Prehistoric Rock Paintings

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 1.

Who painted first, and why on a rock?

Long before paper, language or any written word, people were already making pictures. Prehistory is the stretch of time with no books or documents at all, so everything we know comes from what people left behind: tools, pottery, bones, the places they lived and the drawings on their cave walls. Once food, water, clothing and shelter were secured, people felt the need to express themselves, and painting and drawing became the oldest art forms humans practised, with the cave wall as the canvas.

This chapter is a detective story. The "documents" are rock shelters, the "handwriting" is pigment, and the questions CUET asks are about who found them, where they are, what they show and how the colours survived.

Setting the scene: the Old Stone Age

The prehistoric period in the early development of human beings is known as the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic Age. It is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper phases, and the first thing to fix in your head is the dividing line: we do not know whether Lower Palaeolithic people made any art objects at all, but by the Upper Palaeolithic we see art spreading widely across the world. In India too, the earliest paintings reported are from Upper Palaeolithic times.

Cave walls across the world from this time are full of finely carved and painted animals, the very animals the cave dwellers hunted. The subjects were much the same everywhere: human figures, human activities, geometric designs and animal symbols. That shared vocabulary shows that making images was a human instinct, not a local custom.

The discovery timeline

Pause and predict: a question gives you "1867–68" and asks who made the first discovery of rock paintings in India. Wakankar is a famous name in this chapter. Is he the answer?

Check your answer: No. Wakankar is linked to Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957–58. The first discovery in India, in 1867–68, is credited to Archibold Carlleyle. Two names, two dates: keep them paired.

Where the paintings are: a site table

Rock paintings have been reported from the caves of several districts of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar, and some from the Kumaon hills of Uttarakhand. The sites to learn:

Lakhudiyar: one lakh caves

Lakhudiyar literally means "one lakh caves". The shelters lie on the banks of the River Suyal, about twenty kilometres along the Almora–Barechina road. Paintings here are in white, black and red ochre and fall into three categories: man, animal and geometric patterns.

Humans are drawn as stick-like forms. The main animal motifs are a long-snouted animal, a fox and a multiple-legged lizard. The geometric designs include wavy lines, rectangle-filled designs and groups of dots. One of the scenes you should be able to picture is of hand-linked dancing human figures, a row of small stick people holding hands, which is why this site is so often used in image-based questions.

The superimposition order at Lakhudiyar. Painters sometimes painted new pictures over old ones, which gives archaeologists a ready-made sequence. Here the earliest are in black, over them are red ochre paintings, and the last group is white. Think of it as dark to light: black, then red, then white.

Pause and predict: at a rock shelter, a white painting lies on top of a red one, which lies on top of a black one. Which is the oldest?

Check your answer: Black, because whatever lies underneath was painted first. Layers stack in time like pages in a pile: oldest at the bottom, newest on top.

The southern granite sites

The granite rocks of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh gave suitable canvases to Neolithic people. Several sites exist, but the famous ones are Kupgallu, Piklihal and Tekkalkota. Three types of paintings are reported here: paintings in white, paintings in red ochre over a white background, and paintings in red ochre. They belong to late historical, early historical and Neolithic periods. The subjects are bulls, elephants, sambhars, gazelles, sheep, goats, horses, stylised humans and tridents, but only rarely vegetal motifs.

Bhimbetka: the richest gallery

The richest paintings come from the Vindhya ranges of Madhya Pradesh and their Kaimurean extensions in Uttar Pradesh. Why here? These hills are full of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic remains and are also full of forests, wild plants, fruits, streams and creeks, a perfect place for Stone Age people to live.

The largest and most spectacular rock shelter is Bhimbetka, in the Vindhya hills of Madhya Pradesh. It is forty-five kilometres south of Bhopal, in an area of ten square kilometres, with about eight hundred rock shelters, five hundred of which bear paintings. It was discovered in 1957–58 by the archaeologist V.S. Wakankar, who spent several years surveying the inaccessible hills and jungles.

