Harry Walia
Jammu Province had hoped that the coveted Geographical Indication (GI) Tag for Basohli School of Painting will bring rightful recognition to the unique art, and help restore and renew the sheen of the historic place of Basohli. The factually distorted documentation, however, has soured the joy and dashed the hopes.
A Geographical Indication, as per the World Intellectual Property Organization, is a tag used on products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities, characteristics or a reputation that are essentially due to that place of origin. It conveys assurance of quality and distinctiveness, confers legal protection, and enables authorised users to prevent its use by a third party whose product does not conform to the standards set out in its code of practice. The tag is valid for a decade, after which it can be renewed.
By this definition, the features and traits of Basohli School of Painting must be rooted in Basohli, its endemic natural resources, traditions, artists and their ancient/ancestral skills and intellect.
BasohliVishwasthali Art and Painting Handicrafts Industrial Cooperative Ltd. as the applicant, Directorate of Handicrafts & Handloom, Jammu and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) as the facilitators of the process, have submitted to the GI Registry that “The Basohli painting craft started by Moghuls”; Basohli Paintings is a fusion of Hindu mythology Mughal Miniature Techniques & Folk art of local hills evolved in the 17th & 18th Centuries”; and “Basohli was founded by Raja Bhupat Pal sometime in 1635.” These erroneous claims and contradictory to the history have been published in the GI Journal.
As per local tradition, Basohli State is said to have been founded by ‘Basu’, a local Rana. He was defeated in 10th Century by Raja Man Shakiya of Vallapur (Balaur), who subsequently absorbed Basohli with Vallapur, writes Shiv Dobliya in ‘Basohli Darshan’.
On the other hand, Ganesh Das Badhera’s ‘Rajdarshini’ mentions that in 10th Century, Raja Avtar Dev of Jammu provided refuge to Raja Anand Pal of Takshashila, who had suffered defeat at the hands of Mahmud Ghaznavi, and also bestowed on him the jagir of Basohli. In ‘Duggar ka Itihaas’, Padma Shri Prof. Shiv Nirmohi opines that these facts in Rajdarshini might be correct as a matter of course. He’s also remarked that ShakyaVanshi Rajas of Vallapur are different from PalVanshi Rajas of Basohli and the latter might have possibly absorbed Vallapur and its dynasty in 13th-14th Century.
The historians including Nirmohi and Dobliya have written that Raja Bhupat Pal (born 1573) of Basohli was imprisoned by Raja Jagat Singh of Nurpur with the help of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, where he languished for 14 years, until about 1627 AD. That year, he assembled his army and defeated Nurpur Garrison and recovered his state. The transfer of capital from Balaur to Basohli due to security reasons, probably happened in 1630. He was assassinated in 1635, allegedly by Raja Jagat Singh of Nurpur with the connivance of Mughals, when he had gone to Delhi to visit Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.
It can be inferred from the available texts that Basohli state was not founded in 1635. Nor for that matter, was Basohli town.
Further, the first mention of Basohli School of Painting is in a report of Archaeological Survey of India 1918-19, stating that Archaeological Section of the Central Museum, Lahore has acquired a few Basohli Miniature Paintings (called ‘Tibeti’ by the curio dealers around Punjab) and their curator has concluded that the School is possibly of Pre-Mughal origin. Since these paintings were of Tantrik Devis such as Durga, and used fragments of beetles’ wings for ornamentation, amongst other considerations, they are found to be the later works of the Basohli School.
Ajit Ghose, India’s foremost art collector and critic, revealed he had begun collecting specimens of Basohli Miniature Paintings more than a decade before the report, some of which are clearly older than those in Lahore Museum, and represent a much older tradition. He also points to the possibility of descent from mural paintings.
We need to acknowledge that even the earliest known extant paintings of Basohli School, represent a technically mature style, which would have in all likelihood taken hundreds of years for the artists to perfect.
