RAJA RAVI VARMA: THE COMEBACK KID
From a small village to the famous London auction house of Sotheby’s, the afterlife of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings has acquired a certain uniqueness that is, perhaps, only rivalled by the life of the artist himself.
Born in 1848, in the village of Kilimanoor in Kerala, and related to the royal family of Travancore by blood, legend has it that Ravi Varma, as a child, started painting on the walls of his house.
Earlier this month, an unnamed painting by the artist depicting the mythological figure, Damayanti, from the Mahabharata, fetched a record Rs 11.09 crore at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, more than double its upper estimate.
“One of the reasons for this record price for a Raja Ravi Varma canvas is because it is so rare for his works to come out,” says Yamini Telkar, the Mumbai director of Delhi Art Gallery, which owns a sizeable collection of rare Ravi Varma paintings.
“Most Ravi Varma paintings are housed in private collections, as he painted for the Travancore court. Besides, more than a portrait, the Damayanti canvas is part of his famed mythological series, the series for which he is particularly well known.”
The aesthetics of Raja Ravi Varma has become so ubiquitous today that it’s difficult to imagine what impact it must have had in the royal court of Travancore.
His colour palette has become the source for innumerable representations of Indian gods and goddesses, from the popular calendar art to the comic books of Amar Chitra Katha.
Daubed in bright, dazzling colours, his paintings of goddesses, draped in Maheshwari and Paithani saris, evoked a kind of femininity that in popular representations henceforth came to define ‘Indianness’.
In a way, working during the heyday of Indian nationalism, Varma’s works, particularly his mythological works, were embedded in the deep cultural ethos emerging at the time.
Christopher Pinney, in his magisterial work, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, recounts how nationalist figures like Bal Gangadhar Tilak drew from the artist’s images to paint a picture of the emerging nation’s mythic past, a project that was so crucial for nationalism to succeed.
With Independence, and the emergence of progressive artists such as MF Husain in the ’50s and ’60s, Ravi Varma’s images saw a sharp decline in terms of critical consensus.