For The Love Of The Gods

New books and a film about Raja Ravi Varma inspire fresh debates about art, eroticism and artistic freedom writes RAGHU KARNAD

IN 2007, THE YEAR after he was chased out of the country, MF Hussain was offered the Raja Ravi Varma Award by the Kerala state government. For the vigilantes pursuing Hussain, this was rubbing salt in the wounds of Hindu sanskriti. Very soon, every Hindutva website ran a feature comparing Hussain’s paintings with those of Ravi Varma. India’s cultural schism, the struggle for its soul, was bared for all to see: on one side the depraved, erotic and deviant Hussain, on the other the pious, patriotic and consummately traditional Ravi Varma.

Yet that juxtaposition makes much more of a point than the vigilantes realised. If they knew just a little about Ravi Varma’s life, they might see it mirrored in Hussain’s. Both created new styles, definitive of modern Indian painting, by adapting the contemporary European vogue. They created bold new imagery of Hindu deities. Both were explosively popular, and so often mimicked they became half-identified as kitsch.

Both men were widely acclaimed as geniuses. Then they came under the crosshairs of conservative censorship. Ultimately, both were used by the ideological movements of the day. Ravi Varma’s art was sanctified by the early stirrings of the freedom struggle and Hindu revivalism. Hussain’s has been demonised by a swelling Hindutva .

This year has seen a revived interest in Raja Ravi Varma. Neville Tuli, the chairman of Osian’s auction house, purchased a Ravi Varma for Rs. 6 crore, his highest-ever valuation. He is the subject of a film by Ketan Mehta, Rang Rasiya, played by Randeep Hooda. A new biography by art historian Rupika Chawla appears later this year.

The reason for this interest is Ravi Varma’s deep, complicated influence on artistic freedom in India. In the mid-1890s, he faced an obscenity trial, which forms the narrative of Rang Rasiya. “Ravi Varma dared to imagine the divine”, said Mehta, “So he was persecuted by fundamentalists. That is extremely relevant to us today — a hundred years have passed, but that intolerance remains”. The father of modern Indian art was once its most rebellious son.

Ravi Varma was born in 1848 in an erstwhile royal family of Kerala, the House of Travancore, and his family encouraged his gift for painting. Oils were an exotic, medium, but Ravi Varma was born with a silver paintbrush in his fist. His family could afford to buy him oils, and he was trained by European portrait-painters visiting the Travancore Court.

He had a gift for portraiture, blending European naturalism with touches of Thanjavur painting. His popularity soared, to the point that a post office was built in Kilimanoor for his mail. In 1873, having won first prize at the Vienna Exhibition, Ravi Varma left portraiture, and began painting gods and Puranic heroes, using the same academic naturalism. “He uniquely combined western technique with Indian mythic and religious sensibilities” says Tuli. “Unlike any other artist’s, his imagery reached out to thousands of households, and influenced the aesthetic sensibilities of millions of Indians.” But his new visual idiom was only part of the reason for his influence on Indian art. It would be propagated by a new technology and a new political momentum.

The technology was chromolithography, a printing technique that replicated oil paintings as cheap, colourful oleographs. Ravi Varma set up India’s first chromolithographic press in Bombay in 1891. People who might never have laid eyes on an oil painting were able to put his prints on their walls. Hanging in middle-class living rooms, in portrait-like human form, divine images were tangible in an entirely new way. Devotees dressed them in fabric and replica jewellery. Ravi Varma’s prints were an amazing development: snapshots of the gods.

Nothing since has displaced Ravi Varma from his position in popular religious art. In every corner of the country, colour-saturated ‘calendar art’ is pasted on taxi windows, kitchen calendars, puja rooms, folded into wallets, framed in the temple sanctum. All of it is Ravi Varma-derived.

The second tide that swept Ravi Varma’s art across the country was the nationalist movement, when it was picked up by Hindu revivalists like Tilak, and Ravi Varma was hailed as an artist-nationalist, a man who seized the oils from the imperialists and created a sacred imagery for the waking Hindu nation.

His art is even credited with consolidating Hindu tradition, by standardising how it depicted the gods. His divinities became nationally recognisable in a way that regional icons had never been. The anthropologist Stephen Inglis suggests that “the ubiquity, portability and mobility of these images have drawn Hindus closer to one another in the ways they perceive the divine”.

Yet his imagery marginalised older artistic traditions, to the chagrin of artists ever since. “He made art that reached every home and village”, said Hussain, speaking from Dubai, “But with a very negative effect on this country’s aesthetics. His images are stale, pale and mediocre in comparison to the Rajasthani tradition, the Kalighat paintings, which were the basis of great Indian art”.

TULI DEFENDS the man: “He simply produced art which he knew the Indian public would absorb. Thereafter, socio-economic-political forces embedded his imagery in their mindsets, making it harder to free the sensibility or allow it to wander in other directions”. An amazing manoeuvre: it effaced existing traditions, then made a tradition of itself.

One way it did so was by burying erotic tradition in religious art. Ravi Varma was an unlikely candidate for the job. He would hire Bombay dance girls as models, and was far from chaste personally (in Rang Rasiya, Hooda does more than just paint Nandana Sen). He was dragged through an obscenity trial at the height of his career: a fact usually left out of his biographies. But his paintings tapped the erotic vein that has always run through Indian devotional art. “His themes were sensual,” says artist Akbar Padamsee, “But they were shy of being sexual. In their saris and contemporary dress, the gods became like family members”. Thanks to him, respectable dress became a divine concern.

It was a guarantee that, in the future, confused defenders of Hindu tradition would treat any eroticism in art as obscenity. Since then, many an artist has been harassed with IPC charges (usually Sections 153A and 295A: promoting enmity and outraging religious feelings). The most pathetic example, of course, is the exile Hussain. His detractors would do well to study the life of Ravi Varma, in which blasphemy and tradition were two stops on a single road. •