The story
In Raja Ravi Varma's Shakuntala, painted in 1898, the heroine of the old Sanskrit story pretends to pull a thorn from her foot so that she can look back at King Dushyanta, while her friends tease her for it. Ravi Varma, the Kerala painter who brought European oil technique to Indian myth, is the best-known name at the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, which keeps more than 40 of his original canvases, among them Damayanti talking to a swan.
The gallery opened in 1935 in the northern grounds of the Napier Museum and was inaugurated by Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma, the last ruling Maharaja of Travancore, whose name it carries. Its roughly 1,100 paintings reach well beyond one artist. There are works by the Russian painters Nicholas and Svetoslav Roerich, a father and son who settled in India, by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengal painter Jamini Roy, along with Mughal and Rajput miniatures, Tibetan scroll paintings called thangkas, and copies of the cave murals of Ajanta and the rock paintings of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka.