In ‘Mysterious Origins: Tantric Devi Series from Basohli’, Terence McInerney notes, “…Brijinder Nath Goswamy, Eberhard Fischer, and others has sketched a continuum of Miniature Painting activity in the Punjab hills from about the year 1620 onward…Any initiatory influence, anything prior to this, is ascribed to a mysterious outside influence. Earlier, the critics had posited the arrival of a wandering artist from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s court, they now posit the arrival of wandering artists from Gujarat or from somewhere else, to explain the sudden appearance of the early Basohli style in late 16th Century, suggesting that artists wandering to the Punjab Hills found a region so deficient in local taste or prejudice that it was putty for the hands of an outside artist to mould. Any theory of origin or influence requiring the intervention of a wandering artist also requires a framing account of an ongoing, local tradition. If there had been no interest in painting in the Punjab Hills, there would have been no need for the Devi Mahatmya artist, or his father, or later colleagues from Gujarat, to wander there.”
Terence argues that such focus on outside interlopers obscures the existence of wall painting, wood/stone carving, manuscript illustration and other known art traditions in the Punjab Hills. “With this background in place, there is no need to introduce artists wandering from Gujarat, ‘who had worked for several years in the Mughal ateliers,’ to explain the sudden appearance of miniature paintings in the Punjab Hills. Whenever they were needed, obliging artists were already in place: local men, standing with paint brush and chisel in hand,” he asserts.
The antiquity and indigeneity of Basohli School of Painting, as such, is beyond any doubt. It goes back than 17th-18th Century, sans Mughal roots.
Historians have observed that Basohli was a sanctuary for Hindu culture and art, standing out in the country for art patronage, bountiful creations and rejection of Mughal influence. Basohli masterpieces, adorning the prestigious walls and collections across India and the world, have been mostly painted around the themes of Hindu Pantheon, Rasamanjari, Ragamala, Ramayana, Tantric manifestations, Gita Govinda, and portraitures of local rulers.
In ‘Indian Court Paintings, 16th-19th Century’ Steven Kossak writes, “In contrast to the assimilationist tendency of the Rajasthani ateliers, the Punjab Hills workshops turned their backs on Mughal influence. The Basohli idiom seems quite clearly to reject Mughal conventions in favor of a style solidly within the mainstream of indigenous Rajput tradition, one that appeals directly to the senses by means of color and pattern. The same holds true for subject matter. These paintings mostly illustrate religious texts rather than embracing Mughal subject matter as most of the Rajasthani ateliers had.” (For Terence, Kossak and the like, ‘Punjab Hills’ meant foothills of the Western Himalayas, where Basohli is a former principality, and not the Punjab itself.)
Describing his collection of ‘Basohli Primitives’ as he termed them, Ghose writes in ‘The Basohli School of Rajputs Painting’, “They represent the oldest style of the purely Hindu Painting of Western Himalayas, and are certainly least conventionalised.”
Hehas emphasized, “…Basohli is a distinctive school, a great virile exponent of traditional art. Indian painting would have been poorer if the art of Basohli had not existed.”
The distinctive style of Basohli School of Painting and its historical importance in the annals of Indian Painting tradition have always survived the wear and tear of debates and unsound labels.The art historians and art appraisers, those who truly understand art and history, have established a different pedestal of respect and recognition for the Basohli School of Painting.
They have underlined how the Basohli style, which has no parallel anywhere in the world to this day, was gradually supplanted or mutated by other Schools in the later half of 18th Century. “The chief proponents of this new idiom with close affinities to Mughal Court Paintings were two brothers, Manaku and Nainsukh, Pahari artists from Guler. Afterwards, it was very largely a continuation of their work by their children, schooled in that new idiom,” Kossak has suggested.
Then who has supplied the falsehood of ‘fusion of Hindu Mythology Mughal techniques’ in the Basohli School of Painting? To justify the monumental blunder, who knows, a past is being invented where Mughals loved, encouraged and practised Hindu art and religious traditions.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi led Union Government has introduced slew of reforms to bolster the ecosystem of GI Tags, and to bring India’s heritage to global platform. The fact that it took four long years, and still not get the facts straight is a severe indictment of the way J&K Government, the Directorate of H&H Jammu, to be precise, has gone about the business of securing a fundamentally flawed GI Tag for Basohli School of Painting.
Or, is it yet another move by bigots to disappear the heritage and history of the whole of Jammu Province? Because if Basohli goes, can the rest of Jammu be far behind?
Erasure of the primary Basohli style, the centuries of its presence, its magnificence, subversion of the claim to fame of its artists, vandalization of the Basohli history, and a forced Mughal connection is what precisely the erroneous GI tag will do in coming years if not remedied immediately.
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