Raja Ravi Varma

Ravi Varma was born on April 29, 1848, at Kilimanoor palace, the seat of a noble family related by marriage to the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Travancore (Thiruvithamkoor) in what is now Kerala ^[1]. His father, Ezhumavil Neelakanthan Bhattatiripad, was a scholar of Sanskrit, and his mother, Uma Ambabayi Thampuratti, composed poetry. The household followed the matrilineal customs of the region, and the boy grew up surrounded by temple ritual, Kathakali performance, and classical literature, all of which later supplied him with subjects ^[2].

Stories of the child covering the palace walls with charcoal drawings circulated within the family, and his uncle Raja Raja Varma, himself a painter in the Tanjore tradition, gave him his first instruction ^[1]. At about fourteen he was taken to Thiruvananthapuram, the Travancore capital, where the ruler Ayilyam Thirunal took an interest in him. The court gave the teenager access to its collection of European paintings and to the painters who passed through it ^[3].

Two encounters at court proved decisive. Rama Swamy Naidu, a court artist working in watercolour, taught him reluctantly and guardedly, and the Dutch-trained portraitist Theodore Jensen, who visited Travancore in the 1860s, allowed the young man to watch him work in oils ^[2]. Ravi Varma absorbed what he could by observation, since Jensen would not take him as a formal pupil, and he taught himself the handling of oil paint largely through trial and persistence ^[3].

The turning point in the Raja Ravi Varma biography came in 1873, when his painting of a Nair woman adorning her hair took the first prize at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madras ^[1]. The same work was sent to the international exhibition in Vienna that year and won a certificate of merit, an unusual distinction for an Indian artist of the period and one that made his reputation across British India almost overnight ^[4].

Commissions followed from princely courts and colonial officials alike. In 1881 the Gaekwad of Baroda, Sayajirao III, invited him to paint a formal portrait, beginning a long association with that court; Baroda later commissioned a celebrated series of paintings on themes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata ^[3]. He travelled widely through the subcontinent with his younger brother C. Raja Raja Varma, who managed his affairs, kept a diary that remains a key source on the painter's working life, and assisted on canvases ^[2].

For anyone asking who was Raja Ravi Varma in the eyes of his contemporaries, the answer was straightforward: he was the most sought-after portraitist in India, patronized by maharajas from Mysore to Udaipur and praised by British administrators who saw in his academic realism a validation of European training ^[4]. Yet his ambitions ran beyond portraiture. He wanted to give Indian mythological subjects the scale, perspective, and naturalism of the European salon picture, and it was this project that defined the rest of his career ^[5].

Among Raja Ravi Varma achievements, the best known are his mythological canvases: Shakuntala looking back at Dushyanta while pretending to remove a thorn from her foot, Damayanti conversing with the swan, Draupadi at the court of Virata, and serene frontal images of Lakshmi and Saraswati ^[1]. He posed living models, often women of Kerala and Maharashtra, in draped saris against painterly backdrops, and in doing so created a visual vocabulary for Hindu goddesses that had not existed before in quite that form ^[5].

His command of academic technique earned formal recognition abroad as well as at home. Ten of his works were shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he received medals, and in 1904 the Viceroy Lord Curzon conferred on him the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal on behalf of the British government ^[4]. The honorific "Raja" attached to his name reflected this courtly recognition rather than any ruling title ^[1].

The most consequential decision of his career, however, was industrial rather than artistic. In 1894 he established the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press at Ghatkopar near Bombay, later moved to Malavli near Lonavala, to reproduce his paintings as inexpensive colour oleographs ^[6]. Prints of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Rama, and Krishna sold in enormous numbers and hung in shops, homes, and shrines across the subcontinent, reaching people who would never see an oil painting. Scholars of Indian visual culture credit these prints with standardizing the popular iconography of the Hindu pantheon and with laying groundwork for calendar art and, indirectly, the imagery of early Indian cinema ^[5]. The pioneering filmmaker Dadasaheb Phalke worked for a time in the printing trade that Varma's press helped create ^[6].

In 1866, at the age of eighteen, Ravi Varma married Bhageerthi Bayi (Pooruruttati Nal Bhageerathi Bayi Thampuratti) of the royal house of Mavelikkara, a match arranged in keeping with aristocratic custom ^[2]. The couple had five children, two sons and three daughters. Through the matrilineal line, his descendants entered the Travancore royal family: his granddaughter Sethu Lakshmi Bayi served as regent Maharani of Travancore in the 1920s ^[3].

His working life was itinerant to a degree unusual for his class. He and his brother spent long stretches away from Kerala, in Baroda, Bombay, Mysore, and the Deccan, following commissions and supervising the press ^[2]. The brothers' partnership was close: Ravi Varma handled figures and composition while C. Raja Raja Varma, an accomplished landscape painter in his own right, often painted backgrounds and negotiated with patrons and printers. The younger brother's death in 1905 was a blow from which the painter did not fully recover ^[3].

Contemporaries described him as courteous, devout, and shrewd about money, though the press eventually strained his finances. Mounting debts and management troubles led him to sell the lithographic works in 1901 to Fritz Schleicher, a German technician who had run its printing operations, while the presses continued to issue images bearing the Ravi Varma name for decades ^[6].

The final decade brought both honours and criticism. Even as Curzon's government decorated him, a younger generation of artists and critics associated with the Bengal school began to attack his work as derivative, arguing that true Indian art should revive indigenous traditions of line and flat colour rather than imitate the European academy ^[5]. Writers such as Ananda Coomaraswamy dismissed his mythological paintings as theatrical, a judgment that dominated critical opinion for half a century after his death ^[5].

Varma kept painting through illness and bereavement. After his brother died in 1905 he returned to Travancore and continued to accept commissions, though his health was failing. Diabetes had troubled him for years, and on October 2, 1906, he died at Attingal in Travancore at the age of fifty-eight ^[1]. Obituaries across India mourned him as the country's foremost painter, and princely courts that held his canvases treated them as dynastic treasures ^[4].

His studio practice did not vanish with him. Pupils, relatives, and press artists trained in his manner carried the style forward, and the Malavli press continued printing gods and goddesses from his designs well into the twentieth century, until a fire destroyed much of its stock and original material in 1972 ^[6].

Few artists have shaped the everyday visual world of a country as thoroughly. The framed print of Lakshmi on a lotus that hangs in countless Indian homes descends directly from Varma's compositions, and art historians treat his oleographs as a founding moment of Indian mass visual culture ^[5]. After decades of critical neglect, his reputation revived from the 1970s onward, as scholars such as Partha Mitter re-examined colonial-era art on its own terms and museums began to restore and exhibit his canvases ^[5].

Institutional recognition followed. The Government of Kerala instituted the Raja Ravi Varma Puraskaram, an annual award for excellence in art, and galleries devoted to his work exist at the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum in Baroda, and the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad ^[3]. On the art market his oils now command some of the highest prices ever paid for Indian paintings; his 1881 work Radha in the Moonlight and other canvases have sold at auction for sums in the tens of crores of rupees ^[7].

The basic Raja Ravi Varma facts, a Kerala aristocrat born in 1848 who mastered oil painting by observation, won medals in Vienna and Chicago, and democratized religious imagery through a printing press, only partly explain his afterlife. His deeper legacy is a way of seeing: gods with human faces, mythological heroines with the presence of portrait sitters, and an idea of Indian womanhood in the draped sari that advertising, cinema, and calendar art repeated for a century ^[5]. Filmmakers have returned to his life as well, notably the 2014 Malayalam feature based on his relationship with his Bombay model, evidence that the painter himself has become part of the mythology he once painted ^[7].