Nihâl Chand
India · Rajput painting, Kishangarh school, Indian miniature painting
The story
A woman in profile, with a long arched eye, a sharp nose and a curling lock of hair at her cheek, has become the emblem of Kishangarh, a small Rajput kingdom in Rajasthan. She is known as Bani Thani, the adorned lady, and the portrait of her attributed to Nihâl Chand appeared on an Indian postage stamp in 1973.
Nihâl Chand was the leading painter at the Kishangarh court under Raja Savant Singh, a ruler who wrote devotional verse to Krishna under the pen name Nagari Das. Bani Thani was a singer and poet at the court and became the raja's companion. In Nihâl Chand's pictures the two often appear as Krishna and Radha, the divine lovers, in unusually large miniatures full of lakes and pavilions, with the stylised, elongated faces that became the Kishangarh signature.
Little is documented about the painter's own life, and even his dates are approximate. He is thought to have reached Kishangarh in the 1720s. His finest work belongs to the decades before 1757, when Savant Singh gave up the throne and withdrew with Bani Thani to Vrindavan, the town of Krishna's childhood.
