Tracing the Historical Roots of Various Cultural Influences o n Dogra Folk-Paintings and Traditions

Paintings, sculpture, music, literature and other arts are often considered to be the repository of a society’s collective memory. Art and Paintings in this sense is communication providing incentive to communicate with each other via images, sounds and stories. The land of Dogras also called as Duggar is rich in its heritage in terms of its unique culture comprising of the various components from the time immemorial. The development of Dogra School of painting is one of them, known all over the world for its creative art forms. Folk art is the result of strong religious faith, love for beauty and lovely imagination, which, no doubt, are found among the people of a particular culture. Dogra wall paintings are located in the outer Himalayan range of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The main centres for these paintings are the valleys of Jammu, Udhampur, Doda, Basholi, Poonch. The rulers of these small hill states lived in serenely beautiful terrain. The boundaries and political alignments of the region were constantly in flux. The continuous trading and political interaction with the Kashmir valley as well as this hill region of Jammu was also in close contact with other hill states of the western Himalaya. Since the ruling clans of Himachal Pradesh also come from the plains, there were strong social and cultural ties between the Dogra rajas and those of Himachal Pradesh. This paper is an attempt to understand the process of acculturation depicted in the folk -paintings and traditions of Dogra cross-cultural society. As such inter-cultural contacts had resulted in both cultural and social change in Dogra folk art and traditions.