The Painter Who Gave Gods and Goddesses Human Skin — and Paid the Price
On April 29, 1848, in the princely state of Travancore in what is now Kerala, India, a child was born who would upend centuries of Indian visual tradition. Raja Ravi Varma — largely self-taught in the European oil technique — did something no Indian artist had dared: he painted Hindu deities and epic heroines not as abstract symbols but as living, breathing, bare-skinned women with real flesh, real hair, and a gaze that met the viewer head-on.
The result was electric. And scandalous. And, ultimately, revolutionary.
A Royal Portraitist Who Broke the Rules
Varma came from aristocratic stock — the Kilimanoor royal family, connected to the ruling dynasty of Travancore. He grew up watching European portraitists at the court and taught himself oil painting by studying their techniques. By his twenties, his commissions included portraits of the Maharajah of Travancore and other Indian royalty.
But Varma’s ambitions extended far beyond portraiture. He was drawn to the great narratives of Indian mythology — the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas — and he conceived the radical idea of depicting these stories not in the stylized, miniature traditions of Indian art, but in the full-blooded realism of European academic painting.
The gods and goddesses who had previously appeared as flat, iconographic symbols suddenly had skin you could almost touch. Saraswati sat on her lotus with her sari slipping from her shoulder. Lakshmi materialized ornamented but unmistakably human. The apsaras — Urvashi, Rambha, Tilottama — danced across his canvases in states of partial undress that shocked the era’s sensibilities.
“Shakuntala” — Desire Disguised as Devotion
Perhaps no Varma painting captures his radical fusion of the sacred and the sensual better than Shakuntala Looking Back to Glimpse Dushyanta (1898). The scene comes from Kalidasa’s classical play: Shakuntala, lost in reverie about her absent lover, pretends to remove a thorn from her foot — an excuse to glance back one more time.
It is a masterclass in equivocation. The bare feet, the displaced sari, the half-turned body — Varma packages desire as devotion and lets the viewer decide which they’re looking at. The painting won the Travancore prize for best landscape in oils with figures, but the controversy it engendered followed Varma his entire career.
The Obscenity Trial
Varma’s semi-nude depictions of figures like Urvashi and Rambha — celestial courtesans from Hindu scripture, yes, but rendered with an unmistakeable erotic charge — provoked outrage. He was charged at the Bombay High Court with hurting religious sentiments and encouraging obscenity.
He won the case. And he kept painting.
This was not a trivial matter in colonial India. The British courts, Indian social reformers, and orthodox Hindu authorities all had competing definitions of what could be shown and to whom. Varma’s great transgression was not the nudity itself — temple sculpture across India had depicted uncovered bodies for centuries — but the *medium*. By putting oil-on-canvas nudes into reproducible prints, Varma took images that had been confined to temple walls and elite collections and distributed them to middle-class Indian homes. He democratized the body.
The Press That Changed Indian Art
In 1894, Varma established a lithographic press — the Ravi Varma Press — in what may be his most underappreciated contribution to visual culture. The press produced affordable oleographs of his mythological paintings, making them available to ordinary Indian households for the first time. Previously, art had been the province of temples and palaces; Varma put it on the living room wall.
This act of mass reproduction turbocharged the controversy. A semi-nude Lakshmi or Saraswati, rendered in sensual oil-painted realism, was one thing when it hung in a maharajah’s palace. It was quite another when it appeared as a chromolithograph in a clerk’s flat in Bombay. The press was later destroyed by fire in 1972 — years after Varma’s death — but by then Indian visual culture had been permanently transformed.
What Varma Understood That His Critics Didn’t
The most enduring criticism of Varma came from the Bengal School, who accused him of being too “Western” — of importing European academic realism into a visual tradition that had no need of it. This critique misses the radical nature of what he achieved.
Indian art had long reveled in the body. The temples of Khajuraho, Konark, and Hampioverflow with sculpture that makes Varma’s canvases look tame by comparison. But those bodies belonged to stone, to architecture, to the temple compound. Varma’s revolution was democratization: the same unclothed divine bodies that had lived in stone for millennia now appeared in prints that a family of any caste could own. He took the erotic out of the temple and put it in the household.
He was also, perhaps inadvertently, one of India’s earliest feminist painters. The women in Varma’s canvases always command the frame. Whether it’s Shakuntala lost in thought, Damayanti choosing her suitor, or a goddess seated in serene authority, the female figure is never subordinate. She regards the viewer — or refuses to — on her own terms.
Why It Matters for the Nude in Art
Raja Ravi Varma occupies a unique position in the global history of the nude: he is the bridge where the Western tradition of academic figure painting met one of the world’s oldest and richest traditions of sacred bodily representation. He proved that the nude in art is never just a European category. Every culture negotiates its own relationship with the unclothed body, and Varma’s paintings remain a lightning rod for those negotiations in India — scrutinized, censored, celebrated, and imitated, sometimes all at once.
He died on October 2, 1906, at the age of 58. But the debates his paintings ignited — about who gets to depict the body, how, and for whom — are very much alive today.
Further reading: Raja Ravi Varma’s chromolithographs are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; and the Sree Chitra Art Gallery, Thiruvananthapuram. His 1898 painting Shakuntala Looking Back to Glimpse Dushyanta is in the collection of the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum, Vadodara.