Tryna Lyons’s The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects. Early in the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy created a vision of the artist as an anonymous yogin, meditating on internalized canons to make his imagery. It was a romantic ideal that still makes itself felt, even though a number of scholars of South Asian art have since turned their attention to individual artists, using inscriptions and archival data to discover information on real names, lineages, patronage arrangements, and remuneration (most notably B.N. Goswamy on the family of Pandit Seu). By necessity, even the best of these studies reach back through more or less scanty data toward people long dead. The voices of the painters we now know by name and style cannot talk back to our theories about them; and though our understanding of Indian painters is more nuanced, we continue to entertain hazy notions about them, such as the “timelessness” of the Indian artist’s vision. By interviewing living artists from Nathadwara and studying late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nathadwara painters whose notebooks exist and whose descendents remember them, Lyons finally turns the field of Indian painting studies toward the artists’ perspectives, with the result that we begin to see the painter’s profession in a very different light.

The Rajasthani pilgrimage town of Nathadwara in Mewar is the chief home of the Vaishnav sect called Pushtimarg. Its main temple is dedicated to an infant form of Krishna called Shri Nathji, whose priests devote their days to the god’s comfort and pleasure. Paintings play an important role in temple worship. Large paintings on cloth (pichwais) hang behind the god, and simpler works are available for pilgrims to purchase for domestic worship. A distinct Nathadwara style of painting emerged in the early nineteenth century, and a considerable number of artists continue to work at and around the temple, many of them in a contemporary version of the Nathadwara idiom.

The Artists of Nathadwara, which grew out of Lyons’s dissertation, results from years of painstakingly thorough research and interviews. At the center of the book are five chapters, each focused on a different artist’s or artist family’s sketchbooks—fifteen sketchbooks in all. The artists on whom Lyons focuses were born between 1860 and 1875, and died well before Independence. Framing these chapters are an introduction and an opening chapter on Nathadwara murals, and, at the end of the book, chapters on women artists and on painter lineages. The book’s anecdotal, personal tone provides the reader with a rich sense of information earned over cups of tea as repeat visits resulted in expanding trust and friendships. The tone also reminds us that painters live in the informal, haphazard world of real time where romantic theories tend to founder in the vagaries of actual lives and in the practicalities of making a living. At times, Lyons seems almost defensive about her decision not to give her work a more theoretical shape. “Would Freud or Marx really be able to explain all that we have seen of Nathadwara and its artists?” (294) I doubt any reader would criticize Lyons for skipping Freud. In the face of sketchbooks that juxtapose elephant studies, beautiful women, designs for crowns or fountains, pasted advertisements, self-portraits, and recipes for flatulence, the author has—as far as possible—wisely stood back to let the idiosyncratic richness of lives and sketches suggest their own story.

What the book offers above all is new material: previously unknown sketchbooks, family lineages, names, dates, anecdotes, and extensive information about how painters trained and worked. Concerning pedagogy, for instance, we are told that Mewar apprentices started their training with sketches of elephants. It was then common practice for a teacher to make a drawing in a student’s sketchbook and for the student to copy it, resulting in books filled with teacher sketches. Lyons looks at several of these books, including one that was carefully made on their model as a gift to the painter’s posterity, perhaps to his own son whom he desired to become an artist like himself (he became a doctor). While we have tended to assume that a painter learned from one teacher, often his father, and that family was frequently the basis of an artist’s style, the author informs us that Nathadwara painters were expected to round out their training with more than one instructor, and that they explored any material that caught their eyes, without regard to stylistic lineages.

The author uncovers a great deal of information on the social politics of Nathadwara’s painters, who belonged to three castes: the adi gaur, the jangirs, and the Mewaras. All have employed genealogists over the centuries to record and enhance their family histories. Successful enhancement traditionally had professional ramifications. Nathadwara painters have succeeded in the quest for Brahmin status, but, Lyons informs us, the adi gaurs did so first. Their long connection to the Nathji temple and their claim to have come to Nathadwara with the god from his original home have brought them a preponderance of Pushtimarg patronage. Perhaps because they were less favored, the author suggests, the jangirs became more versatile artists, working in wood, metal, and stone as well as paint. This is the kind of information that paintings and inscriptions alone cannot provide.

Available inscriptional and archival material has long suggested that the Nathadwara artists were not a static bunch, but the extent of their peregrinations and the wide variety of their patrons comes as a surprise. Lyons’s painter lineages find artists migrating to Nathadwara from all over Rajasthan and even Madhya Pradesh. Ghasiram was hired for some time by the ruler of Jhalawar, though he eventually shifted back to Nathadwara. Likewise, Champalal, whose father was from Nathadwara, was born in Bombay; and though Champalal did stints in Nathadwara, he remained attached to the Bombay temple. Nathadwara’s artists also worked “at sites as far away as what is now Pakistan, the Near East and South Africa” (32). In addition, because of traditional obligations to the Mewar rulers, writes Lyons, the painters had to contribute to his projects on demand. Their mobility made the painters flexible. Lyons notes the capacity of Nathadwara artists to adapt to local idioms, and their facility with both European and Nathadwara styles and techniques is remarkable throughout the notebooks she describes.

