Later Mural Traditions

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Fine Arts Class XI (An Introduction to Indian Art Part I), Chapter 5.

Where did Ajanta's painters go?

Ajanta's great painted caves reached their height by about the fifth century CE. Then the trail seems to go cold. Very few painted sites survive after Ajanta, and that is not because painters stopped working. Houses, palaces and wooden buildings perished, and even stone sculptures were once plastered and painted, with the colour long gone. What survives is a handful of fragments in caves and temples. Read together, those fragments show a living tradition that moved south and changed with every dynasty. This chapter follows that journey, and CUET asks it as a chain of site, ruler, theme and style.

The big idea: one tradition, six homes

The easiest way to hold the chapter is a map in words. Painting follows power and patronage: wherever a dynasty built caves and temples, painters decorated them.

Badami: Ajanta travels south

Badami in Karnataka was the capital of the early Chalukyas, who ruled from 543 to 598 CE and rose as Vakataka power declined. The Chalukya king Mangalesha, the younger son of Pulakesi I and brother of Kirtivarman I, patronised the Badami caves. An inscription in Cave 4 gives the date 578–579 CE, praises the beauty of the cave and records the dedication of an image of Vishnu. That is why the cave is popularly called the Vishnu Cave, and it also tells us the patron's own Vaishnava affiliation.

Only a fragment of painting survives, on the vaulted roof of the front mandapa. It shows a palace scene: Kirtivarman, the elder brother of Mangalesha, sits with his wife and feudatories and watches a dance, while Indra and his retinue appear towards a corner of the panel. The queen and the king have gracefully drawn faces with large eye sockets, half closed eyes and protruding lips, a modelling style that reminds you of Ajanta.

Why it matters. The painters of Badami had no heavy shading to create volume. They used line alone. The contours of the cheeks, chin and lips seem to push out of the face, so a simple, sinuous outline is enough to make the head look rounded. When a question says "volume created by line treatment", think Badami.

Pallava, Pandya and Chola: the Tamil country

The tradition travelled further south into Tamil Nadu, where the style changed with each dynasty.

Pallava. Mahendravarma I, who ruled in the seventh century, built temples at Panamalai, Mandagapattu and Kanchipuram. His inscription at Mandagapattu gives him three titles that show how he saw himself. CUET loves to shuffle them.

Only fragments of his paintings remain. The figure of a female divinity at Panamalai is drawn gracefully. At Kanchipuram the paintings were patronised by Rajsimha and only traces survive. They show the Somaskanda theme. The faces are round and large, the line is rhythmic and more ornamental than before, and the torso is still sculptural but elongated.

Pandya. Pandya rulers patronised the Tirumalaipuram caves, where only a few layers of painting survive, and the Jain caves at Sittanvasal. At Sittanvasal paintings appear on shrine ceilings, in verandas and on brackets. On the veranda pillars are dancing celestial nymphs, with firm contours in vermilion red against a lighter background and bodies in yellow with subtle modelling. Their supple limbs, expressive faces and swaying rhythm show how well the painter imagined the figure within the architecture. The eyes are slightly elongated and sometimes project beyond the face, a feature that returns in many later paintings of the Deccan and South India.

Chola. The Cholas ruled from the ninth to the thirteenth century and reached their peak in the eleventh. The great temples of Brihadeswara at Thanjavur, Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Darasuram were built under Rajaraja Chola, his son Rajendra Chola and Rajaraja Chola II. Chola paintings also exist at Nartamalai, but the most important are inside the Brihadeswara temple, on the walls of the narrow passage that runs around the shrine.

When these paintings were discovered, they were found in two layers. The upper layer was painted in the Nayak period in the sixteenth century. Cleaning away the surface painting revealed the Chola work beneath. The themes centre on Shiva: Shiva in Kailash, Shiva as Tripurantaka, Shiva as Nataraja, a portrait of Rajaraja with his mentor Kuruvar, and dancing figures.

Pause and predict: a restorer removes the top layer of painting at Brihadeswara. Which tradition does she uncover, and which one did she remove?

Check your answer: She uncovers the Chola painting of the eleventh century and removes the Nayak painting of the sixteenth century. The older work is underneath, which is the opposite of what students often guess.

Vijayanagara and Nayaka: a pictorial language that stays put

The Brihadeswara paintings show a mature style: flowing predetermined lines, supple modelling and elongated features. When Chola power declined in the thirteenth century, the Vijayanagara dynasty (fourteenth to sixteenth century) took over the region from Hampi to Trichy, with Hampi as its capital. Many paintings survive in its temples.

