Rang Rasiya: Conversation with Ketan Mehta (Conversation) (Interview‪)‬

Paintings of women, both contemporary as well as historical, form the major corpus of Raja Ravi Varma's works. Ketan Mehta's 2008 film, Rang Rasiya dwells upon the effect these paintings had in their time, in a cinematic account based on a Marathi biography of the painter published in 1984. In the film, Mehta presents Ravi Varma's predicament as a revolutionary painter of his day in an allegory that reflects contemporary issues of artistic freedom and censorship. Basing the narrative around a fictional case filed against Ravi Varma for his seductive nudes, Rang Rasiya attempts to historicize the contests over the representation of the female body and the outrage they might have raised in their day. ND: Do you think that Ravi Varma's art focused particularly on women? Do you see it as in any way connected to the new arts of mechanical reproduction where women's bodies were displayed in a way unimaginable before?