The themes are of great variety, from ordinary daily events to sacred and royal images: hunting, dancing, music, horse and elephant riders, animal fighting, honey collection, decoration of bodies and household scenes.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Bhimbetka's art is sorted into seven historical periods by style, technique and superimposition, and you study the first three. In reality: painted surfaces are very hard to date directly, so scholars rely on the order of layers, the style of the figures and the tools found in the same shelters. That is why periods are best understood as a relative sequence, and why the exact ages of some paintings are still discussed. Bhimbetka is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2003).

Bhimbetka's periods side by side

Period I is the Upper Palaeolithic, Period II the Mesolithic and Period III the Chalcolithic. After Period III there are four more successive periods, and the chapter confines itself to the first three. The two you must know in detail are:

Why green for dancers and red for hunters? The chapter records the pairing without explaining it, so treat it as a fact to memorise rather than something to reason out. A useful memory hook is "Green Dances, Red Hunts".

The Mesolithic gallery: a stone age storybook

The Mesolithic period is the busiest. Hunting scenes show people hunting in groups, armed with barbed spears, pointed sticks, arrows and bows, and sometimes with traps and snares. Animals chase men in some pictures and are chased by men in others. Some animal paintings seem to show fear of animals, while many others show tenderness and love for them. There are also a few engravings, mainly of animals.

One important contrast sums up the style: animals are painted in a naturalistic style, while humans are depicted only in a stylistic manner. "Naturalistic" means lifelike. "Stylistic" means simplified and conventional, like the stick figures. Learn this exact pairing, because the reverse is a standard trap.

The people in these paintings are not only hunters. Women are painted both nude and clothed, the young and old both appear, children are shown running, jumping and playing, and community dances are a common theme. There are scenes of people gathering fruit or honey from trees and of women grinding and preparing food, and some pictures of men, women and children seem to show a kind of family life. In many shelters we also find hand prints, fist prints and dots made with fingertips.

Pause and predict: a painting at Bhimbetka shows a tiny man next to a huge animal chasing him. Why might the artist have drawn the animal so large?

Check your answer: The animal is made to dominate the picture, which makes the scene dramatic and tells the viewer who holds the power in that moment. The point for the exam is that scale can be a storytelling choice and not a mistake in proportion. Elsewhere, the chapter says the animals are shown as more youthful and majestic than they probably were.

Colours, materials and why they have lasted

The Bhimbetka artists used many colours: various shades of white, yellow, orange, red ochre, purple, brown, green and black. White and red were the favourites. The paints were made by grinding different rocks and minerals.

The method was: the rock or mineral was first ground into a powder, then mixed with water and probably with a thick, sticky substance such as animal fat, gum or resin from trees. Brushes were made of plant fibre.

The surprising fact is that these colours have survived thousands of years of bad weather. The explanation is the chemical reaction of the oxide present on the surface of the rocks, not the climate and not any special varnish. This is a favourite assertion-reason pairing.

Why paint there, and why paint again?

Some paintings are in shelters where people lived, but others were made in places that do not seem to have been living spaces at all, so those places may have had religious importance. Some of the most beautiful paintings are very high up, near the ceilings, in awkward positions, so perhaps the paintings were meant to be noticed from a distance. At some places there are as many as twenty layers of paintings, one over another. Possible reasons for repainting are that the artist did not like an earlier picture, that some places were considered sacred or special, or that different generations used the area at different times.

Two views. For the exam: people painted to make their shelters more colourful, or to keep a visual record of daily life, the way some of us keep a diary, and the repeated painting at the same spots suggests sacred places returned to over generations. Another reading: many rock-art scholars around the world also read hunting scenes as part of ritual practice meant to give people power over the animals they met in the open, and others stress storytelling and the marking of shared places. No single explanation fits every site, which is why the chapter gives several.

Why it matters. Because there is no writing from this time, the paintings are the main evidence of how early people lived, what they ate, and how they thought. The hunting scenes show food habits, the dancing scenes show community life, and the repainted walls hint at belief.

Key terms at a glance

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: Arts of the Indus Valley moves from wall paintings to seals, sculpture and pottery of a city civilisation.
• Later wall art: Post-Mauryan Trends in Indian Art and Architecture covers the painted caves at Ajanta, where pigment on rock becomes a refined mural tradition.
• Mural story: Later Mural Traditions follows wall painting through the centuries after the cave paintings.