Resumen de Private lives and interior spaces: Raja Ravi Varma's scholar paintings
This essay examines two paintings by the celebrated Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) that depict men reading within the interiors of a Westernized home. Along with the contemporary Malayalam novel, the paintings identify the domestic interior as a stage upon which a private life is imagined, where personal space and reflection are brought together to convey an interiority that one typically associates with the bourgeois modern subject. My analysis examines how the interior figured in domestic architecture and family life, its implications for gender and social relations and, finally, how a new idea of home emerged in tandem with a territorial imagination fuelled by the new possibilities of travel in late nineteenth-century Kerala. Using the symbolic qualities of light and shadow, Ravi Varma recreates an inner world that imagines the Nayar matrilineal "tharavad" (household) as an intimate space for the cultivation of the (male) self.
