Illuminating India
Three centuries’ worth of royal arts from Jodhpur now on display at MFAH.
OF all the museum exhibitions Mahrukh Tarapor has organized, none has felt more personal than “Peacock in the Desert.” Opening Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the landmark show brings three centuries’ worth of treasures from Jodhpur, India, to light, exploring the patronage of a single royal Indian house in depth for the first time.
Most of the 300 exquisitely detailed objects have never left India before. Many are signature possessions of the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, established in the early 1970s by H.H. GajSingh II, the current Maharaja of Marwar-Jodhpur, to protect treasures his ancestors commissioned from the 17th to the early-20th centuries.
Sumptuous paintings, textiles, jewelry, weapons, devotional objects, room settings and vehicles (including a 1927 Rolls Royce
Phantom and a 1940’s Stinson LF Sentinal airplane) are now arrayed across five MFAH galleries whose collective opulence rivals anything the museum has shown recently. Digital renderings of palace walls and large projections enhance the viewing experience, making it almost immersive.
Glitz comes with the territory but was not the point.
“We have these great palaces, fortresses and rich traditions we identify with. But how did our traditions remain alive? The British never taught me that and didn’t preserve it for me,” said Tarapor, the Houston museum’s senior adviser for international initiatives. “As an Indian … how do I call this my culture?”
It wasn’t until she was a graduate student in English literature at Harvard University in the 1980s that she came to realize — by auditing a class of the great connoisseur Stuart Cary Welch — how India’s ruling houses patronized their artists. Their evolving, cosmopolitan culture was influenced by their political and military alliances with colonial invaders — first Muslim Mughals, then the British.
Through centuries, the royal families persevered, maintained their riches and commissioned objects to supply and document their lavish lifestyle.
“That’s what kept the arts alive,” said Tarapor. “I want other Indians to know that.”
But even for a museum in a city with more than 150,000 Indian-Americans, she wasn’t just considering demographics. Tarapor wanted to convey the cultural significance of the art by showing it through a purely Indian sensibility, created by Indians, in India.
She enlisted Mehrangarh Museum director Karni Singh Jasol to lead the team of Indian scholars who gathered, researched and conserved the objects and planned their presentation.
“It’s been a huge learning experience for us,” Tarapor said. Preserved traditions
Growing up in the 1950s in southern India, Tarapor attended an Irish Catholic boarding school. India had just gained its independence from Great Britain, and everything she knew of her country’s history was filtered through that lens. She didn’t even know Jodhpur existed.
On a migratory and trade route for centuries, the remote city stood 680 miles to her north in the province of Marwar, in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, near the vast and inhospitable Thar Desert.
“Peacock,” revealing the region’s artistic riches, took four years to realize but in a way completes a much longer cycle for Tarapor and MFAH director Gary Tinterow.
Both studied with Welch, the Indian expert, at Harvard. They started their careers during the same era at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked there together for decades.
Tinterow counts Tarapor’s first Met show, 1985’s “India!,” as one of the most memorable of his life.
“I always held that out as a model of a truly spectacular, life-changing exhibition,” he said. When Tinterow persuaded Tarapor to consult for the MFAH a few years ago, he thought she was “the one person who could make it happen again.”
Not that colleagues at other institutions hadn’t tried to create a deeper dive into India’s culture, but bureaucratic obstacles, funding problems, even deaths in families — all sorts of things put the kibosh on massive projects, Tinterow said. “I just felt that, if anything, Marhukh and I could just try again.”
Initially, she resisted. She had seen too many stereotypical maharaja exhibitions focused on the late-19th and early-20th century, when India’s wealthy embraced everything European — from its Cartier jewelry to fancy cars and airplanes.
Tinterow agreed. He wanted to show the continuity of the cultural heritage — “from the beginning of the ‘modern’ era — the 15th century — to today,” he said.
They focused on Jodhpur for several reasons. Unlike some of India’s other royal houses, the clan at Jodhpur has kept much of its treasury intact. And as a Mehrangarh trustee, Tarapor was friendly with GajSingh. The relationship allowed a rare engagement, as the Maharaja committed considerable resources — even bringing an Indian musical ensemble to perform during the opening weekend.
“Whatever Gary wanted, he got,” Tarapor said. “It was trust, chemistry. These things count for something.”
Traditions are so well preserved at Mehrangarh that Jasol’s team was able to recreate the front arches of the “Lal Dera” — a 17th-century tent made of red velvet sumptuously embroidered in gold silk, one of the only items of its kind — that were too delicate to travel.
“If you’re missing a piece of some early Baroque wonderment from Nuremberg, you can’t go to Nuremburg and have the missing pieces re-created “The Maharaja of Jodhpur, more than his peers, has tried very hard to maintain as much as he can. He’s a believer in the past, and an embodiment of the tradition of patronage.” Mahrukh Tarapor, MFAH senior adviser for international initiatives for you. But you can in India,” Tinterow said. “Also, Jodhpur has a particularly fine school of painting that emerged in the 18th century and continues today. We’re going to be selling paintings in the gift shop in the traditional style, by Jodhpur painters, that were made a month ago.”
