The rarer and less seen an artwork, the higher the price. The rule may stand true for most masters but not Raja Ravi Varma. His 1890 work, ‘Yashoda and Krishna’, which was an everyday feature across Indian households, became the most expensive Indian painting last month, fetching a staggering ₹167.2 crore. By making affordable oleographs of the masterful oil that rendered the divine as human, Ravi Varma’s FAL Press in Bombay made the now record-breaking work accessible.So what was his legacy? Democratising art, cultural iconography or a style that blended Indian themes with European sensibilities? On the artist’s 178th birth anniversary, here’s a look at why his legacy endures, his textured journey and the ecosystem that both celebrated and criticised his talent.Intent and talentBorn to an aristocratic family in Kerala’s Kilimanoor, Ravi Varma found painting as his calling as a child. He began training in painting, particularly water colours, in the Travancore palace at 14 under court artist Rama Swami Naidu. He later picked up oil painting techniques by observing British painter Theodore Jenson at the Travancore court. Rupika Chawla, in her book Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India (Mapin, 2010), notes that Varma had easy access to formal education and Kilimanoor provided a potent milieu for artistic inspiration.“For instance, as many of the Kilimanur family members were trained in singing and instrumental music, it was not unusual for Ravi Varma and Raja Raja Varma to see them play the veena, the string instrument,” she writes. This is where Ravi Varma’s rendition of the all-too-familiar Saraswati playing the veena originated.But it wasn’t talent alone that earned Ravi Varma the wide acclaim he went on to receive. It was an earnest desire to do more than just ‘make’ art.Also in Explained | Raja Ravi Varma painting sells for record Rs 167 crore: How India’s most expensive artist made art for the massesTo that end, he established the Raja Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic press in 1894 in Bombay and printed affordable oleographs of his elaborate oils of Indian gods and goddesses, offering Indians a shared visual vocabulary. “His press was a financial disaster but I don’t think he went into it thinking of profit as such; what he really wanted to do was make an impact. There was a clear feeling that the country had to be united through shared linkages of this type,” says historian Manu S Pillai, who wrote False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (2021, Juggernaut).Besides rendering Indian mythology on canvas and subsequently as prints, Ravi Varma also produced prints of popular political leaders like Tilak and historical figures like Chhatrapati Shivaji. “It was his way of contributing to the emerging national arena. Because India was looking for national icons. He was keen to offer them visual symbols of pride,” Pillai adds.Story continues below this ad ‘Yashoda and Krishna’, 1890 (Wikimedia Commons)His original works were as remarkable in volume as they were in technique. Ravi Varma died at 58. During his three-decade-long career, he is estimated to have created between 2,000 and 7,000 works, including oil paintings and portraits, sketches, studies and other works distributed across private collections.“Ravi Varma’s regimen of painting long hours in a sustained way was one of the reasons…” writes Chawla. The other was that “several of his drawings and sketches, done to a certain formula, with a few alterations, could be expanded and redefined into new imagery… A seated, slightly reclining woman could be a veena player or become one that belonged to the reverie/ contemplation series with minor adjustments.”Shaped by the timesHowever, Ravi Varma’s artistic legacy cannot be seen in isolation from the elite ecosystem that shaped it and the nationalist current that later turned against him. Victorian values had as much influence as traditional Indian ideas. Besides the medium of oil, which was a Western import, Ravi Varma painted his protagonists largely fair-skinned. His women wore modest blouses, while in temple sculptures, they were often topless.“His art centred an elite perspective on India, setting that as ‘the’ narrative. His major productions based on the epics were backed by the maharajahs of Baroda and Mysore, and it was a dewan of Travancore and Baroda (Sir T Madhava Rao) who first suggested he make affordable prints of his paintings,” Pillai notes.Story continues below this adAlso in Explained | What Michael Jackson’s new biopic leaves out about his complicated legacySoon, Ravi Varma drew the ire of those leading the Swadeshi movement, which considered his works a “hybrid product of the colonial regime”. As the Bengal School of Art, led by Abanindranath Tagore, rejected the West’s academic naturalism and three-dimensional illusionism, changing the country’s preferred visual lexicon, the demand for Ravi Varma’s style gradually diminished.But the ‘man from Malabar’ had already influenced the Indian imagination profoundly. “Before Varma made these images, the preferred depictions of the gods and goddesses were stylised and did not display naturalism,” art historian and curator Atteqa Ali writes in an essay on South Asian modernism. He gave them a language to visualise their gods, and in a sense, Ravi Varma had become omnipresent through his oleographs, theatrical reimaginings among others. “Even now, when we visualise goddesses, the image most people channel is the one Ravi Varma created. This version seeped into cinema and eventually television,” agrees Pillai.The enduring legacyIt wasn’t, however, until the nineties that Ravi Varma began getting rediscovered as an artist after being written off, first by the Bengal School and then by artists and critics alike post-Independence. Even MF Husain, who Ravi Varma surpassed to become the record-holder, also dismissed him as a “calendar artist”.NewsletterFollow our daily newsletter so you never miss anything important. On Wednesday, we answer readers' questions.SubscribeIn 1993, Chawla and artist A Ramachandran organised an exhibition at Delhi’s National Museum that showcased a collection of Ravi Varma’s original works, thereby establishing his status as a master painter, reviving interest in him as a serious artist and a subsequent reentry into the canon of Indian art.Story continues below this adAs for our imaginations, he never really left. As Hoskote says, “You can’t throw a stone without hitting some resonance of Ravi Varma somewhere.”