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The story of Indian painting begins with the art of primitive man which has survived in rock shelters and caves in places like Hoshangabad, Mirzapur and Bhimbetka.
Stone Age paintings belonging to the Magdalenian phase (15,000 B.C.) have been discovered elsewhere. These paintings share the vivid realism of primitive art that has been discovered in many places like Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France.
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The Indus epoch may have had extensive mural painting, for the painting on the pottery that has come down to us in abundance shows maturity and range, form vigorous realism through rhythmic stylization to strikingly expressive abstraction.
The earliest paintings of Ajanta date back to the first century B.C. and the latest to the eighth century. The spirit of the compassionate Buddha is their inspiration.The Jataka tales elaborated the vicissitudes of the various incarnations of Buddha and the Ajantan artists painted them in sinuous line and sensitive colour. City, countryside and forest, men and women of every type, fauna and flora, all are mentioned in these murals
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When Buddhism radiated to the rest of Asia, Ajanta became a fountainhead of Asian painting and murals with the clear stamp of its style. In India itself the mural tradition continued, though with less momentum, in Chalukyan Badami (sixth century), Pallava Panamala (seventh century), Pandyan Sittannavassal (ninth century), Chola Tanjore (twelfth century), Lepaksh of Vijayanagar (Sixteenth century) and the murals of Kerala of various dates reaching to the middle of the nineteenth century.Meanwhile, painting had come down from the extended mural surface to the miniature dimension of the manuscript, originally on palm, leaf, later on paper.
The miniatures of Pala period Bengal (tenth and eleventh centuries) conserve the sensuous line of Ajanta. But there is a rapid decline now and the line has become brittle and angular.
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It is this style that spread to western India and is seen in numerous illuminated manuscripts.Indian miniature stabilizes a fine pictorial style even before the advent of the Moghuls.
Akbar recruited a very large number of Indian artists. Each painting was most often a co-operative effort of Indian and Persian artists with one man doing the drawing, another the colouring, a third the details. The indigenisation received further momentum when Akbar commissioned the translation and illustration of Indian texts like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
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It was mostly artists trained in the Moghul atelier who became the court painters of the Rajput princes. But while Moghul painting was elitist, reflecting Imperial pomp and circumstance, Rajput painting presented in line and colour the great myths and legends of the land, the story of Rama, of Krishna, of the Bhagavata and the Gita Govinda.
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In the small principalities of the Himalayan valleys set up by intrepid Rajput warriors from the plains, many centres came up of which Basohli is unique for its intensity of expression, Kulu for its closeness to the folk style and Kangra for both its romanticism and large output. A decline followed the close of the Rajput phase.
Pioneers of modern painting in India were: Gaganendranath Tagore, who tried out every technique and style; Amrita Shergil, who integrated the pictorial idiom of the west and an Indian vision; Jamini Roy, who discovered the virility of the folk tradition and modulated it in many ways; and Rabindranath Tagore, who demanded for paintings music's autonomy and independence from factulity and thus gave a charter for free variations on naturalism, abstraction and expressionism.
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