D Kajri Jain lionisation of Ravi Varma in the domain of fine art, particularly with respect to the importance of grasping illusionist technique, were not diminished instantly (if ever) by the criticisms of the Bengal School: they continued to hold sway in the art schools of Bombay and Madras, which have been a consistent source of artists for the calendar industry. M.V. Dhurandhar studied at Bombay's J.J. School of Art (another target of Calcutta scorn) at the turn of the century, as did S.M. Pandit in the 1930s, Indra Sharma and B.C. Sharma from the Chitrakar community of Nathdwara and S.V. Aras (the baby artist) in the forties and fifties, S.S. Shaikh in the early sixties, and, most recently, Venkatesh Sapar and his wife May a (who studied Applied Art) in the eighties. The legendary S.M. Pandit (1916-1991) went through no less than three art schools (the Madras School of Art, the J.J. and G.S. Dandavatimath's Nutan Kala Mandir in Bombay) before starting his commercial career in 1938, designing MGM showcards and covers for Filmindia magazine. Other calendar artists who studied at the Madras School of Art include C. Kondiah Raju (1898-1976), who worked as a scene painter in a touring drama company and ran a photographic studio in Kovilpatti (near Sivakasi), before his icon paintings launched the careers of the calendar printers at Sivakasi in the mid-fifties; K. Madhavan, who also worked as a backcloth painter and then joined the Gemini Studios in the forties;9 and S. Courtallam, who studied under Deviprasad Roychowdhry in the fifties, working at the Vahini Studios and Filmistan before eventually settling in Sivakasi. Most of these artists (notably Kondiah Raju) have inspired others through their work, or have had apprentices or assistants who also went on to paint for calendars. However, the influence of art school training must be seen in the context of other kinds of creative practice in the backgrounds of many calendar artists—including some of those who also went to art school and thereby brought these local traditions into a shared 'cosmopolitan' space.10 Pandit was from an artisan family of Gulbarga; many of the Chitrakars from Nathdwara have been calendar artists; Kondiah Raju was descended from a community earlier engaged in Tanjavur painting (one of Kondiah's early mentors in this tradition, also trained at the Madras School of Art, was N. Subba Naidu, the brother of Raja Ravi Varma's rival, Ramaswamy Naidu of the Travancore court). The Sapar Brothers (Venkatesh Sapar's father and uncle) used to paint murals to decorate a Sholapur temple at Janmashtami every year before becoming calendar artists; similarly, the grandfather of the self-taught R.S. Mulgaonkar (1922-1976), was a Goan landowner who used to make terracotta idols for the annual Ganapati festival, while Mulgaonkar's father had a sideline making black and white crayon portraits enlarged from photographs. As is evident from some of these career trajectories, the kinds of opportunities available to graduates in fine art, particularly those from non-elite backgrounds, brought them into a commercial arena where a different set of imperatives was at work. Indeed, right from the start, the dissemination in print of the 'Puranic' paintings of Ravi Varma and others, who had gained recognition in the world of fine art (such as Annada Numbers 30-31