Painted Snapshots of Everyday India

Once carried to Britain as souvenirs, Patna Qalam paintings captured daily 18th-century life in India with rare tenderness. An exhibition in Patna now revives this art tradition on home ground

- Arshia

IN POPULAR IMAGINATION, the landscape of Indian miniature paintings is largely occupied by the Mughal, Pala, Pahari, and Jain schools, with a wide range of sub-genres within each category, reflecting their places of origin.

But across the board, miniatures were storytelling devices—a lot like single-panel graphic novels—that emerged as illustrations for manuscripts.

Among the more forgotten of these traditions is the 18th-century Patna Qalam—a school of miniature painting that marries both Mughal and Company styles (a British style of painting that came into being around the time of the East India Company)—and boasted a long roster of British patrons back in the day. In the absence of photography, these paintings acted as stand-ins for pictures taken of everyday life in India that colonizers carried back to Britain as souvenirs.