More modest versions of the show will travel to Seattle and Toronto. Only in Houston, Tarapor said, will visitors experience “the full, comprehensive version.” Embracing modernity “Elephants come in all shapes and sizes!” Tarapor said, smiling but serious as she described how mannequins for the re-created wedding procession in Cullinan Hall — the first glimpse visitors will have of the show — had to be custom-made to exacting dimensions, so that specific howdahs, or seats, would fit snugly atop their backs.
Though the bride of that procession would have been hidden from view, the installation hints at the show’s somewhat enlightened perspective about women as agents of cultural change in India, even centuries ago.
“Most of these marriages were alliances between families that needed friendly connections,” Tarapor said. “The bridegroom is there, with all of his glory behind him. But the bride comes with her entourage, her priests, musicians, cooks, jewelers, from whichever state of India she comes from — with these myriad influences that then merge and percolate with what they find locally. And of course what they find locally has been created by a similar, previous amalgam, through generations. That accounts for the cosmopolitanism of the Jodhpur court, which is in the middle of nowhere.”
Upstairs, a magnificent Mahadol (a hand-held carriage) crafted of gilded wood, glass and copper dominates the first gallery. Although the paintings on the bright-yellow walls are nearly as glittering. The room conveys the spiritual and cultural foundations of the Rathore clan that built Mehrangarh, a 26-acre compound in Jodhpur whose castle, temples and gardens were carved into red sandstone cliffs above the city, as well as the scenery. A wall of colorful turbans suggests the diversity of the Marwar-Jodhpur people.
Each painting contains its own complex world, produced on the thick, handmade paper called wasli and colored liberally with gold and pigments extracted from lampblack and natural and semiprecious stones. Some of the most spectacular paintings are largeformat “monumental” folios, although the style is often referred to as “miniature painting” because it is so detailed, made with the tiniest of brushes.
“Cary Welch used to say to me, ‘You have to use different eye muscles to look at a miniature painting,’ ” Tarapor said. “I’ve never forgotten that. … You’ve got to look from the tiniest dot, from microcosm to macrocosm.”
Another gallery re-creates a Zenana, the women’s wing of the palace. It’s not hard to imagine the ladies busily occupied there amid their riches, commissioning art but still only able to view courtly activities through intricately carved sandstone jalis, or screens. (One of the paintings offers a glimpse of how such a scene might have unfolded during a performance by court dancers and musicians.)
The Rolls and the Sentinal steal the show in a gallery that illustrates the profound cultural changes of the Raj era, when Jodhpur’s royalty embraced modernity.
GajSingh knew these objects as belongings of his father and grandfather.
He inherited his title in 1952, when he was 4, after his father died in a plane crash. He was spirited out of the country for safety, because politics were changing. By the time he was old enough to manage his family’s vast resources, Indira Gandhi had abolished royal privileges.
Partly as an act of selfpreservation, GajSingh built a historical and environmental tourism business with his family’s assets. He established the Mehrangarh Trust in 1971, also founding the Mehrangarh Museum and turning the fort’s palace into a hotel. He also transformed Umaid Bhawan Palace, which his grandfather built when the family abandoned its castle at Mehrangarh, into one of finest hotels of its kind in the world.
GajSingh has been a model citizen, Tarapor said. “The Maharaja of Jodhpur, more than his peers, has tried very hard to maintain as much as he can. He’s a believer in the past, and an embodiment of the tradition of patronage.”
India’s national economy still derives a large percentage of revenues from the making of artisan goods, Tarapor added. “It’s something that makes India unique, and it’s very frightening to think we may be losing that.”
She worries that as the world becomes increasingly homogenized and mechanized, demand for the kind of finely crafted textiles, jewelry and paintings that maharajas once encouraged will decrease.
“We are trying to keep the maharaja tradition alive, but they have a hard time, like the families with British stately homes,” Tarapor said. “These are huge properties that need colossal revenue to maintain.”
That’s why — while Mehrangarh’s signature treasures are on their world tour for “Peacock” — that museum’s board is devising a master plan for its future.
Perhaps the best hope for preserving traditions lies not just with India’s wealthy patrons but also with people like Tarapor. She practiced a kind of professional patronage by entrusting Jasol, the Mehrangarh’s director, with the huge “Peacock” project, including its comprehensive catalog.
Jasol, a member of the Singh clan, grew up in the fort because his father directed the Merhrangarh museum before him. A generation younger than Tarapor, Jasol also learned his art history abroad but came home 13 years ago and lives in the fort again, now with his wife and two adolescent children.
“It’s one of the perks of the job,” he said.
Jasol, a former Fulbright fellow at the Smithsonian’s Sackler | Freer museums, was already on his way to becoming an authority. “Peacock” adds a significant feather to his cap.
Tarapor also hopes the show will spur more collaborations and shows — and the more people who are educated about India’s cultural heritage, the better chance it has of being preserved. She can imagine even small exhibitions based on single objects from the Mehrangarh collection.
“Nothing as monumental as this, but you could teach people how to look at a miniature painting,” she said.
She finds it amazing that “Peacock” came to her from Houston — as opposed to Europe or New York.
“It’s pioneering,” she said. “We hope this exhibition will be a foundation from which other scholars can explore other kingdoms in a similar way.”