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This chapter examines the discourse on light and shadow in two paintings of scholars by Ravi Varma that use chiaroscuro to depict men reading within the interiors of a westernised home. Ravi Varma uses the symbolic qualities of light and shadow to produce private interior spaces, in this case an imagined inner world, where the Nayar matrilineal tharavad (household) is transformed into an intimate space for the cultivation of the (male) self. In step with the contemporary Malayalam novel, the paintings identify the domestic interior as a stage upon which a private life is imagined, where personal space and reflection are brought together to convey an interiority that one typically associates with the bourgeois modern subject. The chapter evaluates how the interior figured in domestic architecture and family life, its implications for gender and social relations and, finally, how a new idea of home emerged in tandem with a territorial imagination fuelled by the new possibilities of travel in late nineteenth-century Kerala. It argues that chiaroscuro emerges as an effective visual device to produce the fictions of the self-reflective autonomous self, with the light and darks suggesting hidden interiorities and buried subjectivities.

Taking a small portrait by Ravi Varma of a scholar reading in the glow of a lamp as a servant waits upon him in the background shadows, this chapter evaluates the emergence of the elitist figure of the artist against the backdrop of the subaltern craftsman. The differential inscription of light marks their place within the new order of visibility – the named artist whose face glows in the lamp and the anonymous craftsman marked by his labour. Keeping in mind recent art-historical scholarship that has tended to view the figure of the artist as the paradigmatic modern subject, this chapter tracks the developments in portraiture and the assertion of individualism, arguing that the representation of the elite artist allowed for a way to transition from the dominant anthropological model of portraiture popular in nineteenth-century India to the fiction of the assured subjectivity of later portraits.

Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.

Chapter 3 further examines Dwivedi’s visually oriented strategies to establish literary authority amidst resistance, especially from critics who publicly decried his brand of poetry as crude, and from poets who continued to publish in Braj Bhasha. Dwivedi’s response was pragmatic: he attempted to bring sophistication to Khari Boli poetry through a cultivated association with art; and he modelled poetry that adhered to a modified agenda. He authored and commissioned a series of image-poems, poetry inspired by and published alongside paintings by Ravi Varma (1848–1906) as well as other contemporary artists. Dwivedi’s limited use and sanction of Braj Bhasha’s linguistic and literary influence in these image-poems did not match his agenda in cartoons and prose. Such maneuvers defined the very substance of modern Hindi poetry in the early twentieth century and established Khari Boli as the language of modern Hindi literature.

This chapter examines the question of authenticity concerning Indian aesthetics during the colonial period, with particular emphasis on some of the complex ways in which race and aesthetics intertwined in the British-Indian colonial encounter. It considers what makes Indian art authentically Indian and how one can remain authentically Indian while being creative, modern, and relevant to the art world as a whole. More specifically, it looks at Indian artists who were able to transcend the dichotomy to become cosmopolitan. That is, they came to be viewed both by Western critics and Indian rasikas as universal: producing art beyond the parochial boundaries of nation, race, ethnicity, and religion. Discourse invoking the trope of the authentic placed aesthetic and even political demands on artists and their artwork and defined the emerging aesthetic sensibility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter explores how these demands were met and how they were sometimes simply sidestepped by focusing on three cosmopolitan artists of colonial India: Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, and Amrita Sher-Gil.

This chapter examines the active role of Viśvāmitra’s mythological persona within the social history of colonial and postcolonial India over the last century—within the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, the political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, cinema and television, and especially within the Marathi devotional performance tradition known as nāradīya kīrtan. Special attention is given to a colonial-period critique of Viśvāmitra’s egoism (ahaṃkār) that appeared in the context of Brahmin social reform in Maharashtra, and how, by the onset of the twenty-first century, his hybridity has now come to reflect a desire to internalize traditional Brahmin identity amidst the corrupt politics, hyperurban chaos, and transnational cultural flows of contemporary Maharashtrian life, pointing toward a new, “postmodern” configuration of Brahmin social power.

Modern Indian art can trace its origins to pre-Independence India, which was when Western influences had started making an impact on Indian art. In the course of her interview, Geeta Kapur discusses the neo-classical style adopted by Raja Ravi Varma, one of the many Indian painters who drew inspiration from Western schools and used Western techniques and principles in their works. She also looks at the foreign influences and traditional approaches to art in modern India.