Illus 3 V Sapar figurative abstract Illus 2 Indian art s[\ k R uihci Knshnci folk dancers calendar printed by artist and date unknov n ( oromtion Puss Sivika i W6 touiksy ] PS md PiSnui I b( roi I1M \R] MILFS IHF BA/A\K If Ravi Varma's legacy is in evidence today in Lakndai ait ait histoi) needs to icckon with the idea that part of that vciy legacy is a continuing mici lace n tth the institutional stmctuies—and the vocabulary- -of fine art, as it is known in Indian ai t schools such as the J J I need hardly labour the point that calendai ai t is pai t of a national model nity (a phrase which itself tends towards pleonasm) st should suffice for me to follow the rhetorical strategy often adopted b} people in the (alendar industry and proceed via an analogy with the moi e familiar cinema Both are part of an ind igenous 'culture industry' based on the investment of capital in modem technologies of mass-reproduction Both developed in the colonial period and were consciously deployed in an anti/colonial figuring of the nation, while their dishibuhon in the marketplace physically traced a pan-national netwoik of transactions and address Unlike the cinema, howevci, the v isual idiom of calendai art dev eloped through an mterrac e w ith colonial ai t institutions (ait schools, exhibitions, patronage illustrated journals and cuticismy and thereby with a discursive held whose notion of fine art traced its genealogy to the emeigence of bourgeois society at an earlier moment of buropean modernity It was thiough this discursive realm of fine art, in the last decades of the nineteenth Lentuiv, that mythological and religious imagery were legitimately brought into a pan-national anti/colonial Indian 'public spheie' ^ As illustrations of Puramc' narratives, the paintings of aitists like Ravi Vaima and M V Dhurandhar could be seen as coi responding, both foimally and ideologically, to the kind of neoclassical painting endoised at the time by the bnglish Royal Academy 8 Ihe aitistk. ideals underlying the Journal of Aits & 7ctes