Scandals, sketches: Celebrating Raja Ravi Varma online

CHENNAI: His father-in-law was embroiled in a scandalous murder in the 1860s, his mother-inlaw was one of his muses. There’s a lot to the life of 19th century

artist

Raja Ravi Varma, and it’s all being explored online on April 29, his 172nd birth anniversary. And yes, there’s a Chennai connect as well.


Google Arts & Culture has collaborated with The

Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation

(TRRVHF) and National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi to launch a digital retrospective of more than 25 stories and 600 images of the artist’s paintings and rare photographs, presented alongside works inspired by the artist on canvas, textiles, and even matchbox art. A 2020 calendar of photographs inspired by

Ravi Varma’s paintings

, featuring actors from Tamil cinema and created by city-based G Venket Ram for NGO NAAM Foundation, is also part of the online exhibit.

“Raja Ravi Varma’s portraits became the common link that united the stories of some of the most fascinating Indians of the late 19th century, ranging from maharajahs to bureaucrats,” says historian Manu S Pillai who authored the limited edition book ‘The World of Raja Ravi Varma: Princes & Patrons’, which tells the story of the men and women in the artist’s portraits. Pillai will speak about the artist on Wednesday, as part of a TRRVHF retrospective on their Facebook page, which also includes the documentary Wanderers between Worlds, directed by Vikas Urs.

Madras, says Pillai, was very much Ravi Varma’s stepping stone to pan-Indian success. “After about a decade learning and working on technique in the Travancore durbar in Kerala, it was in Madras where a wider audience saw his work for the first time.” In 1873, Ravi Varma won a prize in Madras for ‘Nair Lady at the Toilet’, and a couple of years later, when the Prince of Wales was in town, among the presents the Travancore maharajah gave himwas a Ravi Varma painting. Till the early 1880s, Madras was the chief “big city” where Ravi Varma had an elite crowd of admirers. “In 1881, Ravi Varma wrote to Sir T Madhava Rao, then Dewan-Regent at Baroda, telling him that having made a reputation in the south, he now wanted to

explore upper India

,” says Pillai.

Ravi Varma not merely a product of magical talent, says Pillai, he also worked very hard. He defied the ancestral comforts of his aristocratic family, social pressure that frowned on his choice of painting as a profession. “Ravi Varma was methodical, In the mornings, he would finish up a painting and in the evenings take photographs and plan his next work.”

As for his in-laws, all Pillai is willing to reveal at the moment is that the father-in-law’s sordid crime made a splash in British newspapers but was hushed up given who he was. “He was given a reduced sentence as well.” The mother-in-law Bharani Nal Mahaprabha on the other hand went on to become the subject of one of the artist’s portraits. Dark-skinned and with proud bloodshot eyes, she defied the fair-skinned ideal of Indian beauty that Ravi Varma helped popularise.

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