Dance, music, temples, painting and living heritage

Geometric, graceful movements, strong footwork, hand gestures and facial expression. Dancers hold a diamond-shaped half-sitting stance, aramandi. Well-known banis: Thanjavur, Pandanallur, Vazhuvoor and Mysuru.

Famous exponent: C. V. Chandrashekhar

Its name means storytelling: swift spins, rhythmic foot-stamping, delicate hand gestures. Renowned gharanas: Lucknow, Jaipur, Banaras and Raigarh. The posture is sama sthana.

Famous exponent: Sitara Devi

A colourful dance-drama traditionally by men, acting out the epics. Faces are painted by character — green for heroes, red for villains. Two styles: vadakkan (northern) and thekkan (southern).

Famous exponent: Kalamandalam Gopi

Named after the village of Kuchipudi; a dance-drama that adds spoken word (vachika abhinaya). Dancers sometimes perform on a brass plate.

Famous exponent: Vempati Chinna Satyam

Soft, gentle and gliding; includes raas leela, Lai Haraoba movements and Sankirtan. In pung cholom the dancer plays a drum while dancing. Costume: the stiff poloi skirt.

Famous exponent: Guru Bipin Singh

A graceful, flowing dance originally performed only by women, in white or cream kasavu sarees with golden borders. Two traditions: Kalamandalam and Kalyanikutty Amma.

Famous exponent: Kalamandalam Leelamma

Draws on the sculptural poses of Odisha’s temples, the Maharis and the Gotipua boy dancers. Its special pose is the tribhanga (body bent in three places); the square stance is chauka.

Famous exponent: Kelucharan Mohapatra

First performed in the sattras (monasteries) of Assam by male monks called bhokots; later opened to women. Dancers train in sixty-four basic exercises, mati-akhora.

Dhruva, Matya, Rupaka, Jhampa, Triputa, Ata and Eka. A tala is built from three parts: laghu, drutam and anudrutam.

A Carnatic composition in three parts — pallavi, anupallavi and charanam — returning to the pallavi after each.

Daughter of Baba Allauddin Khan of the Maihar gharana, she mastered the surbahar, a ‘bass sitar’; her students included Hariprasad Chaurasia and Nikhil Banerjee.

Popularised the flute as a concert instrument in Hindustani music and was the first to introduce the seven-hole flute.

A Carnatic veena player whose distinctive style is often called the Mysore bani.

A curving shikhara rises over the sanctum (garbhagriha); the simplest, square at the base and curving inward to a point, is the latina or rekha-prasada. North Indian temples usually lack elaborate boundary walls or gateways.

Examples: Lakshmana temple, Khajuraho (954, Chandela king Dhanga); Kandariya Mahadeo temple, Khajuraho; Sun temple, Konark

A pyramidal tower called a vimana; doorkeepers (dvarapalas) stand on the gateways or gopurams. Temple towns such as Kanchipuram, Thanjavur, Madurai and Kumbakonam became administrative centres too.

Examples: Shore temple, Mahabalipuram (Pallava, reign of Narasimhavarman II ‘Rajasimha’, 700–728)

Described by some scholars as an independent style made by selectively mixing the Nagara and Dravida orders.

As Chola and Pandya power waned, the Hoysalas of Karnataka became the leading patrons in the south; their best-known temples are at Belur, Halebid and Somnathpura.

Examples: Belur; Halebid; Somnathpura

Illustrated Buddhist manuscripts of the Palas — with Jain manuscripts, the earliest examples of Indian painting, from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Patronised by the Jain merchant community; the Kalpasutra, with the lives of the 24 Tirthankaras, was its most illustrated text. Palm leaf gave way to paper in the fourteenth century.

Under Jagat Singh I (1628–1652) the artists Sahibdin and Manohar renewed the style; Sahibdin painted the Ragamala (1628) and the Yuddha Kanda of the Ramayana (1652).

The Bundi Ragamala of 1591 marks its formative phase; the school blossomed under Rao Chattar Sal (1631–1659) and his son Rao Bhao Singh (1659–1682).

Raja Sawant Singh wrote devotional poetry as Nagari Das; his great artist Nihal Chand (worked 1735–1757) painted Radha and Krishna — the source of the famed ‘Bani Thani’.

Mewar, Bundi, Kota, Jaipur, Bikaner, Kishangarh, Jodhpur (Marwar), Malwa, Sirohi and others, mainly from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Anand Coomaraswamy called them ‘Rajput Paintings’ in 1916.

Babur (1526) brought Persian and Central Asian taste; Humayun began illustrating the Hamza Nama, continued by Akbar. Jahangir gave the painter Ustad Mansur the title Nadir ul Asr.

Court painting of the Deccan sultanates, with intense colour and dense composition; Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur is among its famous subjects.

Hill centres from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, beginning at Basohli. Around 1730–40 the Guler artist Pandit Seu and his sons Manak and Nainsukh created the refined Guler–Kangra kalam.

Painted largely on paper by local artists, some from the old courts of Murshidabad, Lucknow and Delhi, who adapted to document the world around them by close observation.

Nationalist art nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell. India’s first nationalist art school, Kala Bhavana, opened in 1919 at Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan.

(1913–1941) Trained in Paris, she contributed immensely to modern Indian art through the 1930s.

Young artists in Bombay around Independence who sought artistic as well as political freedom.