DCSAACI

Mehta thought that Varma was the most fascinating artist of that era and his character, persona and paintings. He was fascinated with Ravi Varma right from his days at Film and Television Institute of India. After reading Desai’s novel, Mehta felt inspired to make a film based on the life and times of Ravi Varma, and set about formulating the story of his new film. He moulded and recast the script to project Ravi Varma as a radical painter, a strident advocate of the artistic license to depict nudity, and as a victim of conservative society. He felt that this positioning would help the film achieve more traction with the intelligentsia, and ease the path to awards and honours. Given that many of Ravi Varma’s paintings are actually used as icons of worship in Hindu homes, this positioning represents a major stretch of the imagination, a major effort at fictionalization. In fact, Ravi Varma was himself of conservative outlook whose paintings indicate that he had a strong preference for decently clad, soft-featured, ladylike gentlewomen and a distaste for brazen hussies. Very few of his works venture into the realms of semi-nudity, and these few forays seem to have been calculated, highly reluctant efforts on his part to appeal to a western audience. Even at that time, art appreciation in the west was in the grip of a progressivist mafia who cherished radicalism and disdained traditional norms. In the present era, Ketan Mehta dealt with a similar environment in India, and this informed the choices he made while developing the script of this film. Also, a simple, lineal depiction of Ravi Varma’s life and career would have given the film the look and feel of a documentary, which is what had happened with his previous film, Sardar. Movies require a narrative, as also a certain amount of drama and sensuality, and the script was developed to meet these needs. Mehta came across a relatively minor (and frivolous) court case which had been brought against Ravi Varma for allegedly depicting a Hindu deity irreverent in one of his paintings, and used this to develop a suitable script.