What Pahari painting is

Pahari means 'of the hills'. Pahari painting covers the painting centres of the western Himalayas: Basohli, Guler, Kangra, Kullu, Chamba, Mankot, Nurpur, Mandi, Bilaspur, Jammu and others, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

It began with Basohli's bold, rather coarse and flamboyant style; passed through a Guler (or pre-Kangra) phase; and flowered into the exquisite Kangra School.

The centres each had their own features, but they did not become fully separate schools. Very few dated works, colophons or inscriptions survive.

Mughal and Rajasthani styles reached the hills through Provincial Mughal works, and through marriages between hill rajas and Rajasthani royal families.

The scholar B. N. Goswamy argued that families of artists, above all the family of Pandit Seu, carried the style from place to place, since political borders kept shifting. Most scholars now reject the older idea that Mughal artists migrating to the hills caused the change.