Ravi Varma lie far afield. We may be inclined to develop an aesthetic of resistance which takes on precisely the lapsed commitment to history. And this may happen through pictorial choices as such, by adapting narrative means so discredited by modem art. Our modernism could also be redefined via such linguistic disjunctions that may occur in the course of the most literal adaptations, opening up, even by default, figural devices that match the very exigencies of colonial, ex-colonial and cleft identities. 60 Precisely in such matters is Ravi Varma the indisputable father-figure of modem Indian art. In the specific matter of cultural adaptation with its idiosyncratic effect, but also in terms of pictorial narration and its historic scope. Ravi Varma, naive and ambitious at the same time, opens up the debate for his later compatriots. OIL AND EASEL PAINTING In India the modernizing impulse is signalled into the visual arts in the use by Indian artists of the medium of oils and the easel format.5 There are several aspects to this choice. One, that the know-how is not easily obtained by an Indian. The fact and fiction of Ravi Varma's struggle to learn oil painting becomes a legend. Here is not only the struggle of the artist to gain a technique but the struggle of a native to gain the source of the master's superior knowledge, and the struggle of the prodigy to steal the fire for his own peopleWhat is at stake is a greater hold of reality, directly, through the rich density of oil paint itself; its exceptional plasticity promising more palpable representations of nature. Set as this is in the easel format representation develops laws about framing and within the frame about proximity and distance: the laws of perspective. Justified by the science of optics, perspective has the profound implication of assuring continuity between subject and object and therefore, no matter what the motif and style, an existential contiguity with the painted image. All this is not of course spelt out in Ravi Varma's mind nor in the minds of his patrons who would see it as a mission and an inevitability to adapt European means to Indian effect. This is the driving force with the self-conscious Indian of the nineteenth century as such, to become historically viable. It pushes them to speak in terms of realism which becomes, then, the queen of genres, especially of course in literature.7 But significantly the term is construed to mean an enabling technique rather than a philosophically accredited style of representation within a specific historical context. Oils as paint matter encourages the simulation of substances (flesh, cloth, jewels, gold, masonry, marble) and the capture of atmospheric sensations (the glossiness of light, the translucent depth of shadows). Realism flowing from such material possibilities of paint is a way of appropriating the world, saturating the consciousness with it. It is also a way of appeasing the acquisitive impulse. This realism is then inalienably related to bourgeois desire, bourgeois ideology and ethics. It establishes at the same time the material presence of the subject and the metaphysical status of the objective world through geometric structures and their abstract possibilities. This realism is a complex and often paradoxical phenomenon and has a run of Journal of Arts <& Ideas