Raja Ravi Varma — The Man Who Gave India Its Gods

Raja Ravi Varma. You've probably seen his work without knowing his name.

That image of Goddess Lakshmi standing on a lotus, draped in red and gold, holding a pot of coins — the one you've seen on calendars, on temple walls, on the packaging of half the products in your grandmother's kitchen. That's him.

He painted it in 1896.

The Painter from Kilimanoor

He was born on 29 April 1848 in Kilimanoor — a small royal estate in Travancore, in what is now Kerala. His family was aristocratic, connected to the Travancore royal house. As a child he was presented at the court of the Maharaja of Travancore, Ayilyam Thirunal, who recognized something unusual in the boy and arranged for his formal training.

He learned painting the traditional way first. Then he learned oil painting — a European technique — from a Dutch painter named Theodore Jensen who had come to the Travancore court.

Nobody had done this before. Nobody had looked at Hindu mythology and rendered it in the language of European academic realism.

That combination — the content of one civilization, the technique of another — is what made him.

What He Actually Did

Before Ravi Varma, India's gods lived in stylized forms. Flat, two-dimensional, symbolic. Mughal miniatures. Temple bronzes. Folk paintings. Beautiful, but distant. Intentionally distant — divinity wasn't supposed to look like a person.

Ravi Varma changed that.

He painted Sita. He painted Draupadi. He painted Shakuntala. He painted Lakshmi and Saraswati and Parvati. He painted them as women — real women with weight and shadow and emotion in their faces. You could look at his Damayanti and feel she was thinking something.

An entire generation of Indians saw these paintings and that is the version of their gods they carried forward. The image became the standard. So completely that most people today don't realize it was a choice someone made in the 1880s.

That's the quiet enormity of what he did.

The Presses

In 1894, he set up a lithographic press — the Ravi Varma Fine Arts Lithographic Press — in Ghatkopar, Bombay. For the first time, his paintings could be mass-reproduced as affordable prints.

They sold everywhere. Every home that couldn't afford a painting could now have a print. The gods entered ordinary houses.

He didn't just make art. He made the distribution of art.

The Film Connection

Ravi Varma died on 2 October 1906.

Two years later, a young man named Dhundiraj Govind Phalke — later known as Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema — saw a silent film on the life of Christ in Bombay and walked out thinking: why can't we do this for our own gods?

The visual language he used to tell those stories, the way he imagined Krishna and Rama and Sita on screen — it came directly from Ravi Varma's paintings. His images were the reference.

Dadasaheb Phalke's first film, Raja Harishchandra(1913), is considered the first Indian feature film. The mythology it depicted looked like Ravi Varma's paintings because that's the only visual vocabulary anyone had for it.

Indian cinema was born with Ravi Varma's aesthetic already in its DNA.

What Gets Lost in the Praise

He was extraordinary. He was also contested.

Traditionalists attacked him for making the gods too human, too accessible — for stripping divinity of its appropriate distance. Some critics said he had commercialized the sacred. That the mass-printed calendar art cheapened what should have been rare.

There's something worth sitting with in that critique. When one man's interpretation of a goddess becomes so dominant that it crowds out every other interpretation — that's a kind of power. Not malicious power, but power nonetheless.

He gave India its gods. He also, in a way, narrowed them.

A Note on Responsibility

The connection between Ravi Varma and the visual language of early Indian cinema is documented and not disputed. The specific detail about Dadasaheb Phalke drawing from Ravi Varma's aesthetic is widely referenced in film scholarship.

The claim that his images are “the standard” most Indians carry is an observation, not a documented fact — but it is one shared by most Indian art historians.

The Kilimanoor family's claimed Rajput descent is noted by Manu S. Pillai in The Ivory Throne with deliberate scepticism — Pillai uses the word claiming rather than stating it as fact.

References

Books

• Manu S. Pillai — The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (2015). HarperCollins India. — Primary source for biographical details and Kerala court context.
• Rupika Chawla — Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India (2010). Mapin Publishing. — The most thorough biographical study.
• Geeta Kapur — When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India(2000). — Critical framing of Ravi Varma's place in Indian modernity.

Paintings worth finding

• Sita Bhumi Pravesh — The earth opens to receive Sita after Rama questions her fidelity. She does not resist. She asks Mother Earth to take her back. Painted in 1880, it was his first Ramayana work and the first to enter the royal collection at Baroda. The darkness in the colour palette is deliberate.
• Ravana Carrying Off Sita and Opposed by Jatayu — The old eagle Jatayu tries to stop Ravana mid-flight as he abducts Sita. Ravana slices off his wing. Sita covers her eyes. Three figures in violent motion against an open sky. Painted 1895 — probably his most kinetic composition.
• Yashoda Pointing Balakrishna to His Cows — A quiet domestic scene: Yashoda gestures toward the herd as young Krishna looks up at her. No drama, no divinity on display. Just a mother and a boy. The tenderness in it is the point.
• Victory of Indrajit — Meghnad, Ravana's son, stands triumphant after binding Rama and Lakshmana with his Brahmastra. One of the few Ravi Varma paintings where the “villain” is the subject — painted with the same dignity he reserved for heroes.
• Adi Shankaracharya — 1904. The philosopher seated on the banks of a river with his four disciples: Padmapadacharya, Thotakacharya, Hastamalakacharya, Sureshwaracharya. Painted two years before Ravi Varma's death — calm, scholarly, nothing like his mythological drama.
• Krishna's Embassy to Duryodhana — 1905. Krishna arrives at the Kaurava court as a last attempt to prevent the Kurukshetra war. Duryodhana refuses. The painting captures the exact moment before the war becomes inevitable — everyone in the room knows what comes next.
• Ram Sagar Darpa Haran — Rama Vanquishing the Ocean — Rama's monkey army cannot cross the sea to Lanka. He meditates for three days at the shore. The ocean refuses to yield. Rama reaches for his bow. The ocean god appears. This is the moment he picks — not the miracle, but the fury just before it.

Part of the series — India and its History