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The story of Indian painting has to begin with the art of primitive man which has survived in rock shelters and caves in places like
Hoshangabad, Minzaour, Bhimbetka.
The epoch of the Indus Valley Civilization (3000 B.C-1500B.C) was one of elegant urban culture, but since the superstructures have not survived, no
murals have come down to us.
The earliest paintings of Ajanta date back to the first century
B.C. and the latest the eighth century. The spirit of the compassionate Buddha is their inspiration.
The Jataka tales elaborated the vicissitudes of these
incarnations and the Ajantan artists painted them in sinuous line
and sensitive color. City, countryside and forest, men and women of every type, fauna and flora, all are mentioned in these murals.
Since the brush and the chisel accompanied the message of peace when Buddhism radiated to the rest of Asia.
Ajanta become a fountainhead of Asian painting and murals with the clear stamp of its style. This can be seen in
Sigriya in Sri Lanka, Bamiyan in Afghanistan, in
many places along the old silk route in china, in Korea and in
Horiuji in Japan.
 In India itself the mural tradition continued though with less
momentum, in Chalukyan Badami (sixth century), Pallava
Panamalai (seventh century), Pandyan Sittannavasal (ninth century),
Chola Tanjore (twelfth century), Lepakshi of
Vijanagar (sixteenth century) and the murals of Kerala
Rajasthan of various dates
reaching to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, painting had come down from the extended mural surface to the miniature dimension of the manuscript. Originally on palm-leaf, later on paper. The miniatures of
Pala period Bengal (tenth and eleventh centuries) conserve the sensuous line of
Ajanta. But there is a rapid decline now and the line becomes brittle and angular.
It is this style that spread to western India and is seen in numerous illuminated
manuscripts, the bulk of them being Jain texts, of the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. But a wind of change begins to blow during the latter half of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth.
In response to the lyricism of poems like the
Vasanta Vilasa (dalliance in spring), in Bihana's
Chaura Panchasiks (fifty Stanzas on Stolen Love) and
Laur-Chanda (the Romance of Lorik and Chanda), line again becomes supple,
color lustrous. The Indian miniature stabilizes a fine pictorial
style even before the advent of the Moghuls.
Akbar recruited a very large number of Indian
artists. Each painting was most often a co-operative effort of Indian and Persian artits, one man doing the drawing, another the
coloring, a third the details. The indigenisation received further momentum when
Akbar commissioned the translation and illustration of Indian texts like the Ramayana and the Mahabaratha.
 It is mostly artists trained in the Moghul atelier who became the court painters of the Rajput princes. But while Moghul painting was elitist, reflecting imperial pomp and circumstance, Rajput painting presented in line and colour the gfreat myths and legends of the land, the story of Rama, of Krishna of the Bhagavada and the gita govinda. Of the many states in the plains of Rajastan, two need special mention.
The style of Kotach painting anticipates by nearly eighty years the primitive vision and virility of European fauvists like douanier rousseau.. That of Kishnagrh painting manages the perfect pictorilisation of the poetry of the Radha-Krishna story.
In the small principalities of the Himalayan valleys set up by intrepid Rajput warriors from the plins, many centers came up of which Bansohli is unique for its intensity of expression, Kulu for its closeness to the folk style and kangara for both its romanticism and large output.
A decline followed the close of the Rajput phase, with the strong presence of the west in the British era, western academism became popular, mostly self-taught in the case of pioneer like Ravi Varma, through institutional training in the case of others. The revivaist school, headed by abanidranath Tagore, was nationalist in inspiration, but its pictorial achievement was weak and sentimental.
The four pioneers of modern painting in India are Gaganendranath Tagore who tried out every technique and style,
Amrita Sher Gil who integrated the pictorial idiom of the west and an Indian vision,
Jamini Roy who discovered the virility of the folk tradition and modulated it in many ways and Rabindranath Tagore
who demanded for paintings music's autonomy and independence from factuality and thus gave a charter for free variations on naturalism, abstraction and expressionism.
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