Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon (History, Art & Culture) – September 21, 2020

One popular imperial tradition was that of picturesque landscape painting.

• This style of painting depicted India as a quaint land, to be explored by travelling British artists; its landscape was rugged and wild, seemingly untamed by human hands.
• Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell was the most famous of the artists who painted within this tradition.
• They came to India in 1785 and stayed for seven years, journeying from Calcutta to northern and southern India.
• They produced some of the most evocative picturesque landscapes of Britain’s newly conquered territories in India.

Their large oil paintings on canvas were regularly exhibited to select audiences in Britain, and their albums of engravings were eagerly bought up by a British public keen to know about Britain’s empire.

Tilly Kettle and George Willison are the European artists who visited India (south), to paint Muhhammad Ali Khan portraits, and gifted these paintings to the King of England and the Directors of the East India Company.

In Bengal, around the pilgrimage centre of the temple of Kalighat, local village scroll painters (called patuas) and potters (called kumors in eastern India and kumhars in north India) began developing a new style of art.

• Before the nineteenth century, the village patuas and kumors had worked on mythological themes and produced images of gods and goddesses.
• On shifting to Kalighat, they continued to paint these religious images.
• Traditionally, the figures in scroll paintings looked flat, not rounded.
• Now Kalighat painters began to use shading to give them a rounded form, to make the images look three-dimensional. Yet the images were not realistic and lifelike.
• In fact, what is specially to be noted in these early Kalighat paintings is the use of a bold, deliberately non-realistic style, where the figures emerge large and powerful, with a minimum of lines, detail and colours.

The Tipu’s sword had an incredibly hard and sharp edge that could easily rip through the opponent’s armour.

• This quality of the sword came from a special type of high carbon steel called Wootz which was produced all over south India.
• Wootz steel when made into swords produced a very sharp edge with a flowing water pattern.
• This pattern came from very small carbon crystals embedded in the iron.
• Francis Buchanan, who toured through Mysore in 1800, a year after Tipu Sultan’s death, has left us an account of the technique by which Wootz steel was produced in many hundreds of smelting furnaces in Mysore.
• Wootz is an anglicized version of the Kannada word ukku, Telugu hukku and Tamil and Malayalam urukku – meaning steel.
• Indian Wootz steel fascinated European scientists.
• Michael Faraday, the legendary scientist and discoverer of electricity and electromagnetism, spent four years studying the properties of Indian Wootz (1818-22).
• However, the Wootz steel making process, which was so widely known in south India, was completely lost by the mid-nineteenth century.

Patola was woven in Surat, Ahmedabad and Patan. Highly valued in Indonesia, it became part of the local weaving tradition there.

Jamdani is fine muslin on which decorative motifs are woven on the loom, typically in grey and white.

• Often a mixture of cotton and gold thread was used, as in the cloth in this picture.
• The most important centres of jamdani and mulmul weaving were Dacca in Bengal and Lucknow in the United Provinces.

Chintz: Printed design on fine cloth (chintz) produced in Masulipatnam, Andhra Pradesh, mid nineteenth century.

• This is a fine example of the type of chintz produced for export to Iran and Europe.
• Amongst the pieces ordered in bulk were printed cotton cloths called chintz, cossaes (or khassa) and bandanna.

Similarly, the word bandanna now refers to any brightly coloured and printed scarf for the neck or head.

• Originally, the term derived from the word “bandhna” (Hindi for tying), and referred to a variety of brightly coloured cloth produced through a method of tying and dying.
• Bandanna patterns were mostly produced in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Kabir, who probably lived in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, was one of the most influential saints.

• He was brought up in a family of Muslim julahas or weavers settled in or near the city of Benares (Varanasi). We have little reliable information about his life.
• We get to know of his ideas from a vast collection of verses called sakhis and pads said to have been composed by him and sung by wandering bhajan singers.
• Some of these were later collected and preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib, Panch Vani and Bijak.
• Kabir’s teachings were based on a complete, indeed vehement, rejection of the major religious traditions.

The Vaishnava poet-saints of Maharashtra such as Jnaneshwar, Namadeva, Eknath and Tukaram, Sakhubai and the family of Chokhamela, who belonged to the “untouchable” Mahar caste, were devotees of lord Vitthala (form of lord Vishnu).

• Devotion around lord Vitthala gave rise to the Varkari sect which lay emphasis on an annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur.
• The cult of Vitthala emerged as a powerful mode of devotion and was very popular amongst the people.

Nayanars: There were 63 Nayanars, who belonged to different caste backgrounds such as potters, “untouchable” workers, peasants, hunters, soldiers, Brahmanas and chiefs.

• The best known among them were Appar, Sambandar, Sundarar and Manikkavasagar.
• There are two sets of compilations of their songs – Tevaram and Tiruvacakam.

Alvars: There were 12 Alvars, who came from equally divergent backgrounds, the best known being Periyalvar, his daughter Andal, Tondaradippodi Alvar and Nammalvar.

• Their songs were compiled in the Divya Prabandham.

Epics are grand, long compositions, about heroic men and women, and include stories about gods.

• A famous Tamil epic, the Silappadikaram, was composed by a poet named Ilango, around 1800 years ago.
• It is the story of a merchant named Kovalan, who lived in Puhar and fell in love with a courtesan named Madhavi, neglecting his wife Kannagi.
• Another Tamil epic, the Manimekalai was composed by Sattanar around 1400 years ago. This describes the story of the daughter of Kovalan and Madhavi.
• Kalidasa – Meghaduta in Sanskrit.

Sikh style of architecture developed in the region of modern day Punjab. It was heavily influenced by the Mughal style of architecture. Some of the features of the Sikh school are:

• The use of multiple Chhatris or kiosks on the top of the construction.
• Use of shallow cornices. The buildings had fluted domes, which were generally covered by brass and copper guilds for decoration and support.
• The arches were decorated by the use of numerous foliations.
• Example: Shri Harmandir Sahib or Golden temple. It was initiated in 1585 and completed by Arjan Dev in 1604.

There exists some difference between Greek and Roman styles and Gandhara School integrates both the styles.

• The idealistic style of Greeks is reflected in the muscular depictions of Gods and other men showing strength and beauty.
• Lots of Greek mythological figures from the Greek Parthenon have been sculpted using marble.
• On the other hand, Romans used art for ornamentation and decoration and is realistic in nature as opposed to Greek idealism.
• The Roman art projects realism and depicts real people and major historical events.
• The Romans used concrete in their sculptures. They were also famous for their mural paintings.