Earliest surviving painting in a Hindu temple

Team L&M

In what can be termed as a momentous day in the history of Indian photography, the image of the original photograph and digitally-restored photograph of the earliest surviving painting in a Hindu temple: Queen and Attendants, Earliest-Surviving Hindu Painting, Cave 3, Badami, 6th century CE, photographed in 2001 and digitally restored by art historian, photographer and filmmaker Benoy K Behl, was released today. The image is being preserved in the Arctic World Archives by Sapio Analytics.

The world has studied the history of Indian painting, beginning with the medieval period.  The paintings of Ajanta of the 5th century have been known but have been treated as a “flash in the pan” as India has not been known to have an indigenous tradition of ancient painting. In fact, India has a great and sublime indigenous tradition of painting.  Great Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina paintings of the ancient period are to be found deep in the heart of caves and temples in India.

 

There are remnants of Buddhist paintings contemporaneous to Ajanta in the caves at Pitalkhora in Maharashtra and Bagh in Madhya Pradesh. The earliest surviving Hindu paintings were found in a cave of the 6th century at Badami, in Karnataka. Exquisite previously unphotographed paintings of the 7th century have been documented by Behl, including in a remote part of Tamil Nadu.

There are beautiful remains of Jaina paintings of the 8th-9th centuries at Ellora in Maharashtra and Sittanavasal  in Tamil Nadu. The Brhadiswara Temple at Thanjavur has marvellous paintings on the themes of Lord Shiva which are among the finest paintings of the 10th century in the world. Whenever Behl’s photographs of these have been shown at universities and museums around the world, experts have been astonished to see the extremely high quality of the art of this early period.

“The descriptions of the Badami paintings in the 1950s included much painting which was lost by the time I reached there to photograph in 2001. National Geographic Magazine, when they were doing a story about my work in 2008, could hardly see even those paintings which I had seen and photographed in 2001. Therefore, this photography and restoration is of considerable importance in the documentation of the tradition of Indian paintings,” shares Behl.