Rāgmālā Painting

The earliest extant rāgmālā illustrations are in a palm-leaf manuscript of the Kalpa Sūtra, a Jain hagiography from western India, dated 1475 (Nawab 1956). No other examples of the art form survive from the fifteenth century, but rāgmālā painting thereafter clearly benefited from the introduction of paper and more advanced Islamic painting and publishing techniques. From the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth, artists generally produced small paintings, uniform in size and style and easily...