Abstract
The devotional love of Radha and Krishna forms one of the most enduring aesthetic and spiritual themes in North Indian art, and it found some of its richest visual expression in the courtly workshops of Rajasthan between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper undertakes a comparative study of three regional idioms of Rajasthani miniature painting Mewar, Kishangarh, and Bundi and asks how each reinterpreted the same devotional subject in line with its own political circumstances, theological affiliations, and aesthetic preferences [1], [12], [20]. Drawing on the pictorial conventions, patronage histories, and literary inheritances associated with each school, the paper argues that although the three traditions shared a common textual reservoir of Vaishnava bhakti poetry, each court translated that inheritance into a visibly distinct pictorial language: Mewar's saturated and assertively Rajput courtly idiom, Kishangarh's lyrical and idealised elongation, and Bundi's naturalistic immersion of the divine couple within landscape [4], [8], [11]. A further concern of the paper is the shared institutional context of the Pushti Marg, the devotional path founded by the theologian Vallabhacharya, which linked several Mewar ateliers to the pilgrimage centre of Nathdwara and which has rarely been examined
alongside a direct stylistic comparison of the kind attempted here. The paper concludes that regional variation in the imagery of Radha and Krishna offers a valuable lens for understanding how devotional painting was shaped as much by dynastic identity and local taste as by shared scripture.