Shri Parasuraman was in his mid teens when he chose to channel his passion for Raja Ravi Varma by beginning to collect oleographs of the 19th-century artist from southern Kerala. It was to be a long journey, which ended with the release of a book featuring 110 oleographs he assembled from across India.
When ShriParasuraman was going ahead with his mission, he wasn’t alone. His mother, Dr D Jegat Ishwari , encouraged him and even wrote the text that describes the details and context of each of the paintings. She has thus been credited as the author of the Raja Ravi Varma Oleographs Catalogue .
“The book,” points out Jegat Ishwari, a retired principal from a Chennai school, “is unique in a way. Unlike similar art publications, this has been done without obtaining courtesy from any extraneous source. All the oleographs and other antique pictures published in the appendices are our own collection.” It took two years for the author to do the reference work and complete the writing part of it.
Adds ShriParasuraman, now 32: “I travelled to various cities like Mumbai, Baroda, Pune and Mysore to collect the prints, purchasing them. The long pursuit helped me broaden my arts circle; I got in touch with a lot of collectors, galleries and organisations in the process.” The feel-good experience apart, it still isn’t a matter of total satisfaction for the man: he has yet to get nearly ten more oleographs of Ravi Varma from various places to complete the task of encompassing all such works of the painter in a single-volume book. “I’m trying for that. I plan to make it ‘complete’ in the next edition.”
The prices at which he bought the oleographs varied from Rs 1,000 to Rs 14,000. And some of the works had been last-leg inclusion in the book. “Even less than four weeks before the release of the book, I got two prints — one from Karla (Maharashtra) and the other from a Haryana town,” he recalls. “Now that the book has come out, the collectors with the oleographs we don’t have right now have jacked up the prices. I’m trying to negotiate matters.”
So, how exactly did the collection start? ShriParasuraman winds back to a rainy day in Chennai when he found one print of a Ravi Varma painting lying all wet under the staircase of a building — uncared and almost irretrievable. He took it home with all care, dried it up to make it usable later. “In hindsight,” he says, “that was the only oleograph I got for free in my whole tryst with the Ravi Varma antiques so far.”
The 11” by 8.5” book, containing 149 colour and three black-and-white illustrations, also carries references about the registered number of the print, the size of the picture, its year — and whether or not the work is the embellished version. There’s also an appendix of plate references and a glossary on the mythological and non-English (mostly Sanskrit) words used, besides even a brief list of typographic errors that have crept into the oleographs.
Amid the grievance that the mother-son duo has about Ravi Varma (1848-1906) failing to have got the deserving recognition, they feel happy about a gesture of encouragement from the government: the Indian Council for Cultural Relations has assured to keep the book in several libraries across India and even abroad.
— sreevalsan@expressbuzz.com