The five paintings to compare are the Rajput Bhāgavata Purāṇa folio (Fig. 8.15, 1520), Jahangir’s darbar from the Jahangir-nama (Fig. 8.16), the Razmnama wrestling folio (Fig. 8.17, 1598), the Bikaner Holi painting (Fig. 8.18, mid-17th century) and the Rāmāyaṇa scene (Fig. 8.19).
What all five share
- Small scale, dense detail. Every one is a page-sized painting meant to be held and looked at closely, not hung on a wall — the shift the chapter describes, “from walls to paper”, after paper reached India in the 10th or 11th century.
- Bright opaque mineral colour laid flat, with fine outlines and gold. Nothing is sketchy; every figure is finished.
- Storytelling. Each is a moment from a narrative, and the moment chosen is the one that explains the whole episode.
- Ruled borders framing the picture, and figures shown mostly in profile or three-quarter view with patterned textiles carefully picked out.
Where they differ
| Feature | Rajput works (8.15, 8.18, 8.19) | Mughal works (8.16, 8.17) |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Kṛiṣhṇa defeating the whirlwind Tṛiṇāvarta; women playing Holi; Rāma and Lakṣhmaṇa searching for Sītā — devotional and epic | The emperor in darbar, and a wrestling match — court, event and person |
| Colour | Hot flat fields — a solid red pavilion in 8.15, a yellow text band and blue sky in 8.19 | Softer, more graded tones; modelled green hills, dark rounded trees, a crowd of muted robes |
| Space | No depth: hills, trees and figures are stacked in bands across the surface | Receding ground; figures get smaller further back; architecture is drawn at an angle |
| Faces | Type faces — large eyes, one ideal profile repeated | Individual likenesses; in 8.16 dozens of courtiers with different features, beards and turbans |
| Text | Devanagari written into the picture — along the bottom edge of 8.15 and in the yellow band above 8.19 | Text kept out of the picture; the painting itself carries the account |
Retained — the epic and Purāṇic themes; flat jewel colour and firm outline in the Rajput stream; profile faces and patterned cloth; the decorated border; the habit of packing a whole story into one page.
Changed — naturalism and portrait likeness enter; landscape gains depth and real trees, animals, gardens and hunting scenes; palettes become subtler; subjects become secular. And the change goes both ways: Fig. 8.17 is a Hindu epic painted in the Mughal manner for a Persian translation, while Fig. 8.18 is a Rajput Holi set on a garden terrace with Mughal-influenced softness — painted at Bikaner, the very city to which, the chapter says, Mughal court painters migrated.