This is the ancient Hindu festival of Holi.

One of the most sacred festivals in the Indian calendar.

Every spring,

revellers drown themselves in clouds of pure pigment

as a symbol of the joyous resurgence of life.

In the early 18th century,

this festival became the subject of a striking set of images

commissioned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur.

In them, colour becomes the symbol of karma,

sensory and sexual pleasure,

which in Hindu faith

was one of the essential sacred goals of human life.

In the 1770s,

the paintings then left the world of courtly pleasure behind

to illustrate the ancient tales of the Hindu epics.

The people's stories

and adventures of the Hindu gods.

Designed to be held up at court

to illustrate the epic poems read alongside them,

these immersive images drew their inspiration

from the folk art of the people.

Together with the stylisation of line,

these pictures seethe with

fantastic animation.

Literally the dynamic life of animals,

and to contain all these rollicking adventures,

the format of the paintings had now to be a landscape,

a landscape of dream and magic.

They had this great bolt of intense,

radiant colour,

but above all, these pictures become, like the epics themselves,

massively populated,

casts of thousands of maidens, of rabbits,

of flocks of deer and armies of monkeys.

There are elephants running

under the great rolling clouds of the monsoon.