London: One of the most impressive and widely attended art exhibitions in London at the moment takes you back to an arid part of the Rajasthan desert in the 18th and 19th centuries, into a world of hedonistic pleasure, violent intrigue and spiritual attainment. Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur is a superbly mounted show in seven interlinked galleries at the British Museum. On display are 55 newly rediscovered paintings from the Marwar region that have never before left Indian shores; they are miniature in style but often monumental in size, that is, although the technique is that of the Indian miniaturist they are large-format paintings, some larger than two feet by four feet. Their great surprise, therefore, is that while it is often difficult to imbibe the rich detail of miniatures in a museum without straining eyes and stretching limbs, here the action leaps out at you in its subject matter, vivid colour and nuance.
The Marwar paintings of Jodhpur’s Rathore dynasty chronicle the lives and distinctive pursuits of three separate reigns. Maharaja Bakhat Singh (1706-1752), warrior and sybarite, was a sort of Rajput Casanova who came to power by murdering his brother. His appeal to women was so irresistible that the wife of the Mughal Emperor Ahmad Shah “urged her husband to follow the same diet as the Rathore”. At his fort at Nagaur 85 miles outside Jodhpur he created an idyll that present-day conservationists consider a marvel of micro-climate engineering. And here, in painting after painting, the pleasure-loving prince is at play: in flowering gardens, boating in lakes, watching elephant fights and dallying with his women in glades conjured in the waterless desert.
Bakhat Singh’s successor Vijai Singh (1752-93) was another kettle of fish. His atelier expanded the format of paintings to ever-larger sizes, so that they could be held up in court by two people for public display rather than small works on paper to be contained in a hand and viewed at intimate distance. The themes also changed radically from the temporal to the spiritual. Scene change: Bakhat Singh’s gardens of sensual pleasure become Vijai Singh’s gardens of divine play. Given the new king’s religiosity, the paintings are devoted to lavish invocations from the life of Radha and Krishna or vast action-oriented sequences from the epics: the gathering of monkeys and bears in Kishkinda forest or the dramatic slaying of Vali as Ram and Lakshman wait out the monsoon.
The third set of paintings is among the most enigmatic and powerfully abstract ever executed in the entire corpus of Indian miniatures. They date from the period of Man Singh (1803-43) who came under the influence of a sect of yogic gurus known as the Naths. (A prophecy by the mahasiddha, or immortal ascetic, Jallandranath had helped him seize the throne against all odds.) Man Singh’s obsession with the mysterious cult bred disaffection among the hereditary nobles of Marwar. Conflict erupted between the nobility and the Nath religious elite leading to assassinations and turmoil. But in the process was also created a mysterious school of art, the Nath paintings, with blank fields of shimmering gold, pulsating surfaces and abstract patterns depicting the churning of the cosmic oceans. “They bear an uncanny resemblance to modernist painting,” writes a scholar in the weighty catalogue that accompanies the Gardens and Cosmos exhibition.
With inventiveness and panache, the British Museum has turned its major show of Jodhpur paintings into a full-fledged Indian summer. There are special lectures on Indian art, Indian love poetry, film classics and tours of Indian collections including the Buddhist sculpture of Amravati. The museum shops are doing brisk business in Indian artefacts, clothes and souvenirs. And botanical specialists from Kew gardens have created an Indian landscape with diverse flora from the subcontinent, on view till September end. Meanwhile, the good news is that Gardens and Cosmos will open at the National Museum in New Delhi in November. It should not be missed.
