The town that didn't let go
You arrive in Chamba the way you arrive in most Himachal hill towns, by a road that keeps threatening to end and then doesn't. The Ravi river is below you. The Chaurasi temple complex is ahead. And somewhere in the lanes behind the main bazaar, a painter is grinding lapis lazuli into powder the way painters here have done since the seventeenth century.Chamba sits in a valley that geography kept slightly apart from the rest of the region. That apartness saved things. When Mughal patronage collapsed across the plains and the hill kingdoms scrambled to fill the vacuum, Chamba's rulers, the Varman dynasty, made a choice that most courts didn't: they kept paying their painters. Not lavishly, not always consistently, but enough. The Pahari miniature tradition, which had spread across the Shivalik foothills from Basohli to Guler to Kangra, found in Chamba a place that would not let it become purely decorative or purely historical.
