private apartments of old Hindu families will reveal the existence of the original wall-paintings which are now only known to Europeans by small reproductions on paper. Indian artistic culture is still to a large extent an unexplored domain.
It is not possible in this brief summary to attempt to define the different local styles recognised by Indian connoisseurs, but a few illustrations will serve to bring out some of the main distinctions between Hindu and Musalman painting. The choice of subject shows the difference as clearly as anything else. The Muhammadan painter was almost exclusively concerned with court and camp life, its pageantry and history. But as a courtier he never revealed its inner secrets or told unpleasant truths. Except when he illustrated the mysticism of Sūfi poetry, religion hardly entered into his ideas of art; he reconciled his religious and artistic conscience by leaving it alone.
The Hindu artist, on the other hand, was both a court chronicler and a religious teacher. Vaishnava and Saiva legends, in which the gods descended to earth, lived the life of the people, and performed wondrous miracles, were their favourite themes, treated with all the reverence of the earnest devotee. But though the Hindu painter imbues such subjects with a sensitiveness and artistic charm which are peculiarly his own, the appeal which he makes to the Indian mind is not purely æsthetic. His is no art for art's sake: for the Hindu draws no distinctions between what is sacred and profane. The deepest mysteries are clothed by him in the most familiar garb. So in the intimate scenes of ordinary village life he constantly brings before the spectator the esoteric teaching of his religious cult, knowing that the mysticism of
