The British Museum has announced plans for Indian Summer, a season dedicated to Indian culture featuring a unique programme of exhibitions, installations, performances, lectures and film screenings that will run from 2 May until 28 Spetember 2009 in London.. The season includes: Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, an exhibition which provides a rare opportunity to view paintings of outstanding interest and variety that have never previously been seen in Europe: an India Landscape, a specially commissioned space presenting Indian biodiversity in the Museum's forecourt in collaboration with Kew Gardens: and a rich and varied public programme.

Launching the season British Museum Director, Neil MacGregor commented: "There is an enduring fascination with the rich diversity of the art and culture of India. Garden and Cosmos epitomises this diversity through the polarities expressed in the paintings, focusing on both the external courtly life of pleasure on the one hand and an internal life of devotion and speculation on the other."

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur:
28 May - 23 August 2009
Room 35, £8 - members free

Garden and Cosmos will focus on the distinctive style of court painting which flourished in Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, during the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. The exhibition will feature a loan of fifty-five works from the Mehrangarh Museum Trust in Jodhpur which has been set up by the present Maharaja, H.H. Gaj Singh II. These paintings have never been seen in Europe before and are of exceptional quality.

The two elements of the title, 'Garden' and 'Cosmos' represent two distinct styles and functions over the period represented in the exhibition. 'Garden' presents paintings of palace life, many of them centred on the pleasures of the royal court and including vibrant illustrations of the great Indian epics, especially of the Ramayana.

In 'Cosmos', we see paintings from the long reign of Man Singh (r.1803-43) which are remarkable as, in their subject matter, they turn away from the glowing exterior world of court life and instead address the interior world of philosophical speculation and the origin of the universe. The precise meaning of some of these paintings is unclear but the large fields of unmediated and pulsating colour show that the Jodhpur artists reached the same aesthetic and spiritual zone as Mark Rothko, but a century earlier. Alongside this major loan from Jodhpur are two important paintings loaned from the National Museum in Delhi and two paintings from the British Museum's own collection.

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur is organised by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in collaboration with the Mehrangargh Museum Trust.

India Landscape:
2 May - 28 September 2009
British Museum Forecourt, admission free

To complement the exhibition, the British Museum, in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew will create an Indian-themed landscape on the Museum's west lawn. The landscape will showcase the impressive biodiversity of the Indian subcontinent, taking visitors on a journey from the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, through a temperate region and ending in a sub-tropical zone centred on a tank filled with lotus blossoms. The landscape will highlight plant use in India - as food, medicine and in trade and the way plants such as chilli (native to South America) have travelled and become completely indigenised. Finally, the dramatic consequences of habitat destruction in the subcontinent will also be addressed. The landscape is the second in a series of five planned collaborations with Kew.