In stylistic (artistic) documents text lines of a single page may have different orientations or the text lines may be curve in shape. As a result, it is difficult to detect the skew of such documents and hence character segmentation as well as recognition of such documents is a complex task. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme towards the recognition of Indian stylistic documents. Here, at first, using water reservoir concept based features the characters are segmented from stylistic documents without any skew correction. Next, individual characters are recognized. For recognition, contour distances of the outer contour points of the characters are calculated from the centroid. These contour distances are then arranged in a particular order to get size and rotation invariant feature. Finally, computing statistical feature on these arranged contour distances the input character is recognized.