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Pahari journeys

Updated - 3/8/2010 - thehindu.com.

In 1739 when the marauding hordes of Nadir Shah descended on Delhi and virtually ended the era of the Great Mughals, the artists who had flourished under their patronage dispersed to the small Rajput kingdoms of the Western Himalayas. Collectively these painters were called ‘Pahari’, and divided into schools named after principalities such as Basohli, Kangra, Guler and so on.

B.N. Goswamy, however, suggested that it would lead to a better understanding to classify them according to their family lines, which were the true sources of their distinctive artistic traditions. In the 1990s, in collaboration with Eberhard Fischer, he gave shape to this concept in an exhibition of the work of 14 painters, with an authoritative catalogue that has become a classic on the subject. The present book is an Indian reprint, competitively priced and updated to include recent findings.

Though enough is now known about the provenance of Pahari miniatures and their context, there is a paucity of information about the artists themselves who are therefore the focus of this work. While Mughal painting was dramatic and concerned with heroic people and events, theirs is essentially a folk art, imaginatively effusive, down-to-earth, and appealing to all classes of society. Their themes are either religious or romantic, with a thin dividing line between.

www.thehindu.com/arts/art/article541876.ece

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