I entered the auditorium screening Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya with much apprehension. Mehta achieved so much in his first three films, but his vision went awry starting with 1988’s Hero Hiralal, and he hasn’t made a good film since. To make matters worse, it was a late screening, and I had a headache. Then there was the subject of art history, which films never seem to tackle adequately. Most biopics of painters are either plain absurd, like Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, or well-intentioned but boring, like Salma Hayak’s Frida.
I exited the auditorium at 1.30 am relieved that I had been able to sit through Rang Rasiya with ease. Mehta’s sense of editing rhythm is entirely busted, but a certain visual fluidity that returned to his film-making with Mangal Pandey: The Rising, is evident in his latest essay, and he handles the narrative arc of the story relatively well. This might feel like damning with faint praise but, while I can’t honestly call Rang Rasiya a successful movie, it has many good things in it, not least its stand on artistic freedom. I’m heartened that some recent films, Dev D, Queen, and Haider among them, have staked out ground less compromising than traditional commercial fare. Otherwise it was always some variation of the atheist making his peace with God at the climax.
How accurate is Rang Rasiya’s account of Ravi Varma’s life and achievements? I’d give it a B- on historical veracity, which, again, is not bad considering most Hindi films are straight Fs. Ravi Varma was a far cannier man than Randeep Hooda’s interpretation of Ketan Mehta’s interpretation of Ranjit Desai’s novelistic interpretation of the painter’s career would have us believe. With each intermediary step, a layer of romanticism has been added till Ravi Varma becomes something closer to an idea of an artist, removed from everything excepting his art and his muse, than a flesh and blood individual.
Reinforcing a myth
Entirely ignored is his deep debt to Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema who studied the ruins of Pompeii and constructed in his canvases a classical Rome that influenced Hollywood productions as deeply as Ravi Varma’s costumes and backdrop-like landscapes would influence Indian cinema. To acknowledge such influence in a film would be to destroy the myth that the true artist, whether Van Gogh, or Frida Kahlo or Ravi Varma, creates from a mix of personal experience and pure inspiration untouched by conscious imitation.
More importantly, the fictional obscenity trial which is placed at the centre of Ketan Mehta’s film, and features less prominently in Desai’s book, reverses the role Ravi Varma actually played in relation to the depiction of Indian divinities. In the film and book, certain conservative Brahmins accuse the painter of sullying the image of Hindu gods and goddesses by painting them nude or semi-nude. In actual fact, Ravi Varma’s Hindu divinities were far more demure than their predecessors, as anybody who has seen miniatures of Kali copulating with Shiva will know. As for painting goddesses in the nude, an important trial in 1894, which Ravi Varma attended though he wasn’t either accused or accuser, came to the weird conclusion that nudity was permissible only if the depictions were of a religious character.
The background of the trial lay in cheap pornographic chromolithographs imported from Germany that flooded the Indian market in the late 19th century. The verdict in the so-called "Poona pictures" case hinged on a parasol brandished by one of the near-naked women in one of the images. The judges, John Jardine and Mahadev Govind Ranade, held that, “Naked pictures of classical subjects were not obscene, in that the artists had higher ideals than merely exciting the sensual appetites of the spectators. The pictures in question might have been classed among them, had it not been for the introduction into them of modern silk umbrellas and apparel that divested them of their idealism.” After this judgement, Ravi Varma ensured that any of his paintings with nudity in them had a firmly mythological subject.
Ravi Varma’s reputation, like that of Alma-Tadema, went into steep decline for decades, before being resurrected in recent decades alongside a new respect for popular culture. However, in all the scholarship related to the aesthetics of calendar art, and the worship of his printed icons across India, few historians have directly tackled the question of why his works found such a massive audience. No doubt he was a gifted painter, but his technique also had obvious shortcomings. With the British having inaugurated a series of art schools where oil painting was taught, there were Indian painters active in Ravi Varma’s time who displayed greater virtuosity than he did.
Why he succeeded
His depiction of Hindu myths and legends did set him apart from most of his colleagues, who concentrated on commissioned portraits, but it was his manner that was at least as crucial as his subject matter. I believe Ravi Varma’s signal achievement was to translate into a visual medium the sentimentality that characterises India’s narrative tradition, and has historically been lacking in the Indian visual tradition.
Balendranath Tagore was the first to express this explicitly, celebrating the abundance of bhava in Ravi Varma’s art while contrasting it favourably with miniature painting. When a reaction against Ravi Varma’s naturalism arose in Calcutta, it retained the emotiveness of his art even while turning to Indian miniatures for inspiration. Partha Mitter has written about the leader of the anti-Ravi Varma group, Abanindranath Tagore, “Abanindranath’s outlook was very different from the Mughal artist, whose brief did not include the treatment of human emotions. … For all their brilliance, contended Abanindranath, Mughal works lacked bhava (feeling): Human beings were rendered as lifeless mechanical dolls.”
