India's 'Garden' State

And like a god, you get to see whatever you imagine. The painters in your palace are there for just that purpose. It's a little bit like having a Steven Spielberg studio in your basement busily producing pictures of your dreams.

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"Garden and Cosmos" could have been called "The Three Maharajahs."

The first maharajah is a voluptuary. The second is conventionally pious. The third, an ash-smeared yogi, takes to living all alone in the corner of the garden in a wretched little hut.

All appear in profile (as rulers do on coins). All wear swooping black mustaches, and, being maharajahs, all are shown as larger than lesser human beings. Otherwise, each is different. The paintings at the Sackler take you far into their minds.

Maharajah Bakhat Singh (1706-1752) reminds me of Hugh Hefner. He was mighty as a warrior and ruthless as a son (Bakhat became king after murdering his father), but you wouldn't know this from the art he commissioned. He doesn't ride or hunt. What Bakhat does is party, party all the time.

In "Amusements on a Moonlit Water Terrace" (circa 1720), dozens of young women are bringing him his dinner. Others pluck sitars. One, no doubt his favorite, sits beside him. Another of his paintings is called "Revels in a Pleasure Boat." Elsewhere he is shown playing in a swimming pool with 20 of his women; he's squirting them with water jets from a big long brass syringe.

(Then his elegant young niece brought him a new coat, one she'd dipped in poison. That's how Bakhat died.)

When Maharajah Vijay Singh (in Marwar, all the males bore the surname Singh) ascends to the throne in 1752, the paintings lose their spice. Vijay was no sybarite. We're still in the great fort. The setting hasn't changed. We still see the same fountains, terraces and gardens, but the playgirls have been banished, as have the all-girl orchestras. We're now surrounded by gods.

The pleasure craft still float in the palace pool, but now they're there for the god Rama. Or we're in the palace gardens and a party's going on, but the figure frolicking is Krishna with his cowgirls, rather than the king.

When Maharajah Man Singh takes the throne in 1803, the pictures change again.

Man credits his ascension to the grace of Jallandharnath, that most ascetic of ascetics, a being so perfected that he's become immortal. Man now turns his back on the hereditary nobility and dedicates his kingdom to the yogis known as Naths.