The largest retrospective of Raja Ravi Varma's ubiquitous works goes online

In a year that started badly and quickly became worse, a narrative of things remembered and celebrated has lifted dreary days.

Among these is the fact that several biographers agree that 2020 marks 150 years of Raja Ravi Varma’s first commissioned painting, a family portrait of Krishna Menon, a sub-judge of the Calicut Court.

This also marked the beginning of a life lived travelling to paint portraits at various royal courts. A life where Varma would famously go on to democratise art through a printing press that took his vision of Hindu gods to virtually every Hindu household, and in the process altering the aesthetics of an entire subcontinent.

To commemorate this date, the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, a Bengaluru-based non-profit, has partnered with four palaces, three government museums as well as private galleries and collectors to present the largest permanent digital repository of Varma’s works. With sketches, paintings, oleographs and archival photographs, this collection of over 300 works can be accessed on the foundation’s Google Arts & Culture platform. The collection includes the first commissioned work, as well as one of Varma’s last paintings, one showing the Mysore Khedda, a campsite used by the Prince of Wales in 1906.

An image of a lithograph of Saraswati in the making. The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation

Ganesh Shivaswamy, a fifth-generation lawyer who established the non-profit (he also collects works by other artists), classifies the images on the platform as “ethical images” — he has received permissions from the various collections the works have been sourced from. (Though the works might be owned by different people, they have no copyright. This is a matter of principle since images of Varma’s works are widespread.)

There’s more celebration this week of the painter and printmaker who was given the title of “Raja” in 1904 by Viceroy Lord Curzon. To mark his 172nd birthday (April 29), another Bengaluru-based non-profit, the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, has launched two new exhibits, also on the Google Arts & Culture platform.

A litho stone used to make prints of Urvashi. The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation

One of these is a book for researchers, called The World of Raja Ravi Varma: Princes & Patrons. Written by Manu Pillai, this is a collection of stories of the people in Varma’s commissioned portraits. One of Pillai’s favourites is a portrait of Mahaprabha of Mavelikkara, Varma’s mother-in-law who was embroiled in a murder case. One of the weapons, reveals Pillai, was a Kerala summer staple — a giant jackfruit. More on this in Pillai’s latest book (not for sale but will be made available to researchers on request).

Varma's sketch of an elephant carrying the Travancore State Emblem.

The other exhibit is a 33-minute documentary on Varma’s printing press, by Goa-based filmmaker Vikas Urs. Available on YouTube as well, the film begins with the arrival of a printing press, a machine which could make 800 prints every hour. This press churned out affordable yet quality prints of Varma’s brand of art, one that fused Indian stories with European aesthetics. It was set up in Ghatkopar, Bombay (Mumbai) in 1894 with German technicians. In the wake of an epidemic that quickly spread to various parts of India, the press was moved to Malavli near Lonavala. Riddled with debt and uncertainty compounded by the plague, Ravi Varma and his brother C Raja Raja Varma sold the press in 1903. But the new proprietor, one of the technicians, Fritz Schleicher, continued to churn out Varma’s works. From postcards, matchboxes, calendars and advertisements, Varma’s ubiquitous imagery went on to have a life of its own.

There comes Papa, sourced from the Kowdiar Palace Collection, Thiruvananthapuram. The Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation

Perhaps this is why Shivaswamy declares firmly that the painter and his printing press were two different entities altogether: there’s the Varma who died in 1906, and the Varma whose prints continued to take on a myriad forms and spoke to a different clientele, the common people.

Shivaswamy’s own journey with Varma began when he was 13, when his mother tasked him with finding a Ravi Varma Saraswati to replace the one his aunt had taken. He found a Saraswati, but it wasn’t the version his family owned. It made him wonder how many other versions of the same gods and goddesses Varma had made, setting off a 30-year-long journey.

Salvaged printing machinery from the abandoned press in Malavli.

On talking to Ravi Varma experts, such as art conservator Rupika Chawla (author of Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India) and going back to original resources, Shivaswamy realised that a lot of the original sources were no longer where they were expected to be.

“At this rate, no future academician or researcher would have been able to look at the original resources for new narratives which require base material,” says Shivaswamy. Besides, not everyone has the necessary access, with tours of collections maintained by palaces and collectors. “That’s why it’s imperative to have everything on one platform. Now not everyone has to start from scratch,” he says. It’s a case not just for art lovers, but also for art academia in India.