Indian Painting: The Lesser Known Traditions

India has an astonishingly rich variety of painting traditions. While miniature painting schools became virtually extinct with the decline of aristocratic patronage, several local vernacular idioms still survive and continue to evolve. The present collection of papers is a volume of the proceedings from the conference ‘Indian Painting: The Lesser-Known Traditions,’ held in Houston in 2008. The conference aimed to highlight these lesser-known artistic expressions, which were grouped, until recently, under the heading of ‘folk art’. These creative expressions are now beginning to be recognised as pivotal to an understanding of the social setting in which they have evolved. The essays concentrate on Assam, Bengal, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The period covered by the works discussed by the contributors ranges from the late seventeenth century to the present day.