Only a Free Woman Is a Muse | The Ambedkarian Chronicle

This article is inspired by a reel from the wonderful Aleena (iseesomeletters on Instagram) about UC women’s obsession with Raja Ravi Varma’s art, which made me write.

Who was Raja Ravi Varma? He was an artist, a Nair, husband of a ruling matriarchal queen, chosen over his elder brother as a mate. All the obvious facts.

I recently saw a reel by the wonderful Aleena (iseesomeletters on Instagram) about UC women’s obsession with Raja Ravi Varma’s art, which made me write a long post in my stories but the magic of Instagram is that my words got deleted before I could post it. So here I am finally writing my first Substack. And it’s about Kerala, the region from which my ancestors escaped to neighbouring South Canara, how fitting no? But my hatred for Kerala’s caste culture is well known and I won’t bother you with it.

Let’s come back to Raja Ravi Varma for a second. More importantly, WHO was he? WHAT did he represent? Why are Indians so obsessed with his art a century later? Was he really that great an artist? Not really, to my eyes he seems like a hack. And most of the prominent art critics of the time saw him as an imitator of Western aesthetics. A mimic. So WHY is he so desperately beloved of Indians?

Aleena made an important point in her video that Ravi Varma’s art looks nothing like the real upper caste women of that time, who were photographed looking uncomfortable, awkward and nothing like the flowy natural femininity portrayed in Ravi Varma’s aesthetics. In which case, it could be incredibly confusing where he was inspired for the women in his art. If you Google it, the many hagiographical articles say that Ravi Varma used his own daughters as inspiration for his artwork, which I refuse to believe.

Fresh from Bath, by Ravi Varma

But the truth does spill out. In an article, Manu S Pillai says: Models were also acquired for a fee, though this was often challenging. In a picture titled At the Bath, we see a woman who has accidentally strayed to the wrong bathing ghat, and quickly covers herself up when confronted by the male gaze. The composition is believed to be based on an actual incident from Ravi Varma’s ancestral home. Yet the model who helped bring the image to life was not a temple attendant, as in the original story. Instead, it was a sex-worker from Hyderabad who modelled for this painting in 1902—as the artist’s brother wrote, “Myself and some friends picked up… prostitutes to select a model from.” They liked a Muslim woman “with a very charming face”, though it was with “great difficulty” that she was persuaded “to come to our studio”. “These prostitutes,” the man finished, “readily come if called for immoral purposes, but when required for posing they raise great objections.”

And so the secret is out.

The caste system of India has a sort of Madonna and Whore problem that goes beyond anything imaginable in the Western World (which was more influenced by the Bible but also had a strong undercurrent of past paganism).

Here because of caste, any hint of femininity is enough to cast you as a slut. You don’t have to be sexual, just feminine. Feminine = wily = slut.

What need does the caste girl or woman have for performing femininity or sensuality. No one is choosing her to love, or romance. She is literally a part of multiple dowries that move hands from one family to another. And generation after generation this pattern is repeated. Most people in the subcontinent in that era or even as recently as the 70s saw each other for the first time on the day of the wedding. There was simply no need to even have the illusion of love or personal choice - cause there was no necessity for it.

Group of Nair women photographed by Egon von Eickstedt, 1920s, Malabar.

And performing any kind of femininity was dangerous - verboten. That is why the early unposed pictures of stoic Nair women have them looking so awkward. They are probably surprised at being perceived as human for the first time.

So given this historical reality — what happened when the always insecure brahmin and other upper-castes came in contact with a civilizational powerhouse like the British that was already evoking a huge groundswell of support among the lower caste Indians who the upper castes both feared and despised?

It suddenly became a battle of civilizations - brahminical vs. western.

The British had won the battles and the wars—but culture was still up for grabs. Fascinated by Indian traditions, they founded institutions like the Theosophical Society and the Archaeological Survey of India to study the civilization they had conquered. Brahmins were often their translators. After the 1857 revolt, the British began to suspect them—even as they continued to consult them on religious matters they had no intention of incorporating into their own lives. They weren’t fools. They weren’t about to start building temples, anointing Brahmins as ministers, or ceding political power to the very elites they had just displaced.

The Brahmins, however, sensed an opportunity—a new kind of upper hand. All they had to do was master the art of duplicity.

And so, artists like Raja Ravi Varma—and others who dabbled similarly in music and dance(they appropriated bahujan art forms in the end, but other better people have written about that)—emerged as symptoms of a deeper cultural anxiety. His work, I suggest, embodied the Brahminical panic in the face of a civilizational force they had never before encountered: one that demanded not only scholarship and military power, not just beauty and creativity but also a displayed sensuality - a flagrant femininity, protected by masculinity in the privacy of homes and in the public streets of the big cities they built.

