Deccani School Of Painting
The development of Deccani School of painting started during the times when Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi and Qutub Shahi once ruled in Bijapur. They supported in the development of this school. Deccani was inspired from the Mughal School and progressed to its own unique and distinctive style. The development of Deccani started from 1526 when the Muslim courts of Ahmednagar. Bjapur and Golconda joined as the leading authorities in the southern part. Later they became the most argumentative neighbors of the Hindu Kingdom of Vijaynagar. Later again on the same year they stood together and demolished the rich capital of Vijaynagar, but the alliance at once faded and the three went their own ways. After this period the conquerors took in many cultural characters of their Hindu opponents and employed many local craftsmen of medieval art styles of southern India. Deccani thrived in the 16th and 17th century but slowly faded away in the 18th and 19th century. A multicultural civilization containing of Indian Muslims, Hindus, Persians, Turks, Arabs and African, formed the modern symbolic expression that has been compared to an incredible, fantastic mood of an illusion. Pre Mughal styles of painting as well as Persian, Turkish and even European societies and tradition represented as substances to the blossoming of tiny painting in the midpoints of Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda and Hyderabad. There was a painting known as Nujum-al-Ulum, a richly demonstrated reference work painted at 1570 in the Chester Beatly Library at Bijapur with a total of 876 tiny paintings in this work. There were numerous paintings showing weapons, utensils and constellations too. Other series of paintings consisted of the spiritual leaders of aspects of the earth who are portrayed as forbidding ladies in the South Indian dress, tall and slim as those in the Ragamala paintings.Ibrahim Adil Shah (II), who was the king of Bijapur in the 14th-15th century AD, loved painting and flourished from Deccani along with many other artists. His portrait is available in different museums in the world. Deccani School of painting’s skill, magnificence, talent and lushness can be signified and symbolized from the best portraits of Adil Shah which are available at the British Museum and also in the Lalgarh palace at Bikaner. He was the owner of Nujum-al-Ulum’s document. He had many successful compositions too. The picture here is in the Islamic Persian tradition especially the arabesques on the top of the throne, but conquered by a truly Deccani piece of plants and leaves against the deep blue sky.
http://www.indianetzone.com/23/deccani_school_painting.htm
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1862 in Bengal and expired on 1941. His father Debendranath Tagore was a leading light of the Brahmo Samaj. It is a new religious group in the 19th century Bengal and which attempted a renewal of the final monistic foundation of Hinduism as placed down in the Upanishads. He did not go to school but when he turned seventeen, he went to England for formal schooling but again did not finish his studies there. When he grew up, he took part in many activities which made him closer in touch with common humanity and made him gain his attention in social reforms. He also put use of his Upanishadic principles of education when he started a trial school at Shantiniketan. Later in life he gradually took part in the Indian nationalist movement. A few years after 1915 when British Government was ruling he resigned the honor as a protest against British policies in India. He wrote many writings in his native Bengal and was well known in the West. Later he became very famous and was taken across continents for lectures and tours of friendship and he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage and he was inspired by many people living in West Bengal. He was an artist of every kind. His writings summed up to fifty with some of his of volumes of poetry. He wrote numerous volumes of short stories and novels too. He even wrote musical dramas, essays of every kind, travel diaries and two autobiographies. He was the first to win Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 as a non-European.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-bio.html