The book is redolent with a sense of transitions. These days, for instance, Lyons tells us that the artists tend to neglect their genealogists, and that the market, not family history, has become the main impetus for success. The old playful rivalries, remembered fondly, have been replaced by more sour commercial competition. Even at its height in the nineteenth century, however, Nathadwara painting thrived in the shadow of the enormous changes the British introduced to India’s arts and art patronage, including Western-style naturalism and portraiture, colonial art schools, salons, and the gentleman artist. Lyons is very right to criticize the story of nineteenth-century art that now dominates the field (see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), as that story leaves out the many traditional artists, like Nathadwara’s, who were still very much in the picture. But while The Artists of Nathadwara reminds us of the need to create a more complex vision of the period, it shows how the marginalization of Nathadwara’s artists is by no means recent. One of the tantalizing anecdotes in the book is about the jealousy and confusion the famous artist Ravi Varma’s visit to Mewar generated among local artists. They sedulously copied his works, and when they were photographed they posed with European easels and brushes. Yet, Lyons finds, when one of them made the trip to Europe and subsequently attempted to become a Varma in Nathadwara, the other Nathadwara painters ostracized him.

During the nineteenth century, Nathadwara artists trained themselves extensively in European imagery and techniques, which they adapted to their own tastes and subjects. The author views the Europeanization of Nathadwara art as a bit of a canard. In one sense, she is right. Borrowing new imagery is, overall, the rule, not the exception, whatever might be said about the supposed conservatism of India’s artists. Yet what they chose, how they used it, how they brought traditional and European imagery into productive relationships on the page is at the heart of how artists of the period thought visually. Clearly, European imagery was suitable for some subjects and not others, but why? The author acknowledges the possibilities of such a question. Of the European imagery artists collected in their notebooks, she writes that “much can be learned about aesthetic perceptions by examining the kinds of images that artists . . . collected” (133). Why then does she avoid such an examination? Lyons has chosen to maintain a descriptive voice, presumably with the idea that analysis would be an imposition on the artists, and she shies away not just from questions of Europeanization but of visual choices generally. Yet understanding artists ultimately requires an attempt to understand their paintings; this is the art historian’s job. Failing to analyze leaves us strangely distant from the very works that have made the artists interesting to us in the first place.

This curious reticence toward analysis also weakens Lyons’s claim that the Nathadwara artists are not folk artists, and that their art merits extended attention. True, they are not folk artists; but to make the point requires some discussion of how Nathadwara painting derives from a wider, sophisticated tradition of court painting that exalted the visionary over the everyday. Lyons has little to say about this relationship and instead takes a strange digression that does not support her case. Pushtimarg, she points out, encourages a folk romance, inspiring elites to imagine themselves as villagers frolicking with Krishna and his friends. “To the question, ‘Is it folk art?’” Lyons answers, “‘No, but it would sometimes like to be’” (24), meaning, presumably, that its aim is in part to create an illusion of rural simplicity. How fascinating if in fact one could find Nathadwara artists deliberately invoking a folk idiom to recreate a village ambience; but to my knowledge this was never the case, and Lyons gives no examples to support what should be an important line of reasoning, instead letting the matter of the paintings’ “folkishness” peter out as a kind of poetic aside.

An underpinning of the book is its value to scholars of earlier Rajasthani painting. “Although [pre-modern] traditions are rapidly being dismantled in post-Independence India, they linger on in Nathadwara. For this reason, the town provides an ideal location for a researcher interested in the praxis of art in pre-modern India” (9). Some discussion of the relationship between the artists she studies and their predecessors is needed here. Is there evidence that artists have always taught with the aid of notebooks? Have they always traveled so extensively? Were they always so eclectic? Intuitively one senses that much of the world Lyons presents retains many elements from the past, but she has left the work of connecting past and present to others.

In the face of Lyons’s achievements, however, such criticisms may seem petty. The wealth of reality The Artists of Nathadwara offers the field far outweighs its shortcomings. Delving into hard-to-find, hard-to-access, and hard-to-read records (“How was it that I did it?” she justly asks herself (27)), Lyons has brought an enormous amount of new material to light—from previously unknown sketchbooks, to her findings on women artists, to her extraordinary tracings of painter family history. She has made these artists too present to ignore, and many of our assumptions will have to make way to accommodate them.