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Title: Reverse Glass Painting in India

EDITOR: Anna L Dallapiccola

PP: 1495

PRICE:₹250

Publisher:Niyogi Books


The book contains about a hundred colour images of reverse glass paintings from various private collections in India. Writer Anna Dalapiccola is an authority on Asian Art. She was Professor of Indian art at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University from 1971 to 1995. Dalapiccola is also the author of the Catalogue of South Indian Paintings in the Collection of the British Museum (2001). Her current research includes two projects on the art of Vijayanagara successor states (Hampi, Bidar etc) and art of the Lepakshi temple. Indian universities don’t have chairs like this, nor do Indian academics come up with such unique tomes on India’s arts and crafts. It is always the foreign academic who is researching on Indian paintings or textiles or metalcraft and history of the Qut’b Minar or the Ashoka pillar or the Wootz steel and swordmaking.

The writer acknowledges Jaya Appasamy’s work Indian Paintings on Glass. Rather, Dalapiccola reminds us that such a book exists, courtesy Indian Council of Cultural Relations, costing just Rs 80. Appasamy’s work was painstaking research. In comparison, look at the glossy Niyogi book production. Of course, funding is needed for a book like Reverse Glass Painting… an art form that came with the Europeans to India, and survived from late 18th century to early 20th century. But for support from owners of the famed ‘Phillips – European and Oriental Art’ that was established in 1860, Farooq and Mubina Issa, such a tome may not have been perhaps been possible. Floral patterns on doors, windows are returning to fashion, with revival of the Chettinad-style interiors, but reverse glass painting in India today is confined to individual hobbies, nothing more. Now we have a book for the coffee-table, especially for those who love to show Tanjore paintings on their walls. In her introduction, Dalapiccola gives an overview of indian paintings, their history. The earliest example preserved are the cave paintings naturally, the Ajanta frescos 600 years before Christ, the Bagh cave paintings of 6th century AD. The British Library has an extraordinary collection of birch bark writings from ancient Gandhara in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, which may represent the oldest surviving Buddhist texts (and also the oldest South Asian manuscripts) ever discovered from first century AD. The yamapattas to Thangkas all is art. There are paintings on wood, preserved in pothis (palm leaf etc), then came the paper, the Mughals and the miniatures from 1400 AD onwards. The Portuguese on the West coast brought reverse glass painting to India, and the book does have some beautiful examples. Yes, glass was popular in the South, making glass bead curtains was a hobby with well-to-do women of the nineteenth century, but glass paintings by women are not especially chronicled. Yes, the artist, named as Nirmmala, has some display but her work is 1956, not even a hundred years ago. The book has too many of the Madurai Viran pictures and paintings of the typical ‘dandy’. One is a little disappointed that there are so few examples from the rest of India, a nameless Chinese artist’s work from Gujarat, a Warren Hastings portrait from the Marg Illustrated Desk Calendar, a few others from the same source.a ‘singh bahadur’ picture by a Chinese artist, possibly the same one are about all. One sort of sighs, what about the rest of India. Well India is a vast land, there must be many more glass paintings, one has to search for them. The book on your table may inspire you to become a collector, there is scope.