India has a literary tradition absolutely soaked with sentiment, from the karuna of the Ramayana, to the Shakuntala of Kalidasa (Kalidasa’s version of Shakuntala’s story, a favourite of Ravi Varma’s, differs substantially from the one in the Mahabharata), to contemporary Bollywood tear-jerkers. It was Ravi Varma who changed Indian visual art so it could be placed alongside Valmiki, and Kalidasa, and Karan Johar.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
I exited the auditorium at 1.30 am relieved that I had been able to sit through Rang Rasiya with ease. Mehta’s sense of editing rhythm is entirely busted, but a certain visual fluidity that returned to his film-making with Mangal Pandey: The Rising, is evident in his latest essay, and he handles the narrative arc of the story relatively well. This might feel like damning with faint praise but, while I can’t honestly call Rang Rasiya a successful movie, it has many good things in it, not least its stand on artistic freedom. I’m heartened that some recent films, Dev D, Queen, and Haider among them, have staked out ground less compromising than traditional commercial fare. Otherwise it was always some variation of the atheist making his peace with God at the climax.
How accurate is Rang Rasiya’s account of Ravi Varma’s life and achievements? I’d give it a B- on historical veracity, which, again, is not bad considering most Hindi films are straight Fs. Ravi Varma was a far cannier man than Randeep Hooda’s interpretation of Ketan Mehta’s interpretation of Ranjit Desai’s novelistic interpretation of the painter’s career would have us believe. With each intermediary step, a layer of romanticism has been added till Ravi Varma becomes something closer to an idea of an artist, removed from everything excepting his art and his muse, than a flesh and blood individual.
Reinforcing a myth
Entirely ignored is his deep debt to Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema who studied the ruins of Pompeii and constructed in his canvases a classical Rome that influenced Hollywood productions as deeply as Ravi Varma’s costumes and backdrop-like landscapes would influence Indian cinema. To acknowledge such influence in a film would be to destroy the myth that the true artist, whether Van Gogh, or Frida Kahlo or Ravi Varma, creates from a mix of personal experience and pure inspiration untouched by conscious imitation.
More importantly, the fictional obscenity trial which is placed at the centre of Ketan Mehta’s film, and features less prominently in Desai’s book, reverses the role Ravi Varma actually played in relation to the depiction of Indian divinities. In the film and book, certain conservative Brahmins accuse the painter of sullying the image of Hindu gods and goddesses by painting them nude or semi-nude. In actual fact, Ravi Varma’s Hindu divinities were far more demure than their predecessors, as anybody who has seen miniatures of Kali copulating with Shiva will know. As for painting goddesses in the nude, an important trial in 1894, which Ravi Varma attended though he wasn’t either accused or accuser, came to the weird conclusion that nudity was permissible only if the depictions were of a religious character.
The background of the trial lay in cheap pornographic chromolithographs imported from Germany that flooded the Indian market in the late 19th century. The verdict in the so-called "Poona pictures" case hinged on a parasol brandished by one of the near-naked women in one of the images. The judges, John Jardine and Mahadev Govind Ranade, held that, “Naked pictures of classical subjects were not obscene, in that the artists had higher ideals than merely exciting the sensual appetites of the spectators. The pictures in question might have been classed among them, had it not been for the introduction into them of modern silk umbrellas and apparel that divested them of their idealism.” After this judgement, Ravi Varma ensured that any of his paintings with nudity in them had a firmly mythological subject.
Ravi Varma’s reputation, like that of Alma-Tadema, went into steep decline for decades, before being resurrected in recent decades alongside a new respect for popular culture. However, in all the scholarship related to the aesthetics of calendar art, and the worship of his printed icons across India, few historians have directly tackled the question of why his works found such a massive audience. No doubt he was a gifted painter, but his technique also had obvious shortcomings. With the British having inaugurated a series of art schools where oil painting was taught, there were Indian painters active in Ravi Varma’s time who displayed greater virtuosity than he did.
Why he succeeded
His depiction of Hindu myths and legends did set him apart from most of his colleagues, who concentrated on commissioned portraits, but it was his manner that was at least as crucial as his subject matter. I believe Ravi Varma’s signal achievement was to translate into a visual medium the sentimentality that characterises India’s narrative tradition, and has historically been lacking in the Indian visual tradition.
Balendranath Tagore was the first to express this explicitly, celebrating the abundance of bhava in Ravi Varma’s art while contrasting it favourably with miniature painting. When a reaction against Ravi Varma’s naturalism arose in Calcutta, it retained the emotiveness of his art even while turning to Indian miniatures for inspiration. Partha Mitter has written about the leader of the anti-Ravi Varma group, Abanindranath Tagore, “Abanindranath’s outlook was very different from the Mughal artist, whose brief did not include the treatment of human emotions. … For all their brilliance, contended Abanindranath, Mughal works lacked bhava (feeling): Human beings were rendered as lifeless mechanical dolls.”
India has a literary tradition absolutely soaked with sentiment, from the karuna of the Ramayana, to the Shakuntala of Kalidasa (Kalidasa’s version of Shakuntala’s story, a favourite of Ravi Varma’s, differs substantially from the one in the Mahabharata), to contemporary Bollywood tear-jerkers. It was Ravi Varma who changed Indian visual art so it could be placed alongside Valmiki, and Kalidasa, and Karan Johar.
