Mythologies of the Artist in Modern India: Cinema, Melodrama and Ravi Varma: Cinema, melodrama, and Ravi Varma

Although the Indian artist Ravi Varma (1948-1906) was much celebrated during his lifetime, and not quite forgotten after his death in 1906, in the last decade there has been a true revival of interest in his life and work. In 2008 Ketan Mehta directed a Hindi film Rang Rasiya (Colours of Passion) based on the life of the celebrated Indian painter.1 Another fictionalized biographical sketch of the artist, this time in book form, The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma by Deepanjana Pal, followed in 2009 and was directed towards a broad audience. In 2010 a more scholarly treatment of Varma’s life and work was published under the title Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India; it was written by Rupika Chawla, who had curated a major retrospective of the artist in 1993 at the National Museum in Delhi. This exhibition had provided a major impetus for the reconsideration of the artist’s work in the annals of modern Indian art. A second film on his life and work in Malayalam followed in 2010; entitled Makaramanju (The Mist of Capricorn) and directed by Lenin Rajendran it was then dubbed in Tamil as Apsaras (2011). 2013 marked the arrival of an English translation of a romantic Marathi biography (Raja Ravi Varma, 2013) by the writer Ranjit Desai. It was this publication that served as the source of both the films produced on Ravi Varma.