1(a) Whether realistic or imagined

The Mughal period in Indian history had seen widespread cultural developments, especially in the field of miniature paintings. These paintings are like binoculars which help us to trace the medieval history of India. As it was rooted in a diverse mix of cultural, religious and artistic traditions, the art of miniature paintings in India became one of the richest and most productive schools.

The art of painting is often made to face a question: Is it an instrument that regulates past, a picture, a camera vision of something that has been once in existence, a situation, or event that has once taken place, the likeness of a person who has once lived, and so on. The questions, as to whether art is different from history or is only one of its alternative sources, and, whether an Indian miniature is different in this regard from other classes of paintings or not, haunt the minds of art critics all around the world.

While classifying the miniature paintings, 2 important aspects should be clear in mind:

• Miniatures were by and large a ‘commissioned thing’, requiring the artist to paint the 'desired'- something that delighted his patron or served any of his needs; the spiritual, aesthetic or sensual. Its theme, hence, comprised broadly some reality or an idea, which its patron would have liked to see, translated into lines and colors. Miniaturist's fancy had obviously a little role to play. At the most, it could be used to delete or sophisticate the crudeness or to add to the 'real', some degree of aesthetic refinement, as his patron would not have liked to see his 'reality' bearing a crude face.

• Secondly, when the miniaturists appeared on the scene, India had already developed a massive tradition of art, architecture and sculpture along with associated aesthetics and formative principles. Great literature, well sustained theology, mythology, tradition of unparalleled heroism, thought and learning, all existed in India. It had an all-round enormously great past. As a result, the miniaturist and his patron, were bound to inherit not only several of its stylistic features but also the major bulk of themes from it. It was often a truth of past, but in it he always perceived his 'real', that is, the truth of the tradition was miniaturist's 'reality' by perception, and this, despite that it was materially non-existent, was treated with utmost realism.

Thus a miniature is realistic but not by the reality of the thing that it depicts but by its own perception of it. It is in treating a theme that an Indian miniature has its realism. Different from a creation of fancy or even imagination, a miniature inclines to record the 'real', although unlike histories which record facts, both keeping changing.

A miniature discovers, on the contrary, the realism of events. A miniature is, thus, both imaginative and realistic, but it is not imaginative in the sense in which are some of the abstract or symbolic art modes that seek to transform a materially 'existent' into an abstract symbol. Its realism is also not that of a mechanical copier reproducing a thing verbatim. The truth of an Indian miniature stands midway, somewhere in between the 'real' and the 'unreal', or imagined, and it is in this dilemma that it discovers its uniqueness.