The Ashta Nayikas: A Quantitative Approach to the Miniature Paintings of the Nayikas

The study of Indian Art has been the constant focus of various art historians around the world since the colonial times. A significant body of textual sources coupled with substantial secondary research, therefore, exists before researchers studying various aspects of Indian art, such as, relief and stand-alone sculptures, frescoes, miniature paintings among others. Consequently, the scope of error in terms of understanding and classifying the art thematically has also increased manifold. This erroneous interpretation is partly a result of faulty translations of underlying philosophical terms such as ‘rasa’, ‘tantra’ or affixing the names such as prasadhika or nayika, without fully understanding their etymological connotations. Equally responsible is the heavy reliance on secondary sources instead of consulting primary sources, not just in the case of researchers but also on the part of the museums. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to look into the nayika paintings and attempt to provide a solution to this problem with the help of a quantitative method of studying miniature paintings, which can be useful in generating rigorous data, easily accessible for similar approaches and can enable quantifiable conclusions, significant for both archaeological and art-historical discourses. It may be noted that whilst the case study focuses largely on a selective number of samples housed in the National Museum, New Delhi, the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, the Lahore Museum and the Himachal State Museum, Shimla, especially, focusing on samples that were wrongly identified and provenanced, thus, a similar approach can be applied to miniature paintings of any theme, type or school of art.