RAVI VARMA
The Governor of Maharashtra - Shri. K. Sankaranarayanan, releasing the book under review said, Raja Ravi Varma was a rare phenomenon to have happened to the world of art and it was he who brought Indian paintings on the world canvas, gave ‘face’ to many Gods and Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. If there was ever a painter who could claim to have completely changed the way popular Indian imagination pictured its Gods, Goddesses, myths and legends, then it was that charismatic Keralite Raja Ravi Varma.
This book by Rupika Chawla is an account of the painter from a royal family in the background of colonial India, and the impact of this milieu on his profession as an aristocratic itinerant painter. This lavishly illustrated book is a great collection of paintings from royal and private collections and museums, and works hitherto unseen, along with previously undisclosed maps, letters, photographs and other archival material.
For this magnificent Coffee Table book Chawla has travelled all over the country for long many years, prising out the slightest of secrets. This book offers fresh insights especially into the way he painted and obtained from the diary of the Raja of Aundh (near Pune), in whose court the prince-painter spent a lot of time painting. The Raja was a very careful observer and questioner and asked genuine questions. To quote the author, “he writes about the way Raja Ravi Varma painted, the hours he painted and about the time and trouble he took to get emotion on the faces he made, reworking them several times... He also writes about the painter’s fascination for the nine yard sari because it showed the body so well.” Chawla portrays the times the painter lived in. She shows us how this modern man with a vision was able to use turn-of-the-century technological innovations such as electricity, the railways, newspapers and oleographs.
The author, who is the wife of the ex-Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, is a conservator of paintings based in Delhi who has restored several Ravi Varma paintings at her studio in Delhi and also gives training in conservation. Together with artist A. Ramachandran she organized the seminal exhibition on Raja Ravi Varma in 1993 at the National Museum, Delhi, which brought about a strong revival of the artist and his work.
This well-researched book traces the sources used by Ravi Varma, examines the techniques and methodology of his paintings, and discusses their conservation and the problem of fakes and copies and is a goldmine for historians, collectors, curators and art lovers.
Rupika Chawla revealed how she was fascinated by the Kerala painter and spent over two decades tracing his life, locating lost paintings, and interviewing descendants of his family members, friends and acquaintances. This book provides a peek into the artist’s inner world, his muses, visits to different parts of the country and the influences in his work.
The author declared that very little was known about this painter. Who was he? How was he able to make the kind of paintings he made, what motivated him, what was his background, the times he lived in, who were the people he knew, his collectors, the value of his art - then and now, his technique and method of painting, the people who were influenced by him and the value of his art today. In her research, all these questions were answered, and much more. Her favorite paintings were the Mysore collection. They were among the last that Ravi Varma did. In terms of composition, they are complex, well executed and exquisitely beautiful, while also concentrating and expressing the drama that involves their narrative. Ravi Varma balanced tradition and modernity, combined business enterprise with his love of painting, understood the commercial value of art and was a forerunner in propagating art. With that in mind he started the oleograph press and wished to make a museum but died before he could manage that.
Raja Ravi Varma was born on April 29, 1848, in Kilimanoor, Kerala. He belonged to a family of scholars, poets and artists. Noted in his family were Vidwan Koil Tampuran, author of the famous Kathakali work Ravana Vijayam; Raja Raja Varma, who painted after the Tanjore style, and Uma Amba Bai Tampuratty who composed Parvati Swayamvaram, a work for the tullal dance. As a small boy, he filled the walls of his home with pictures of animals, acts and scenes from his daily life, which impressed his uncle, Raja Raja Varma as the signs of a blossoming genius. The uncle, not only gave the first drawing lessons to his nephew, but took a keen interest in his further training and education with the help of the ruling king, Ayilyam Thirunal. When he was only 14, Ravi Varma was sent to Thiruvananthapuram where he stayed in the Kilimanoor palace and was taught water painting by the palace painter Ramaswami Naidu. Here Varma’s talent was nurtured by the personal interest of the King who exposed him to the famous paintings of Italian painters. Ravi Varma had been using the indigenous paints made from leaves, flowers, tree bark and soil which his uncle Raja Raja Varma prepared for him. His first set of oil paints was brought from Madras after noticing a newspaper advertisement.
