Tradition · miniature painting tradition
Pahari painting
Also known as Kangra kalam, Kangra painting, Basohli painting, Guler school, Pahari miniature
The miniature schools of the Himalayan foothill states — Basohli, Guler, Kangra, Chamba, Garhwal — running from the fierce flat colour and beetle-wing inlay of Basohli about 1690 to the soft naturalism of the Kangra kalam a century later. Its subject is overwhelmingly Krishna and the Gīta Govinda.
- Date
- c. 1690 – 1850
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Tradition
- Pahari workshop lineages; court collections
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The shift from Basohli to Kangra is traced to one family: Pandit Seu of Guler and his sons Manaku and Nainsukh, whose descendants worked for four generations across several courts. Nainsukh's portraits of his patron Balwant Singh doing ordinary things are unlike anything else in Indian painting.
Connections (3)
- PatronageSansār Chand Katoch
Kangra painting at its height is Sansār Chand's workshop: the Gīta Govinda and Bihārī Satsaī series, and the soft-modelled Krishna of the Kangra kalam. When Ranjit Singh reduced him in 1809 the painters scattered to Guler, Chamba and Garhwal, so the collapse of his court is what spread the style.
- Craft tradition ofKangra
The Pahari schools sit in the same Shivalik valleys as the goddess shrines — Basohli, Guler, Kangra, Chamba — and the courts that paid for the painting also paid for the temples. The Kangra valley therefore carries two traditions of the same patronage: a pīṭha and a workshop. Sansār Chand's defeat by Ranjit Singh in 1809 scattered his painters to Guler, Chamba and Garhwal, which is how one court's style became a whole region's.
- Craft tradition ofNāthdvāra
Pahari painting and Nāthdvāra's pichhwais are the two great Krishna picture traditions of western India, and both serve devotion rather than the court alone. Pahari works on paper for handling; Nāthdvāra on cloth for hanging behind the image and changing with the season. Nāthdvāra's pichhwai painters still work in families that have done nothing else for generations, and the backdrop is changed with the season, the festival and the time of day.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pahari painting”. Sangeet Natak Akademi and Ministry of Textiles documentation, and the standard field studies.
Open Pahari painting in the repository →