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Originally trained in the later Mughal style, he was able to render appearances with exquisite delicacy but was also acutely aware of rhythmical elegance. And it is this which constantly characterized his work, his greatest achievement being the creation of a local manner for portraying Radha and Krishna.
These disturbances, it may be mentioned, were caused by the continued refusal of Ráná Partáp Singh to submit to the Mughal. After his defeat at Huldíghát in 1576, that prince had fled to the jungles, closely followed by the imperial army.
After half a century the power of his successors passed into the hands of their Brahman ministers, known as Peshwas, who became the heads of a confederacy of Maratha chiefs, including the Rajas of Gwalior, Berar and Orissa, Indore and Baroda. About 1760 the Marathas were practically masters of India and though the Mughal Emperor nominally ruled at Delhi, he was under their tutelage.
The historian of the Tabakat-í-Akbarí adds that this practice became a rule in all his campaigns; 'and sometimes even bags of money were given to these inspectors, so that they might at once estimate and satisfy the claims of the raiyats and farmers, and obviate any interference with the revenue collectors. This plan, which is in all essentials the plan of the western people who virtually succeeded to the Mughal, deprived war of its horrors for the people over whose territories it was necessary to march.
It may here be added that during this year the Mughal troops attempted, but failed to take the strong fortress of Kángra, in the Jálandhar Duáb. The besiegers had reduced the garrison to extremities when they were called off by the invasion of the adventurer whose death near Múltán I have recorded. Kángra did not fall to the Mughal till the reign of the son of Akbar.
There is no evidence that at this time Bundelkhand possessed its own school of painting and in consequence the most likely explanation is that yet another inferior artist trained in the early Mughal manner, migrated to the court and there produced this crude prosaic version. In none of these provincial Mughal pictures is there any feeling for Krishna as God or even as a character.
The dread thus engendered by the arrival of a new invader, whose character and whose dispositions were alike unknown, was increased by the machinations of the Muhammadan adherents of the old families. These men argued that the success of the Mughal invader meant ruin to them.
Up to the spring of 1564 Akbar had not put into execution the designs which he cherished for establishing the Mughal power in the provinces to the east of Allahábád. Chanar, then considered the key of those eastern territories, was held by a slave of the Adel dynasty. This slave, threatened by one of Akbar's generals, wrote a letter to the Emperor offering to surrender it.
I crave the indulgence of the reader whilst I explain as briefly as possible the plan upon which I have written this short life of the great sovereign who firmly established the Mughal dynasty in India. The original conception of such an empire was not Akbar's own.
It is likely that in the early years of the seventeenth century, many areas of India possessed no artists whatsoever and if a Hindu ruler was to copy Mughal fashion, the only artists available to him might be those of an inferior rank. And although exact data are wanting, such circumstances may well explain another document of Krishna, the first illustrated version of Keshav Das's Rasika Priya.
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