Rupika Chawla has done detection of an extraordinary type for this book on the life and times of Raja Ravi Varma, considered by many to be India’s first modern painter. She has given us the portrait of a man in full by doggedly following the most evanescent of clues across India, ferreting out unknown Ravi Varma paintings, digging into dispersed archives, studying scores of his work, tracing his scattered descendants in pursuit of bits of information or some forgotten and damaged Ravi Varma canvas - even making the slightest of links lead into fascinating revelations.
The readers are taken on a journey and we can almost visualise the painter prince’s life unfold before us and Chawla draws for us a picture of his artistic struggles. We also learn more about his models and muses. The author has effectively used the diaries of his younger brother C. Raja Raja Varma - they worked and travelled together on commissions. A man ahead of his times, he was a marketing genius and shrewd entrepreneur. He set up the Ravi Varma Fine Arts Lithographic Press to make his art more accessible, to travel far beyond the circle of wealthy patrons. Not satisfied with the quality of the prints in India, he dispatched a man to Germany in 1893 to find an expert chromo-lithograph printer who could help them produce superior Indian-made oleographs. The young German Fritz Schleicher came to India and became the printer and manager of the oleograph and chromo-lithograph workshop. Chawla tracked down Schleicher’s grandson, Robert Sandhu, to garner fascinating details about the collaboration between Schleicher and the Varma brothers.
Till Ravi Varma arrived on the scene, Indian art was wondrous, metaphoric, symbolic, abstract, geometric and much more but never directly representational of the retinal reality. Most importantly, Hindu Gods were not perceived to be made in the image of man. They were portrayed by the depiction of their attributes in hundreds of different styles and manners. But the setting up of the Ravi Varma Press in 1894 in Bombay changed all that. Soon, from Simla to Trivandrum and from Calcutta to Bombay, every middle-class Hindu home in the 20th century was and is decorated with highly affordable prints of Ravi Varma’s “natural and realistic” renderings of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Rama, Sita and Hanuman, to name just a few. Moreover, Ravi Varma’s penchant for the dramatic pageant influenced popular theatre and films, thereby increasing the impact of his artifice manifold.
In the latter half of the 19th century, the medium of oil on-canvas itself was new to India and Ravi Varma’s chosen style of painting European realism (though outmoded in Europe by then) - was still unfamiliar and novel here. But once Ravi Varma had mastered both his technique and his style around the 1870s, there was no stopping him. His familial links with the Travancore ruling family ensured a network of connections that led to a spate of commissions ranging from tiny states like Pudukottai, Aundh and Bhavnagar to big ones like Mysore, Baroda and Hyderabad. He was much sought after not only for his portraits but also for his “thematic” paintings depicting pivotal scenes from Hindu myths and Sanskrit literature.
Paradoxically in contrast to his immense mass appeal and popular influence as India’s first painter of iconic images, the life and legacy of Ravi Varma had never been seriously studied till now. This volume, which admirably fills a gap, is not a heavy academic tome. In style and substance, it is hugely engaging, carrying its scholarship with a remarkable lightness of grace. Chawla’s chronicling of Ravi Varma’s life and works is full of anecdotes from secondary sources such as accounts of his patrons, colleagues and friends, the most important among these being the diaries kept by his beloved brother C. Raja Raja Varma, who was his pupil and partner in virtually all of the commissions and enterprises that Ravi Varma undertook.
What makes this book significantly different is that it covers brilliantly social, cultural and political life in colonial India - especially that of the native princes and attempts to underline the newly emerging dynamic link between technology and a colonised society bound by moribund feudal values that was aspiring to modernity, freedom and democracy. So the “shortening of time and distances” by the coming of the Railways, the place of art “in the time of mechanical reproduction” and the double-edged politics of cultural nationalism all come into focus in this absorbing narrative of a painterly transience.
05/07/2020
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