Raja Ravi Varma in the Realm of the Public brahmanism, it was well in tune with the universalist-integrationist parameters of British liberalism and the benevolent crosscultural synthesis it promoted. The exhortation of Lord Napier, the governor of Madras, in the early 1870s, to depict Indian mythological subjects with 'the powers of European art',3 which Ravi Varma 42 might have taken to, has to be seen in this context. When sanskritic elitism took to translating the classic texts of Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti and so on, it was as much due to the urge to prove the modernity of Malayalam as to fall back on the anchorage of its own cultural self-image. But at a time when versification was the order of the day and verse was practically synonymous with literature, this kind of translation was undertaken with an ease that was no more than routinely matter of fact. When the English translation of Shakuntalam by Monier Williams was staged in Trivandrum in two parts on consecutive days in September 1892, by the Karamanai Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society, 'All our chief native officials and many Europeans and their ladies honoured the occasion with their presence.' A certain Padmanabha Aiyar of the Mutual Improvement Society wrote to Monier Williams the next year: 'Our object in acting Hindu plays is to bring home to the Hindus the good lessons that our ancient authors are able to teach us ... in an age that is turning its back on time-honoured creeds and dogmas.'4 And that this had to be through an English translation of Shakuntalam has more to it than a cruel joke. The customary practice among the same translation-prone and English-educated scholastics, of writing the preface to their own book of Malayalam verse or the foreword to some other's, was to do so mostly in English. On the formation of the Textbook Committee in the wake of the establishment of vernacular schools, when it was found that there was no literary prose in Malayalam, those who got down to writing it were the same elites for whom literature meant kavya. Writing the less respectable prose in bemused condescension also invalidated the question of subject matter. Coming from such a background of provincial sanskritic orthodoxy with its ambivalent relations to the cultural contacts with the English, when Ravi Varma discarded his training in the familiar miniature format and conventional rendering of the Tanjore School, to take to the academic realism of the oil medium, it was a significant gesture in itself. This also implied, more than adopting a new technique on his part, identifying with a modern vision of the milieu to which he belonged — 'modem', the sense of which was experienced by his prosperous patrons and other sections of the society in vastly different ways. It was the inherent contradiction verging on conceptual vacuousness of this vision of modernity that he identified with, the historical rationale or otherwise of the style he 'chose', that deprived his paintings of their context. Being proficient in the oil medium, which was always the superior craft of the master, could earn him acceptance among the Indian princes as being 'modem'. It is also worth noting that after 1858, the professional British artists were less keen to come to India as the charm of the picturesque and the exotic was not to be any more; at the same time the need for illustrating letters home was not felt, and drawing and watercolour were considered definitely inferior.5 By the mid-nineteenth century, religion was gradually receding into the private Journal of Arts df Ideas