Raja Ravi Varma: The People's Painter

A prince's academy of one

Raja Ravi Varma was born in 1848 at Kilimanoor, a small palace estate allied to the royal house of Travancore in what is now Kerala, into a family that already had painters in it — an uncle, Raja Raja Varma, gave him his first instruction in traditional mural technique. What made Varma historically unusual was not that a well-connected boy learned to paint; it is that he then sought out, and was given access to, European academic oil technique at a moment when almost no Indian painter had systematic training in it. He studied watercolor under the palace's Dutch-trained painter Rama Swamy Naidu and, crucially, oil technique under Theodore Jensen, a British portraitist working in Travancore, absorbing the full academic vocabulary of the European salon: modeled anatomy, cast shadow, atmospheric perspective, oil glazing built up in layers to produce convincing flesh and fabric. He then did something no prior Indian painter of comparable stature had done at scale: he pointed that entirely European technical apparatus at wholly Indian subject matter — the gods, queens, and heroines of Hindu myth and the Sanskrit epics — and produced images that looked, to Indian and European eyes alike, startlingly persuasive as real, embodied scenes rather than the flatter, symbolic conventions of traditional temple and manuscript painting.

His talent was recognized early and locked in institutionally: he became a favored painter of the Travancore court and later worked under the patronage of other princely states, exhibiting to acclaim in Vienna in 1873 and later at exhibitions across British India, collecting medals that established him, within his own lifetime, as India's most famous living painter. This royal and institutional backing gave him something rarer than talent alone: the standing to be taken seriously by British colonial cultural authorities and Indian elites simultaneously, at a moment when very few artists straddled both worlds.

The gods learn to pose like queens

Varma's most consequential aesthetic decision was to give divine and mythic figures the physical presence of real, specific women — often modeled on South Indian women he observed directly, dressed in recognizable regional textiles and jewelry, posed with theatrical, legible gesture, set against detailed, illusionistic backgrounds. Sita, Saraswati, Damayanti stopped looking like iconographic diagrams and started looking like portraits of particular, believable people who happened to be divine.

Two paintings show this method at its most refined. Galaxy of Musicians (1889) depicts eleven women in regional dress from across India, each holding a different traditional instrument, arranged in a frieze-like composition that has been read ever since as an allegorical vision of a unified India expressed through its diverse regional cultures — assembled a full generation before Indian nationalism had coalesced as an organized mass movement, which is part of why the painting is now discussed as an early, intuitive visual statement of pan-Indian identity rather than an explicitly political one. Hamsa-Damayanti (Damayanti and the Swan, 1899) takes a single, quieter episode from the Mahabharata's Nala-Damayanti story — the princess Damayanti in conversation with a golden swan that carries messages between her and Nala — and renders it with a psychological intimacy and command of drapery and light that art historians still cite as one of the high points of Varma's easel painting, distinct from and arguably more refined than his mass-market lithographs of the same period.

Building the press: from Ghatkopar to a German manager's hands

Varma understood, better than any Indian painter before him, that a single oil painting could only ever be owned by one wealthy patron, while the imagery itself had a far larger public hungry for it. In 1894, with backing and technical machinery imported for the purpose, he established the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press at Ghatkopar, near Bombay, together with his brother C. Raja Raja Varma, specifically to reproduce his mythological compositions as oleographs — lithographic prints finished with a varnish that gave them an oil-painting sheen — at a price ordinary middle-class families could afford. The press employed German lithographic technicians to operate the color-separation and printing machinery, reflecting the fact that multi-stone color lithography was still a specialized technical trade in which European operators held the deepest expertise at the time.

The press did not stay in one place: after a fire and other operational difficulties, it relocated from Ghatkopar to Malavli, near Lonavala, around the turn of the century, and Varma eventually sold the business to his German technical manager, Fritz Schleicher, who continued producing Ravi Varma prints under license for years afterward — meaning "a genuine Ravi Varma oleograph" is now a more complicated bibliographic category than a single fixed object, spanning prints made under Varma's own direct supervision and later ones made from his printing blocks after the sale. Regardless of exactly whose hand ran the press in a given year, the output flooded Indian homes, shops, and shrines with images of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Krishna, and epic heroines that had never before been available outside temple walls or princely collections.

The template the twentieth century inherited

The scale of the press's cultural effect is hard to overstate. Varma's compositions became the default visual template for what Hindu deities and epic characters were supposed to look like in mass media for the next century: the calendar art industry that blanketed shopfronts, offices, and homes across India through the twentieth century drew directly and repeatedly on Varma's poses, palette, and staging conventions, to the point that later calendar artists were, in effect, working in a genre Varma had invented rather than inventing their own. Early Indian cinema absorbed the same visual grammar almost wholesale — Dadasaheb Phalke, the filmmaker generally credited as the father of Indian cinema, worked briefly as a colorist and technician associated with the world of Varma-style lithography before turning to film, and the costuming, staging, and frontal, theatrical composition of gods and heroines in silent-era mythological films borrowed directly from the visual vocabulary Varma's prints had already made instantly recognizable to audiences. In effect, Varma supplied the face of Hindu popular visual culture before photography, calendar art, and cinema each took their turn distributing it further.

"Too Western," then reclaimed

Not everyone was pleased. From early in his career, and especially in the decades of rising cultural nationalism around the turn of the century, Varma drew sustained criticism from figures associated with the Bengal School and the broader Swadeshi-era art movement, who argued that his reliance on European academic technique — illusionistic modeling, oil glazing, Western compositional conventions — represented a colonized aesthetic unsuited to expressing authentically Indian spiritual and artistic values. Ananda Coomaraswamy and painters aligned with Abanindranath Tagore's revivalist project explicitly positioned their flatter, wash-based, consciously "Indian" style in opposition to what they characterized as Varma's derivative academicism; some critics went further and dismissed the oleograph business itself as a vulgarization of sacred imagery for commercial mass consumption.

That critique dominated elite art-historical opinion in India for much of the twentieth century, but it has been substantially revised since. Later scholarship, and major museum retrospectives of his work, have reframed Varma not as a colonized imitator but as the artist who first solved the problem of giving India's own mythic imagination a modern, mass-reproducible visual form — arguing that the "Western" technique was never the point, only the tool, and that the real innovation was cultural: building, from scratch, a shared national visual vocabulary for gods and epics that cut across region, language, and caste in a way no prior visual tradition had managed. Contemporary critics increasingly treat Varma as a foundational, not compromised, figure in Indian visual modernity — the point at which "Indian art" and "mass-produced image" stopped being separate categories, decades before either photography or cinema arrived to do the same work by other means. A painting like Galaxy of Musicians, with a single woman standing in for a whole region's culture within one frame, reads today less like colonial mimicry and more like an early, confident attempt to picture a plural nation before that nation had a name for itself.