Raja Ravi Varma — The Artist Who Gave India's Gods a Human Face (1848–1906)

When Raja Ravi Varma set up his printing press in Lonavala in 1894, he unleashed something unprecedented in Indian cultural history: affordable, beautiful images of Hindu gods and goddesses, available to anyone who could afford a few annas. For the first time, a peasant farmer in Bengal or a labourer in Madras could hang Lakshmi or Saraswati on his wall — not as a pale imitation of temple art, but as a vibrant, lifelike vision painted by the greatest artist in India. The calendar art that would define Indian visual culture for the next century — those luminous, sari-clad deities that still hang in homes, shops and taxis across the subcontinent — traces its lineage directly back to Ravi Varma.

But Ravi Varma was more than the father of Indian popular art. He was a technical revolutionary, a cross-cultural innovator, and one of the most significant figures in the history of Asian painting — a man who took the tools of 19th-century European academic art and used them to tell stories that Europe could never have imagined.

Born Into a Palace, Drawn to Paint

Ravi Varma was born on 29 April 1848 in the royal palace of Kilimanoor, near Thiruvananthapuram in the princely state of Travancore — present-day Kerala. His family was aristocratic, literary, and closely allied by marriage to the ruling house of Travancore. Art was in his blood: his mother was a poet and author, and at seven years old, the young Ravi Varma had already begun covering the palace walls with drawings in charcoal.

His uncle, Raja Raja Varma, recognised the boy's gift and introduced him to the Maharaja of Travancore, Ayilyam Thirunal, who invited him to stay at the royal court and observe its painters. It was there that Ravi Varma first encountered the work of European artists — and was struck by the dramatic difference between their illusionistic, perspectival style and the flatter conventions of traditional Indian painting. He resolved to master both.

His formal training was limited — the Dutch portraitist Theodore Jensen taught him the fundamentals of oil painting, but much of what Ravi Varma achieved he taught himself through relentless practice and observation. By his early twenties, he had won the Governor's Gold Medal at the Madras Fine Art Exhibition. By 1873, his paintings were on show in Vienna. By 1893, he had been awarded two gold medals at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was, without question, the most celebrated Indian artist of his age on the international stage.

The Fusion That Changed Everything

What made Ravi Varma's work so radical — and so controversial — was his decision to paint Hindu mythology using the visual language of European academic realism. Gods and goddesses rendered in oil, with the volume, shadow, anatomical detail and textural richness of a Victorian salon painting. Draped in richly detailed saris. Set in landscapes. With expressions and gestures drawn from the human world rather than the symbolic conventions of classical Indian iconography.

His models were real — the beautiful women of Maharashtra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu who sat for his mythological figures, lending Lakshmi, Saraswati, Shakuntala and Damayanti a warmth and physical presence that had never before appeared in Indian religious art. The result was images that felt simultaneously sacred and intimate, divine and human, ancient and modern. They were unlike anything India had seen.

He painted constantly and ambitiously: mythological scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, portraits of maharajas and British administrators, tender studies of women at their toilette, epic dramatic compositions such as Jatayu Vadha and Shri Rama Vanquishing the Sea. And alongside his oils, he produced watercolours of extraordinary refinement. His studio in Bombay, run like a European atelier with multiple paintings in progress simultaneously, was one of the most productive in Asia.

The Press at Lonavala: Art for the Many

In 1894, Ravi Varma made a decision that would reshape Indian visual culture for generations: he established a printing press at Lonavala, near Bombay, equipped with the most advanced lithographic technology then available — imported from Germany. The goal was explicit: to produce high-quality oleographic reproductions of his mythological paintings at a price that ordinary Indians could afford.

The timing was significant. Millions of Indians — particularly those from lower castes — were routinely barred from entering temples. They had never seen the images of the deities kept inside. Ravi Varma's prints gave them something they had been denied: a vision of the divine, rendered in vivid colour, that could be brought into the home. The prints sold in their hundreds of thousands. They became the most reproduced images in India's history, and the visual template from which an entire century of popular religious art would descend.

Not everyone was delighted. Critics and nationalists — including the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy — argued that Ravi Varma's westernised aesthetic was a betrayal of Indian artistic tradition, a capitulation to colonial taste. The debate was fierce and remains unresolved. But the people had voted with their wallets, and Ravi Varma's gods had entered every home.

A Painter Between Two Worlds

Ravi Varma occupied an extraordinary position in colonial India: an aristocrat who worked for maharajas and the British Raj alike; an Indian artist celebrated in Vienna and Chicago; a moderniser condemned by nationalists; a man whose religious images were venerated as sacred objects while critics dismissed them as sentimental. He was, in the phrase of art historian Partha Mitter, considered "modern among traditionalists and a rationalist among moderns" — too Western for the purists, too Indian for the avant-garde.

In 1904, the British Viceroy Lord Curzon awarded him the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal — the first time this honour had been given to an artist rather than a figure of trade or commerce — adding the title "Raja" to his name, by which he is known to history. He died two years later, on 2 October 1906, at Kilimanoor, the palace where he was born.

Where to Find His Work Today

Major collections of Ravi Varma's original works are held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum in Vadodara, and the Sandeep and Gitanjali Maini Foundation, among other private and institutional collections. Original paintings now command prices of several crore rupees at auction.

Discover Raja Ravi Varma at Wallango

Wallango offers museum-quality reproductions of Raja Ravi Varma's most iconic works — mythological masterpieces and luminous portraits printed on thick archival paper with exceptional colour fidelity. Bring the golden age of Indian painting into your home.