How Ravi Varma Became the King

The Wondering Eye

Rupika Chawla

By the time the immensely popular Raja Ravi Varma died in 1906, he had painted innumerable kings, princes and others who could afford his high prices. Through the amazing dissemination of his oleographs, he had familiarised the people of India with his mythological images. The ripples created by the oleographs continued to spread effortlessly through the decades that followed.

There is, in fact, a dual and contradictory movement between his paintings and his oleographs. The mass appeal of his oleographs has never abated, influencing the public imagination in many ways. His paintings, on the other hand, had to face the criticism of the intellectual elite. Sister Nivedita, Ananda K Coomaraswamy and later, Ramananda Chatterjee, found much that was wrong with his genre of painting. He also found disfavour with the Bengal School and the nationalistic mood of that time. The advent of the Progressive Artists Groups, which brought in the fresh air of modernism from the west in the ’40s, completed the circle of obscurity that his paintings encountered.

His paintings hung neglected on damp palace walls, merging with the background. Or else, they were removed, pushed into corners and placed under staircases. They squatted in these forgotten places, waiting patiently for the tide to turn.

In 1992, the gifted artist A Ramachandran and I decided that it was essential to place Ravi Varma in the correct historic perspective, which he certainly deserved. It was necessary to review what was perceived to be the outdated quality of his works and to understand his relevance in the altered perceptions of our times. With the support of the Department of Culture and the National Museum in Delhi, the Sri Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram was convinced to lend the National Museum a large selection of Ravi Varma works.

Paintings from private collections as well as cinema posters and Tanjore paintings were collected to show how Ravi Varma had influenced other art forms. It was also essential to illustrate his impact on later painters like Hemen Mazumdar (1894-1948), M V Dhurandhar (1867-1944) and M F Pithawala (1872-1937).

The inexpensive, gaudy coloured oleographs also found their place on the hallowed museum walls. It was historically necessary to show their impact on popular vision and their eventual deterioration into ‘calendar art’ as also manifested in labels for matchboxes and other sundry articles of use. With the help of the Department of Culture and the National Museum, an abundantly illustrated catalogue on Ravi Varma was published containing contributions from art historians and critics and a section on the artist’s diary.

The impact of the 1993 exhibition surprised us. Almost immediately there was a mad scramble for Ravi Varmas as their monetary value shot up. A Varma painting, which, before the exhibition would have been valued for Rs 50,000 was now going for Rs five lakh.

The graph continues to rise. Fakes and copies have been pushed into the market with relentless pace and collectors fantasise about owning a Ravi Varma. His oleographs today sell between Rs 3000 and Rs 5000 a print. In retrospect it appears that we had inadvertently chanced on the correct timing for the exhibition, which turned into a major event. Ravi Varma, who was formerly outdated, is back in fashion. Today, he is seen as the first modern painter of contemporary Indian art.

The author is an art conservator.