Frolicking deities and impassive maharajas

THIS is an important and fascinating exhibition of Indian paintings that had not been seen in the West until they were included in Garden and Cosmos.

THIS is an important and fascinating exhibition of Indian paintings that had not been seen in the West until they were included in Garden and Cosmos, which was initially presented at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

It travelled to the British Museum before coming to the Art Gallery of NSW.

The scholarly seriousness of the exhibition is attested by the splendid and definitive catalogue that accompanies it.

For the ordinary visitor, however, the labels that accompany the works in the gallery make it relatively easy to follow the principal themes, personalities and stylistic developments.

It helps to have some idea of the historical context of these pictures. They come from the Marwar-Jodhpur area, today part of Rajasthan, and mostly date from the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century.

This was the period from the beginning of the decline of the Mogul empire after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 to the increasing hegemony of the British in the early 19th century.

The Moguls, descendants of Tamerlane -- immortalised for us in Christopher Marlowe's extraordinary dramatic diptych Tamburlaine, parts I and II -- were originally a Turkic people civilised by their contact with Persia and who converted to Islam. A policy of religious tolerance, at least until the reign of Aurangzeb, allowed them to rule over subjects and allies who adhered to Hinduism, and even to intermarry with local Rajput rulers.

One notable example of Mogul liberalism was their enjoyment of narrative and figurative painting, forbidden by the Arabs. The Persian tradition of painting, which they brought to India, evolved into the Mogul style practised in the imperial court and adopted in turn by Hindu vassal kingdoms such as that of Marwar-Jodhpur.

The exhibition deals with the evolution of painting in one particular area that has hitherto been little known; what begins as a relatively rustic and regional style is rapidly transformed by contact with the sophisticated Persian-Mogul visual language, and then develops further under the impetus of local cultural concerns.

The paintings are remarkably rich and varied, both in their style and in their subject matter, which extend from celebrations of the pleasures of court life to the fantastic abundance of Hindu mythic and epic narrative and to the austere and yet refined metaphysical illustrations of esoteric spiritual doctrines.

Most of the works belong to the reigns of three more or less successive monarchs.

The first is the early 18th-century maharaja Bakhat Singh, who seems an amiable enough character until we learn that he murdered his father. He built an elaborate pleasure palace and garden where we see him in page after page, occupying the centre of the composition and usually surrounded by pretty girls.

Refined parties take place in the moonlight or at religious festivities, and sexual pleasure is often implied, in one case by mating ducks in the foreground of the composition; but although the titles of the compositions describe the maharaja as rejoicing, revelling or delighting in some entertainment or the other, somewhat disconcertingly he always remains utterly impassive in his hedonism.

Bakhat's son Vijai Singh was more spiritually inclined -- it is as though a revival of Hindu belief coincided with the ebbing of Mogul authority -- and the pictures painted in his reign include a delightful and fantastically animated series devoted to the epic of the Ramayana, in which Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu, seeks to recover his beloved Sita. Vijai had a special devotion to Krishna, another of Vishnu's avatars, who is shown in a second series exerting an almost Dionysiac power of attraction over the gopi milkmaids.

Vijai's grandson Man Singh, a child when the old maharaja died at the end of the 18th century, was saved from destruction by an evil uncle, thanks to the prophecy of a yogic ascetic from a sect to which he was devoted.

Following his rise to power, the sect of the Naths assumed unprecedented authority in the spiritual as well as the temporal field, displacing not only the aristocracy and priestly establishment but even, to some extent, the traditional deities.

Man Singh's painters produced compositions that were quite different from those of the previous reigns, showing great inventiveness and ingenuity in their attempts to express the most abstract metaphysical and spiritual ideas.

One series explains how the undifferentiated primal absolute gives birth to the world of becoming and multiplicity. Others are maps of spiritual realms.

But for all the complex diagrams and hierarchies, it is useless to look for a rationally coherent structure in what is essentially a mystical system: it is not reason but enlightenment that ultimately reveals to the practitioner of spiritual discipline that the part and the whole, the self and the universe, may be identical.