How Painting Started in India

Painting in India

How Painting Started in India

Indian painting has one of the world's longest continuous traditions, stretching back approximately 10,000 years to humanity's earliest artistic expressions. The story begins not in palaces or temples, but in the shelter of rock formations where prehistoric peoples left their marks.

Prehistoric Beginnings: The Cave Paintings

The earliest Indian paintings were rock paintings of prehistoric times, found in places like the Bhimbetka rock shelters, with some approximately 10,000 years old Wikipedia. These ancient sites, located on the edge of the Deccan Plateau in present-day Madhya Pradesh, preserve humanity's first visual narratives in the region—images of animals, hunters, dancers, and daily life painted with natural pigments on cave walls.

The prehistoric artists worked with materials drawn from their environment: charcoal for blacks, ochre for reds and browns, white from lime or crushed shells. These weren't casual doodles but considered compositions that suggest ritual significance, storytelling, and a deep engagement with the surrounding landscape. The tradition of rock painting continued for thousands of years, evolving through the Mesolithic period and beyond.

The First Murals: Buddhist Caves and Religious Art

The tale of Indian murals finds its beginnings in the ancient and early medieval eras, extending from the 2nd century BC to the 8th-10th century AD Cottage9. During this period, painting moved from open rock shelters into carved cave temples, transforming into sophisticated religious art.

The Ajanta Caves stand as the most magnificent surviving example of ancient Indian painting. Created over several centuries, with major work from the 1st century BCE and especially the 5th century CE, these Buddhist cave murals demonstrate extraordinary technical mastery and spiritual depth. Artists covered walls and ceilings with scenes from the Buddha's life, Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha's previous incarnations), and celestial beings, all rendered with remarkable naturalism, fluid line work, and subtle color gradations.

The technique was demanding: artists prepared walls with layers of clay, cow dung, and lime plaster, then painted on the damp surface using mineral and vegetable pigments. The results—still visible after 1,500 years—show figures with rounded, three-dimensional modeling, graceful movement, and psychological presence.

Other significant early mural sites include the Bagh Caves, Sittanavasal (with Jain paintings), and various temple complexes. These murals predominantly depict religious themes from Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions, though there are instances where the artwork portrays secular subjects Cottage9.

The Development of Manuscript Painting

While wall paintings required stable architecture, portable painting developed through manuscript illustration. The earliest surviving Indian manuscript paintings date to around the 11th-12th centuries, primarily from Western India (especially Gujarat) and Eastern India (Bengal and Bihar during the Pala Empire period).

Jain manuscripts on palm leaf represent some of the oldest examples. These featured small, jewel-like illustrations inserted into religious texts, characterized by distinctive stylization: figures shown in three-quarter view with protruding eyes, pointed noses, and angular bodies. Artists used bold colors—deep reds, blues, and liberal gold—creating images that were decorative yet spiritually charged.

Buddhist manuscripts from Eastern India influenced Tibetan painting traditions and showed sophisticated compositions with fluid line work and narrative complexity.

Materials and Techniques

Early Indian painters developed sophisticated techniques for creating pigments and preparing surfaces. Artists would use natural pigments like charcoal, powdered leaves, rice flour, turmeric, and lime to create vibrant colors for their illustrations Satguru's. Mineral sources provided stable, brilliant colors: lapis lazuli for blues, cinnabar for reds, malachite for greens. Organic materials—indigo, saffron, turmeric—added to the palette.

For manuscripts, artists worked on palm leaves (in earlier periods) or specially prepared paper. For murals, the preparation of the wall surface was critical, involving multiple layers to create a smooth, stable painting ground.

Religious and Cultural Foundations

Indian painting from its inception was deeply intertwined with spiritual life. During the ancient era, Indian paintings were primarily religious in nature and focused on depicting gods, goddesses, and the culture of that specific region Satguru's. Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism all sponsored painting as a means of teaching, worship, and merit-making.

Ancient Indian texts discussed painting as one of the classical arts. The concept of chitra (painting) appears in Sanskrit literature, with theoretical texts outlining principles of composition, color, proportion, and the relationship between painting and other arts. These weren't merely technical manuals but philosophical frameworks understanding art as a path to both aesthetic and spiritual realization.

The Legacy of Early Indian Painting

These ancient foundations established principles that would continue through Indian painting's later development: the emphasis on line as the primary means of defining form; the use of profile or three-quarter views; the symbolic use of color; the integration of text and image; and the understanding of painting as serving spiritual and didactic purposes.

By the medieval period, regional schools flourished—Rajput painting in the royal courts, Pahari painting in the Himalayan foothills, and eventually the synthesis of Persian and Indian traditions under Mughal patronage. But all of these later developments built upon techniques, materials, and spiritual understandings established in those earliest rock shelters and cave temples.

The survival of works like the Ajanta murals, despite India's challenging climate for preservation, speaks to both the technical skill of ancient artists and the cultural importance placed on these creations. When we look at a 1,500-year-old painting from Ajanta—still luminous, still moving—we're witnessing not just the beginning of Indian painting, but the establishment of one of humanity's great visual traditions.