Miniature Frescoes in the Palatial Buildings of the Punjab Hill States

Although frescoes and murals have been a part of the Indian art since the ancient times, wall paintings that are stylistically similar to the school of miniatures of the Mughal ateliers, become prominent only after 1646 CE, when the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan commissions the Bazaar-e-Musakkaf in the Qila-e-Mubarak (or the Red Fort) in Delhi (Sharma, 2001). Until this period, frescoes were commonly found in Mughal tombs, of which Akbar’s Mausoleum in Sikandra, near Agra, and the tombs of Nisar Begum and Prince Khusro at Khusro Bagh, Prayagaraj, are some of the finest examples. Around the same time, several Hill States (later identified as the Punjab Hill States under the British Rule) became Mughal feudatories and consequently, the material culture, including dresses, ornaments and art in these areas became increasingly influenced by the Mughal material culture (Howard, 2013). One such borrowed element was that of frescoes and miniature paintings, which the Hill States adapted and developed as per their indigenous style and aesthetics in the late Medieval period (from seventeenth to twentieth century CE). Of these, the gauche on paper paintings are perhaps the most widely studied. However, the frescoes are by and large missing from the art historic annals.The purpose of this paper is to study the development and spread of the miniature frescoes of the Pahari style in the Hill States of Medieval India and evaluate their present condition with respect to conservation and vulnerability. For the purpose of this paper, frescoes of Nurpur and Kotla, the temple frescoes of the Gauri-Śaṅkar Temple of Katochgarh, Sujanpur Tira, Hamirpur and the Palace of Kishangarh in Kuthar, Kasauli Hills have been studied to understand the origin and the subsequent spread of the art within the hill state.