A painter from the princely family of Kilimanoor who joined European oil-painting technique to Indian mythological subject matter, and whose images of the gods, reproduced by the thousand through his own Bombay lithography press, became the visual template millions of households across the country still recognize today.
केरल · Kerala, 1848–1906
Raja Ravi Varma was born in 1848 in Kilimanoor, a small principality allied to the kingdom of Travancore in present-day Kerala, into a family with its own tradition of art and letters. He trained first under local mural and portrait painters before studying the technique of European academic oil painting, at a time when very few Indian artists worked in that medium. He went on to paint portraits of the ruling families of several princely states, and won recognition and awards at exhibitions in Vienna and Chicago, but the work he is remembered for is his series of large mythological paintings — scenes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas, and individual images of deities such as Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Shri Krishna — rendered with the anatomical realism, depth, and drapery of European painting, set within recognizably Indian settings and dress.
In 1894 Ravi Varma established an oleograph printing press near Bombay, later moved to Malavli, specifically to reproduce his mythological paintings as affordable color prints. The press made his images of the gods available to ordinary households across the country for the first time in this visual form, at a price far below a painting, and they were copied further onto calendars, packaging, and devotional prints for decades afterward. Much of what large numbers of people across Bharat still picture when they picture Saraswati, Lakshmi, or a scene from the epics traces directly back to a Ravi Varma composition, even where the original painting itself is no longer widely seen. He died in 1906, and the press he founded continued printing his images well into the twentieth century.