Rajasthani paintings are the most gleaming lexis of the state’s artistic heritage, with at least a few works of attention on display in almost every main museum or palace in the region – the variety at the city palaces of Kota, Bundi and Udaipur are particularly well. Despite the sporadic power of Mughal art, paintings in Rajasthan are extended in a quite dissimilar manner to that of its Islamic balance. While most Mughal art was more or less practical, Rajasthani paintings were basically symbolic. Much of the reason for this is the far greater attention on religious subjects – mainly those associated with the life of Krishna, a stable source of attraction for local artists. Such paintings results in the popularization of religion and increasing eminence on personal affection to God (bhakti) rather than on firm Brahmin led rituals, which for many Hindus took the form of elated Krishna worship. Rajasthani paintings also tend to be far larger than their Mughal equivalents, and although scrupulously detailed Persian style miniatures remain popular, many of the deluxe Rajasthani paintings are executed on a much larger scale, represented by the splendid murals which became something of a regional specialty.

Unlike their Mughal generation, Rajasthani painters were not usually looking to represent existing or past events or to explore the personality of their subjects, but to create a poetic mood, and there is relatively little distress with realism, viewpoint or the three-dimensional modeling of records. These qualities give many Rajasthani paintings a wonderfully fairy tale, and often an also strangely modern, appearance – a kind of slightly surreal, magical realism which frequently suggests the work of much later Western artists like Chagall or Douanier Rousseau. Part of this quality is created by the use of intense colours, which are sometimes used in an explicitly symbolic way – red for anger, brown for the erotic, yellow for the miraculous, and so on.

Colour is a key element in the remarkable Rajasthani ragamala (“arland of melody) pictorial style, in which individual paintings are designed to stir up the mood of one of the classical modes of Indian music (either the six “male” ragas or their five musical “wives”, called raginis), with different colours used to represent specific musical notes from the raga or ragini.

Different schools of painting flourished in various parts of the region from sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, each developing its own distinctive characteristics (although many of the subtle nuances of style which distinguish the various schools are generally discernible only to the eyes of professional art historians). Rajasthani painting first flourished in Udaipur (which remains the state’s largest contemporary producer of traditional-style miniatures). Early paintings from the state are marked by their simple designs and vivid colours, almost like folk art, though later paintings – such as the numerous examples on display at Udaipur’s City Palace – tend to concentrate on courtly subjects.

Rajasthani painting reached its apogee, however, in the relatively minor state of Bundi, whose painters showed an almost obsessive fascination with various aspects of the Krishna legend – the lifting of Mount Goverdhan is a popular subject, as are Krishna’s dalliances with the gopis, whether in the celebrated scene showing Krishna making off with the gopis’ clothes while they are bathing, or the popular round dance (the Mandalanritya or Rasamandala), showing a circle of gopis dancing in a ring around Krishna and Radha, most memorably depicted in the marvellous mural which crowns the Badal Mahal in Bundi’s City Palace. A similar, if slightly cruder, style flourished at nearby Kota, while another striking regional school of painting emerged at Kishangarh, near Ajmer, whose artists specialized in elegantly elongated figures with huge eyes.

A later and hugely distinctive development of Rajasthani painting occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the towns of Shekhawati, whose magnificent havelis were decorated by local artists in a vast assortment of colourful murals depicting both traditional and contemporary themes – a remarkable kind of public street-art designed for the entertainment and edification of the masses, rather than for the private delectation of a cultured elite. Although technically substandard compared to earlier Rajasthani paintings, the engagingly naive style of these Shekhawati murals, with their fantastical depictions of modern European inventions like planes, trains and motor cars, is hugely entertaining, and adds a final, quaint flourish to the region’s remarkable artistic traditions.

Rajasthan is renowned for its abundance of exquisitely made crafts, and you’ll be lucky to get through the state without buying far more than you ever intended. Textiles and jewellery are Rajasthan’s most famous products, but woodwork, metalwork, ceramics, and almost anything they make, has that special Rajasthani touch of shimmering colour and delicate application.