Jain manuscript painting

Materials and format

The earliest illustrated Jain manuscripts are on palm leaf, in a long narrow format that confines images to small square panels between blocks of text. From about the fourteenth century paper came into use, permitting larger compositions, wider margins and more elaborate borders. Pigment is mineral and vegetable, with gold and, in the costliest commissions, ultramarine ground from imported lapis.

Style

The style is highly conventionalised and instantly recognisable. Figures are angular and shown in strict profile, with the further eye projecting beyond the line of the face — a convention maintained for centuries after it had been abandoned elsewhere. Backgrounds are flat fields of red or blue, textiles are patterned with fine repeating motifs, and space is indicated by stacking rather than recession.

The most frequently illustrated text is the Kalpa Sutra, with the Kalakacharyakatha often bound alongside it. Because both were commissioned repeatedly by lay patrons for donation to temple libraries, the same episodes recur across hundreds of manuscripts, which makes the development of the style unusually easy to trace.

Preservation and importance

Jain temple libraries, the bhandaras at Patan, Jaisalmer, Cambay and elsewhere, preserved these manuscripts in conditions that kept them intact, and preserved a great deal of non-Jain literature copied by the same scribes. Without them the record of Indian painting between the Ajanta murals and the Mughal ateliers would be close to blank.

The conventions of the style fed into early Rajput painting, and the persistence of the projecting eye in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century work outside Jain patronage marks the inheritance.