:: Kishwar Desai

A royal Indian summer

Kishwar Desai

June.6 : It was an amusing and rather fantastic way to enter the British Museum… Inside the large front gates a huge wooden mechanised elephant greeted us, skating around on wheels. On the elaborate howdah placed on the elephant’s back was a woman in ghagra-choli regalia crooning "Aey mera dil pyaar ka diwana" into a microphone. A man sat next to her assisting with the raucous musical accompaniment.

As the elephant zigzagged around the courtyard, guests walked in, dressed to the nines. It was not the usual sober and decorous manner to enter a museum… but it was the start of the "Indian Summer" at the British Museum, and no doubt we had to be greeted with the de rigueur band-baaja. Obviously the evening had been organised with a sense of humour, and also a bow towards the eclectic tastes of the large contingent of Indians, which had been invited for a special preview of the exhibition called "Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur".

However, the director of the museum, Neil Macgregor, ruefully pointed out over dinner that, as depicted in many of the court paintings, he should have also (apart from the token elephant) greeted us beneath specially-decorated glittering silk canopies. Even as he apologised, tongue-in-cheek, we were too mesmerised by the scale and scope of the Jodhpur paintings that the museum has managed to put together. As usual, the irony is that the exhibition has been organised with foreign funding, and was in the United Kingdom courtesy a private bank.

The entire collection of 55 spectacular never-seen-before paintings has been put together by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC. The Mehrangarh Museum Trust in Jodhpur has loaned the works and, as the director took care to proudly point out, this is the first time that the British Museum has welcomed an entire art exhibition from India. The aim is that it will be a start of many such exchanges. This will not only lead to a growth in "scholarship, display and programming" but they will also attract (yet again, hopefully) the large South Asian population in the UK to the British Museum.

While the Indian government appears to have facilitated the effort in many ways, one often wonders why it doesn’t initiate and invest more money to create opportunities such as this, which archive and present our rich heritage to an international audience? One can only wish that there would be many such delightful treasures unveiled during the "Indian Summer".

The vibrant paintings in the exhibition, from the 18th and 19th century, belong to the collection of Gaj Singh II of the Jodhpur-Marwar royal family, who was also present that evening. It would no doubt have given him great pleasure to see the reaction of the guests.

Dr Debra Diamond, a distinguished art historian, has curated the collection and it has been divided into four segments. The first and second part of the collection marks the evolution and maturation of the Marwar School — which was, in fact, a combination of the regional and imperial Mughal styles. But a fascinating and unique part of the exhibition is in the third and final stages — which takes you from the physical to the spiritual.

The third section celebrates Vaishnava devotionalism, while the last and most spectacular section is all painted in the minimal style of "Hatha Yoga metaphysics". All the sections flow into each other and, in fact, after the opulence of the first two, it is the simplicity and almost meditative, reflective nature of the last section that enthrals. What is also striking is the size of the paintings — whilst created with the delicacy of Mughal miniatures, they are all quite large and, in particular, the ones dealing with the cosmos were actually part of monumental manuscripts.

It was the atelier of Maharaja Vijai Singh (reigned 1752-93), which produced the unusually large manuscripts devoted to Lord Krishna, Lord Ram and the Goddess. His grandson, Maharaja Man Singh (reigned 1803-43), also encouraged artists to create the awe-inspiring and unforgettable images of the cosmic origin and mandalas. The artists were encouraged to illustrate the texts that relate with the metaphysical knowledge and legends of the Naths, "a religious order whose adepts gained immortality and omniscience through the practice of Hatha Yoga". The artists, therefore, tried to communicate through the paintings how the perfected Naths or Mahasiddhas saw themselves in relationship to the world. One particularly stunning painting is "The equivalence of self and universe", which describes an inscription from the Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati: "Within this body exist Mount Meru, the seven continents, lakes, oceans, mountains, plains, and the protectors of these... All beings embodied in the three worlds… exist in the body together with all their activities. He who knows all this is a yogin. There is no doubt about this".

It is always astonishing at moments like this to reflect that in India we had known about the connectivity of the universe centuries ago — a concept that has only lately dawned on the Western psyche. Yet, there is a world of difference between the appreciation of the ecologically-sound Indian art and that which celebrates Western spirituality.

For instance, Christian iconography is all-pervasive and artists like Michelangelo and others have won their place in history because of our appreciation of their work.

Unfortunately for us, Hindu iconography and paintings have never been promoted with the same fervour, within India or abroad. Many of the artists, in fact, remain anonymous till today.

But now, with an ever-increasing interest in India, there is curiosity beyond just academic interest. And, perhaps, with exhibitions like this, we can finally hope that the vast archival material we possess will be curated, displayed and enjoyed all over the world.

This exhibition is also an encouraging step because Gaj Singh has understood the value of the paintings and other artefacts that he has housed in the Mehrangarh Museum — and allowed us to share in them. Since it was mainly royal patronage in the past, which had been able to afford and encourage artists in India — one can only imagine that there may still be huge amounts of undiscovered art lying in private collections in India.

By making them available to the public, and allowing historians to curate them, it could be possible that we see other unknown aspects of Indian art. In the same way that in this Garden and Cosmos exhibition we glimpsed a unique display of the philosophy of Hatha Yoga — given a concrete form.

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com