In a quest for an elusive model, many
paintings of the Parsi community by Raja Ravi Varma were examined
Ganesh V. Shivaswamy
In November 2019 I stepped out of an air-conditioned car into the haloed premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) and, as a Bangalore boy unaccustomed to the Bombay heat, quickly rushed into the auditorium where I was to speak on 125 years of the Ravi Varma Print Legacy. The speech completed, the floor was open to an interactive session when, quite predictably, the question of the authenticity of the movie Rang Rasiya, based on the life of celebrated artist and portraitist Raja Ravi Varma, an aristocrat from the Kingdom of Travancore, came......