Eastern Indian Painting

Eastern Indian painting is the term predominantly used for paintings created during the Pāla dynasty. The art centers were located in the area of the modern states of Bihar and West Bengal in northern India and Bangladesh. Pāla art flourished in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and disappeared completely from eastern India after the conquest of the Muslims at the end of the twelfth century. Only illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts and the remains of a wall painting discovered at Nālandā, the most important Buddhist monastic institute in India, but scholars agree that painting was once a major corpus. The painting style of the illustrations in those earliest surviving manuscripts reflects stylistic conventions developed in Indian temple and monastic mural painting, now almost completely lost. Literary evidence indicates that East Indian paintings cover mainly Buddhist motifs. In the late Pāla period, Hindu deities also came into play.

Brief History

The life and teachings of the historic Buddha Śākyamuni (c. 566–486 BCE) had a strong impact on eastern Indian art. In the third century BCE, Emperor Aśoka spread Buddhism in India, marking his empire with pillars covered with Buddhist inscriptions. Painting is known to have existed in India at least as early as the Kushan period, in the second and third centuries CE, but little of these early works has survived. Hindu and Buddhist art reached it height in the Gupta Empire in the fourth through seventh centuries CE, known as the classical period. The precious monumental wall murals displaying religious figures in the cave temples of Ajantā and Ellora show the rich painting style of this area. Unfortunately, in eastern India, no paintings from the Gupta period survived.

The Pāla Empire, founded in c. 730–750 CE, built on the rich legacy of Gupta art and lasted until the twelfth century. Magadha in southern Bihar was the cultural and artistic center of the Pāla kingdom until about the tenth century. It was a vivid cultural and artistic district where open-minded kings like Dharmapala brought the more than 1,500-year-old Buddhist culture to a new high point.

Large monastic establishments known as mahāvihāra (great monasteries) were founded in eastern India. They served as universities and became flourishing centers of art and religion during the Pāla period. The three main monastic institutes, Nālandā, Vikramaśīla and Uddandapura, were visited regularly by scholars and travelers from Nepal, Tibet, China, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, and Indonesia, who brought back portable pieces of art like paintings, statues, and votive stūpas to their home countries. In this way they helped to transplant east Indian art to different areas of Central and Southeast Asia, where it largely influenced regional styles. In Nepal, Tibet, and China, the influence of East Indian art had a long-lasting effect that was evident until the eighteenth century.

The later period of Pāla art, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, focused largely on the depiction of Hindu motifs. The artistic centers were located in the area of today’s West Bengal in India, and Bangladesh. Islamic art had very little influence on East Indian painting before the Mughal period in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Mughal painting was limited to book illustration and individual miniatures.

Overview

Indian illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts of the tenth to thirteenth centuries are very rare. A manuscript consists of several single folios of palm leaves that were strung together with a cord or fixed by two metal sticks. The folios originally were enclosed in wooden covers, which are beautifully painted. In the scriptoria of the main Buddhist monasteries in eastern India scribes and artists worked together closely to produce unique pieces of book art. First, the scribes wrote the text directly on the folio surface, leaving the spaces blank, and later the artists, probably also monks, filled the blanks with paintings. Even though the scribes are often mentioned, the illustrations carry no signature of the artist or scribal attribution.

The folios and book covers were illuminated with miniature paintings, typically with images of the deities to whom the text was dedicated. For example, the eleventh century manuscript of the Mahayana Buddhist work Astasāhasrikā Prajnāpāramitā Sūtra (Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines) now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is illustrated with the female deity Prajnāpāramitā, who is understood as the visual personification of wisdom. The manuscript also contains significant miniature paintings of Avalokiteśvara, the male bodhisattva of compassion, and the female bodhisattva Green Tārā.

The paintings in a Pañcaraksā sūtra manuscript (Five Protective Goddesses) produced in Nālandā in the late eleventh century, which is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, show the skillful hands of the Nālandā artisans in the late eleventh to early twelfth centuries. For example, the body of an elegant bodhisattva Vajrapāni is drawn in fine lines and was carefully modeled.

The typical color palette for Pāla manuscript illustrations was a combination of red, yellow, blue, green, with black and white as accent colors. The choice of colors was not because of aesthetic expression but because of a fully developed and very complex symbolism. There are several types of illustrations within manuscripts, and the paintings do not always go along with the manuscript content. When the painting marks the end of a chapter, it functions as a visual index, comparable to the thumb index of the Bible. Some illustrations are mnemonic devices for visualization generated during religious rituals and meditation practice.

During the early Pāla period, the "eight great miraculous events" of the Buddha became a major iconographic theme in Buddhist art. This is also mirrored in the manuscript illustrations. The four principal events are his birth at Lumbinī, the defeat of Māra and enlightenment at Bodhgayā, the first sermon at Sārnāth, and his death or passing into parinirvāna at Kusīnagara. The four other events are the descent from Trāyastrimśa heaven, the gift of honey from the monkey at Vaiśālī, the taming of the wild elephant at Rājgīr, and the great illusion of the Jetavanā monastery as Śrāvasti.

At the end of the twelfth century, the production of Buddhist art and manuscripts had come to an abrupt end. The Muslim conquest in eastern India and neighboring areas resulted in the destruction of monasteries, erasing much of Buddhist culture in its homeland India. All murals and cloth paintings have been destroyed but paintings on palm-leaf manuscript pages, together with their painted wood covers, have survived in great numbers. Prior to its destruction, however, east Indian art disseminated across Asia and its legacy is still visible in the artistic traditions of Southeast Asia (mainly Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia), the Himalayan region (mainly Tibet and Nepal), as well as in China. Buddhist pilgrimage flourishes in the twenty-first century, and the major pilgrimage sites in Bihar have been renovated and extended.

Bibliography

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