The book’s lively illustrations complement Raja Ravi Varma’s art and striking use of colour.

While the book’s subject and narrator are both painters, it also seeks to give, as Srinivasan says, the artists among her readers an opportunity to think about their creativity. In this, illustrator Rayika Sen, who brought these different artistic worlds together, played an important role. She saw herself as a bridge that allowed the author’s words and Varma’s art to seep into young minds. Sen explains how her focus in the book’s introductory pages was to bring Varma’s childhood to life visually as there are no photographic records from that phase. “I used references from period films and the framework of the restored architecture to imagine and recreate what that would look like. For the pages having his artwork, I just wanted the illustrations to construct a framework that complemented the art without distracting from it. For that I drew inspiration from the paintings themselves. Like using a saree design as a border from a subject in a painting, or a particular object from another [like a peacock feather] and highlighting it so as  to excite the young reader to focus on the details of the paintings,” she elaborates.   
 
Both writer and illustrator highlight in particular the importance and beauty of Varma’s mythological portrayals and how some of our most popular and ubiquitous cultural markers can be traced back to them: “…readers will discover that Ravi Varma’s use of colour and realistic renditions of portraits have been ‘copied’ in old Bollywood posters and in Amar Chitra Katha comics that follow this approach. Children are also likely to be drawn to the stories from the Indian epics and the Puranas that were represented with such dramatic detail by Ravi Varma in his paintings,” observes Srinivasan.  

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.84%

AAP 41.79%

INC 25.37%

Submit

View All In Poll

Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan

While introducing young readers to Raja Ravi Varma’s vivid and fascinating world, the book, peppered with humour, is also valuable in the way it is presented from the distinct perspective of a little girl who is filled with wonder about the world, and yet is perceptive enough to feel sorry for Mangala Bayi, Ravi Varma’s sister, who though talented, couldn’t become as famous as her brother only because she was a woman. 

Rayika Sen

A rhyming picture book called Parvati the Elephant’s Very Important Day is Srinivasan’s next project, currently waiting for the right publisher. “I recently read a 2019 report that stated that only about 27,000 wild elephants remain in India. It was 10 times a decade ago. And while there were five million elephants in Africa in the 20th century, only 4,50,000 exist today mostly because of poachers in search of ivory. I wanted to return the elephant—this beautiful large, gentle animal—to our collective consciousness in a joyful way with a story that has the simple premise of a day’s ‘adventure,’” says the author. She is hopeful that this new book will spread awareness about conserving our wildlife, help children learn about the splendour of Indian festivals through the representation of an Asian elephant in the south Indian temple setting, while its rhymes will aid their social and emotional development.