MEMORIS
Portrait of an artist
GAYATRI SINHA
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Despite some substantial gaps, the diary is a remarkable record of a painter's enterprise.
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Populist paintings?: Raja Ravi Varma's oeuvre still provokes debate. Photo: G.R.N. Somashekar
The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma, edited by Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Oxford University Press, 2005
RAVI VARMA'S comprehensive retrospective at the National Museum in 1991 had an unpredictable multiplier effect. Ananda Coomaraswamy's earlier invective, that Ravi Varma had been a purveyor of the pejoratively termed "middle values" returned with a resounding affirmation. The long queues of visitors at the exhibition, the popularity of offset reprints of Ravi Varma's sundaris that flew off the shelves of Lajpat Nagar shops affirmed Coomaraswamy's fears: Ravi Varma was the darling of the Indian masses.
The other realisation was that despite the disparaging objections of J. Swaminathan, M.F. Husain and other modernists carried in the national press, against such substantial sponsorship of the event by the National Museum, academic study of Ravi Varma's oeuvre, and his relevance within the making of a modern Indian canon had begun.
The making of a canon
In the period since the event, Ravi Varma has been analysed by writers as divergent as Partha Mitter, Rattan Parimoo, Gulammohammed Sheikh within the context of Indian popular art, the making of a "modern" iconography, western academic and Indian oil painting and what Ramananda Chatterjee called the "creative function of art in the domain of mythology".
Christine Schelberger and Erwin Neumayer have added with this volume, a most significant contribution to the growing corpus of information on Ravi Varma. The first time the two extant diaries of C. Raja Raja Varma, Ravi Varma's faithful brother, fellow artist and diarist, became available in photocopied form was when the authors showed their magnificent poster collection in New Delhi. The present volume collates Raja Raja Varma's diary from 1895 to his death in 1904. The 940 entries, however, are concentrated in the 1902-1903 period which was dominated by a prolific output, as well as the brothers' vexed problems with financial loss and the eventual sale of the Ravi Varma press. Raja Raja Varma's methodical and rather prosaic style may not have the literary skill of, say, Abanindranath Tagore's diary. Nevertheless, it affords a rare historical insight into the last 10 years of Ravi Varma's life, into the artist as "portraitist of aristocrats and of the celestial".
As India's first successful professional painter, it records Ravi Varma's skilful negotiations with the unpredictable ruler of Udaipur, the demand for his work from Indian merchant princes and the Anglo Indian elite. In his forward, Dr. Partha Mitter writes how the brothers' "work was efficiently divided into portrait commissions with tight deadlines and the more leisurely production of work for exhibitions for the art societies of Bombay". He draws a comparison between Varma's way of working simultaneously on three or four works, of travelling with a retinue of servants and of spending their leisure hours browsing among books and visiting the theatre to the established European tradition of the gentleman artist.
In the main, the diary of Raja Raja Varma reveals the duo's highly organised approach to their work that took them to Udaipur, the jagat seths of Mathura, Agra, Gwalior , Delhi, Kanpur, Ayodhya to fulfil commissions as well as temple pilgrimages. Raja Raja records the scenes of dance and music often arranged for the brothers, of the dominant cultural flavour of Madras and Bombay, the abundance of peacocks on the flat planes of Rajasthan. Raja Raja complains
that the streets of Calcutta are not as well watered as those of Bombay, and the artists' difficulty in getting prostitutes to pose for them.
Raja Raja's narrative has a phlegmatic quality; the brother's financial troubles with the Ravi Varma press are described in the same fairly measured tones as their everyday enterprise of buying painting materials, or the constant arrangement of meetings with wealthy clients. There is also a tantalising absence of detail. In December 1903, Raja Raja records a meeting with "Mr. Dhurandhar, artist" and later that month, one with G.K. Mhatre, whose awards-winning sculpture "To the Temple" had caused a sensation. But Raja Raja leaves no details of the meetings, of what could have transpired between these frontrunners of the academic style.
Despite some substantial gaps, the diary is a remarkable record of a painter's enterprise, and the induction of the three main areas of interest — in portraiture, historicist themes, and towards the last part of his life, Ravi Varma's nationalist phase. The value of the volume is enhanced with additional information, of the German books that the authors discovered in the artists library in Kilimanur, and Ravi Varma's dependence on photographs in his paintings is well documented.
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