Editorial, The Guardian

About two-thirds of the way through the British Museum's new exhibition, Garden and Cosmos, comes a transformation. What was a run of sumptuous paintings of palace life in Jodhpur in western India changes; the depictions of the maharajah cavorting with his maids (royal bedchambers on either side, just to press home the innuendo) give way to something stranger. In contrast to the richly detailed court scenes, these later pictures are stark and largely bare.

The change comes with the otherworldly Man Singh, the last independent ruler of Jodhpur. A follower of the Nath sect of ascetic yogis, he did not share the sensual hankerings of his predecessors, and his studio of artists - whose fathers and grandfathers would have spent their lives painting moonlit romance or the cheerier parts from Hindu epics -- had to turn their hands to the metaphysical. The result, as curator Sona Datta notes, are 19th-century works that would not look out of place in a modish gallery in east London. Commissioned to paint the Absolute (described in one Hindu text as "incomprehensible to the mind ... it has neither name nor colour": no easy task, this), a Muslim artist produces an abstract of shimmering gold, as luminous as a Rothko. Other works turn conventional Hindu beliefs upside down. Such works had not been seen before in India, nor was their like to be seen again. After Man Singh's throne fell into British hands, they were locked away for the best part of 150 years, making their display now all the more wondrous.