The importance of being Raja Ravi Varma

It is a pity that Raja Ravi Varma, credited as the catalyst who became the first Indian painter to use Western idioms for Indian art, should be mocked by the middle-class intellectuarati as a calendar artist. The association with kitsch and Varma is, indeed, deeply ingrained in our psyche, in no small measure because his oleographs helped popularise the whole notion of bazaar prints. It is this popularity that has resulted in somewhat derisive debates around his contribution, even though his canvases - extremely hard to come by - have a very high covenant among collectors. The unfortunate discussions rarely move beyond the grammar of his art and the propensity of the print to debase its value.

There is much that we owe Ravi Varma. His pan-Indian iconography, the use of depth and light for perhaps the first time in Indian art, his insistence on not being limited by geography as he travelled extensively to princely kingdoms and the outposts of Empire to seek commissions, providing in the bargain the stimulus that stirred the movement that would lead, inevitably, to the rise of Indian modernism. The heroic nationalism and subverted sexuality of his work was criticised by, among others, Amrita Sher-Gil, and in recent decades the association with the vulgar has resulted in parody rather than serious study.

Art restorer Rupika Chawla, who has done seminal work on the artist, succeeds where others have failed in turning the artist into a muse for practising artists from around the country. In curating a show where she accepts the notion of 'high' and 'low' art, both of which have ironically been associated with Ravi Varma, she has worked with a sensitivity that has been lacking in the public space in respect to his art as an outcome of his time. Interpretation of Varma's figures in the hands of current artists reignites the recognition of the roots that nurtured it. Most have responded to the challenge with a level of seriousness that invites study. In so doing, the bigger contribution is the dialogue around his work that has been re-opened around the artists' imaginings. Reimagined, the stories now come to us in a myriad styles, from the minimal to the overtly decorated. Not surprisingly, if the hyped, overwrought versions pay ode to the artist, the seminal contribution is from artists who have diverged from Ravi Varma's own rendition, using his myth-making and heroic visualisation to render stories with a restraint that breathes an alternate passion and, therefore, art practice.

The exhibition, currently on view at Art Alive Gallery in Gurgaon, faces off artistic polemics as dissimilar as Anjolie Ela Menon and Rajeshwar Rao, Paresh Maity and Manish Gera Baswani, Atul Dodiya and Jogen Chowdhury, Manjunath Kamath and Anita Dubey, Vivek Vilasini and Pushpamala, G R Iranna and Chintan Upadhyay, Jagannath Panda and Ravinder Reddy, Anupam Sud and Waswo X Waswo, V Ramesh and Ranbir Kaleka among several others. While their ode is commendable, it points out a lacunae in current contemporariness in terms of an inability to create a similar dialogue in mediums - videos, installations, sculpture - that may not have apparent sympathy with Ravi Varma's work. Yet, if Thukral & Tagra can take his Mohini and transfer her into into Wonderwoman, then the shift to mediums removed from those available to Ravi Varma could help take stock of his relevance a hundred years after his practice earned him a place of pre-eminence in art-historical certification - whether classical or bazaar, high or low.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated