. 372, fig. 28. 48. Moti Chandra and U. P. Shah, New Documents of Jaina Paintings. figure 30, and pp. 414-415.
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