The early phase is at Tiruparakunram near Trichy (fourteenth century). At Hampi the Virupaksha temple has paintings on the ceiling of its mandapa, with dynastic history and episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Two panels are well known: Vidyaranya, the spiritual teacher of Bukkaraya Harsha, carried in a palanquin in a procession, and the incarnations of Vishnu. At Lepakshi, near Hindupur in present Andhra Pradesh, the walls of the Shiva temple preserve glorious Vijayanagara paintings.

The painters settled on a fixed pictorial language. Faces are shown in profile but with large frontal eyes, and figures and objects look flat and two dimensional. Lines are still but fluid, and compositions are arranged in rectilinear compartments. The figures have narrow waists. These conventions carried into the Nayaka period.

The Nayaka paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are found at Thiruparakunram, Sreerangam and Tiruvarur in Tamil Nadu. At Thiruparakunram there are paintings of two periods, the fourteenth and the seventeenth century, and the early ones depict scenes from the life of Vardhaman Mahavira. The Nayaka themes are the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and Krishna leela. Tiruvarur has a panel on the story of Muchukunda. Chidambaram has panels of Shiva as Bhikshatana Murti and Vishnu as Mohini. The Sri Krishna temple at Chengam in Arcot district has 60 Ramayana panels from the late phase.

The Nayaka painters still tried to give movement to their figures and make space feel dynamic. The Nataraja at Tiruvalanjuli is the standard example.

Pause and predict: a panel shows profile faces with large frontal eyes in a rectilinear compartment, but the males have a less heavy abdomen than in the sixteenth century. Vijayanagara or Nayaka?

Check your answer: Nayaka. The slimmer abdomen is the clue that separates the late style from its Vijayanagara parent.

Kerala: a language of its own

Kerala painters of the sixteenth to eighteenth century took selected elements from the Nayaka and Vijayanagara schools but built a language of their own. They took cues from living Kerala traditions: Kathakali and kalam ezhuthu, the ritual floor painting of Kerala. The result has vibrant, luminous colours and human figures in three dimensions.

Most paintings are on the walls of shrines and temple cloisters, and some are inside palaces. The stories are mostly episodes from Hindu mythology popular in Kerala, and painters seem to have drawn on oral tradition and local versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. More than sixty sites are known, including three palaces: the Dutch Palace in Kochi, the Krishnapuram Palace in Kayamkulam and the Padmanabhapuram Palace. The mature phase can be seen at the Pundareekapuram Krishna temple, Panayanarkavu, Thirukodithanam, the Triprayar Sri Rama temple and the Trissur Vadakkunathan temple.

Two artworks help you picture the style. The Venugopal at the Triprayar Sri Rama temple shows Krishna as the flute player. The painting at Pundareekapuram shows Krishna playing the flute with gopikas around him, with rich colour and rounded, modelled faces.

Walls that are still painted

The chapter closes with a living tradition. In villages and in havelis across the country, people paint the interior and exterior walls of houses. These paintings are usually made by women, at ceremonies and festivals or simply to clean and decorate the wall. Traditional forms include pithoro in parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, Mithila painting in the Mithila region of northern Bihar and warli painting in Maharashtra, along with wall painting in Odisha, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Quick site finder

Maps can't be drawn here, so use this table to place each site.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: all of these are called murals or wall paintings. In reality: the word fresco strictly means painting on wet lime plaster, and many early Indian wall paintings, Ajanta being the best known, were painted on a prepared dry plaster surface instead. The term mural is the safe and correct word for the whole tradition. Why it matters: use mural in answers and avoid calling every painted wall a fresco.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the Chola paintings at Brihadeswara are older than the Nayak layer above them. In reality: over painting is one reason an older layer can survive. The later coat hid the earlier work from view until the surface was cleaned, which is why the Chola paintings are described as unveiled. Why it matters: it explains why a single wall can carry two periods and why dating a mural means asking which layer you are looking at.

Key people and terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Post Mauryan Trends in Indian Art and Architecture covers the earlier painted caves of Ajanta that this chapter continues.
• Next: Temple Architecture and Sculpture covers the buildings, such as Brihadeswara, that carried these murals.
• Class XII link: The Living Art Traditions of India returns to the folk wall painting that closes this chapter, and The Rajasthani Schools of Painting shows how painting later moved from walls to miniatures.