The British not only fought wars, they made powerful art, they also sang songs, danced holding each other in their arms, wore clothes that expressed femininity. And they considered this the peak of their civilization. Now while the British respected many of the Indian Kings who they had defeated - once defeated what were you going to do to socialise? A bunch of men drinking alone was not the peak of relaxed time for them. And one would think they would balk at the idea of spending festivals raping the lower castes. What about the leering at the bazaru/bazari/bajari - working women out on the streets who were seen as open season? What would they have thought of Kings who buried lower caste men alive in the ramparts of their forts for “luck”? Not so charming after all? Okay okay, lets not talk about it.

The always social Westerner, with his sense of fairplay, invited upper-caste Indians to Christmas and Easter parties. Sunday lunches. Friday soirees. They wanted to talk about art, music, beauty. But the caste Indians had nothing to offer in return.

The Kings invited dancers and musicians from the courtesan community as entertainment, but watching others dance doesn’t have the same ring to it as dancing with each other. Does it now? And why don’t your wives and daughters dance? Why don’t you dance? Why dont you paint, draw, create? Why don’t we ever get to meet your artists and architects, your sculptors, writers, creators and painters at salons?

Because artists existed in India — architects, sculptors, writers, painters, singers, dancers were all part of the caste landscape and brutally perceived as outside the caste order, and thus outside of brahminical civilization. Nainsukh of Guler — is one of my most favorite Indian artists, but could someone of his caste really be invited for a soiree to a brahmin’s home? Could he dance with his patron’s wife? Parlay witty repartee a la Parisian salon culture? Come now, let’s not be absurd.

Nainsukh’s glorious art

This wouldn’t do. India is a society of historically anonymous artists. Where every sculpture, tile, and lamppost in the Western world was credited to its maker, Indian art was stripped of individual names. Even Nainsukh—one of the greatest Indian painters—is barely remembered. His work is known not by name, but by style: Kangra art. But now, thanks to the wretched British, these artists were supposed to be let into civilizational conversations—as humans, not just slaves. And if that happened, if beauty were suddenly democratized, then society might become equal—and where would that leave the caste order?

So a Nair, Ravi Varma, was elevated above the mediocrity of his mimicked art.

His work, I propose, is a copy of Raphael and Jean-Léon Gérôme, with a thin layer of Indianization. The only femininity he had access to was that of the prostitute—already outside his caste order—whose job was to perform femininity. The same femininity that could get a caste woman killed if she ever dared to express it.

I hope you know the story of the Kerala Brahmin woman who was found to be a prostitute and banished from the kingdom, along with all her clients—one of whom was a Nair man. He escaped to what was then Ceylon, with a new wife from the Ezhava community. He died there. But his wife and children returned to Madras, the jewel of the British empire. And his son would go on to ascend to the greatest heights of movie superstardom as MGR.

Anyway, back to Raja Ravi Varma, he had to of course negotiate with his own caste people - for whom sensuality was always suspect. And that is why so much of his artwork had religious themes, so he could be more palatable to them.

Like Gandhi and other moral negotiators, he understood that the way to make his people look civilizationally alive—something they desperately needed if they wanted to convince the British they were ready to rule again (but that’s a story for another day)—was to wrap aesthetics in the comfort of the sacred.

Tastemakers like him after all, had a frantic aesthetic insecurity. The world was looking at India with curiosity, and they panicked: Look! We have culture too! My countrymen buy art too! We hang it in our homes too!

So now, surprise, surprise, they do art too, but Madonna has swallowed the Whore, whole. She has the mechanics, but none of the flagrancy or the sensuality. And it worked. For a while :)

And when today’s upper caste women crow about this beauty as a peak of Indian history, their reels, posts, and articles are proof of the assertion that Indian history is bahujan history. This is our land, everything you love belongs to us.

I now have a very bullish view of the future for my people.

Whichever path you attempt to steer this culture, you will always end up staring at us. Our ancestors are the ghosts in your fun house. We are the face of this culture, we are its soul. Whether you like it or not.

You ate us up whole — we were exhausted, a tirelessly working people who had no strength to even protest, but our beauty is the timebomb in your belly.

They desperately borrow from our culture to appear civilizationally alive even as they deny us basic dignity, but their own language is no longer even spoken, their culture lies in tatters, their worldview broken again and again by their own children, breaking every rule to be modern. All will be revealed, one day or the other. We just have to wait.

And god knows we know to wait :)

Only a Free Woman Is a Muse.

Hypatiaa

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