India's 'Garden' State

They took their name from Jallandharnath, practiced his harsh disciplines and prayed to him continuously. The maharajah did the same. He was an unusual sort of ruler. He "cared nothing for himself nor for worldly affairs," he wrote, "as the greatness of Nathji enveloped his heart." You see this in his art.

In the paintings he commissioned, Naths aren't hard to spot. Their skin is gray. They all wear heavy earrings (Nath earrings pierce the cartilage rather than the lobes). And they all wear pointy hats.

The Naths were problematic. Many Hindus scorned them. Those yogis were not clean (they ate with lower castes), nor were they settled (often they just wandered), and they smoked a lot of hashish. As royal favors fell upon them, their behavior seemed to worsen. They formed abusive gangs. They kidnapped well-born children and stole the goods of merchants. But what could good folk do? They had to be most careful. The Naths had mighty powers. It was known that they could fly and see the far-away and peer into the future and, to make things even scarier, you could never be quite sure if the yogi you had shooed away was a beggar or a god.

To make yourself a yogi, you first had to devote yourself to 12 years of study. The dogmas of their practice, and of their metaphysics, had been written down for centuries but seldom before painted. Now hundreds of Nath pictures were painted for the king.

The Sackler's Debra Diamond, the curator responsible for the show, has arranged these 60 paintings (which, after leaving Washington, will travel to Seattle, the British Museum in London and the National Museum of India) to evoke yogis' progress. The maharajahs' exhibition takes you all the way from photographs of Jodhpur and frolicking in gardens, to the realms of pure abstraction.

The Naths could live on air alone and meditate for days in ligament-stretching postures. Eventually they merged their beings with the absolute.

What does that state look like? Well, it's pure and oceanic, glittering and golden. Also it presages by more than a century the all-gold field paintings made by Robert Rauschenberg, the all-blue ones of Yves Klein and Mark Rothko's glowing atmospheres. It's like a prophecy. You can see it in this show.

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. Through Jan. 4. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, is supported by a grant from Air India. The Leon Levy Foundation helped to pay for its 397-page catalogue. The Sackler is open daily, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. For information, call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions. Admission is free.