Raja Ravi Varma helps make a point

The artwork comprises images captured by Phadke at the museum in Thiruvananthapuram or prints bought by her. They have been layered with elements made digitally or using watercolour

Ten years ago when I visited the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, and spotted the original Raja Ravi Varma paintings for the first time, I said to myself, 'this is absolutely fake'," says Sayali Phadke, recalling a time before she took a fancy to art. Phadke, 24, now freelances as an art director and that experience in the Kerala capital led her to execute a zine called Ravi Varma Decoded seven months ago. And in about 20 pages, Phadke proposes critical questions - not just about the painter's style of realism in the 19th century but about art itself.

Carrying lines with wry humour, the zine takes a dig at "pseudo artsy exhibit books". In fact, the first line accurately summarises the self-publication, available for sale at Filter in Fort. Addressing Varma's work, Phadke writes, "Perfection looked so perfect that it almost appeared staged." Elaborating on what struck her most about Varma as a teenager in a museum with tourists, Phadke says, "Art needs to be expressive, and so I kept asking people if they thought his paintings were an ideal depiction of society, as it were then. I would question, 'Were handmaidens always so perfect? Did they only want to seduce men?'"

Phadke began working on the imagery a year ago. She took pictures of Varma's paintings or bought prints. Some were also illustrated with watercolour or digitally created. So, the reader sees a juxtaposition of the serenity that Varma's pieces evoke as well as modern elements added by her. For those concerned about the use of images, she also adds the above in a clever footnote asking them to chill out. For instance, a portrait of two lovers or a topless woman carries the buffering sign or a disclaimer of "sign-in to confirm your age" - signifying the truly "modern" time we live in. "The point is that he was brought up in a royal family. So, what he painted was his reality. I want to say that reality is the bits and pieces a person picks up from their surroundings. This book is as inter-disciplinary as it gets," Phadke asserts.

Sayali Phadke

Why then opt to make a zine when all of this artwork could be turned into a larger format? For Phadke, it all bottles down to the current scenario. "People can take offence to literally anything. We keeping emphasising on how passionate we are about Indian culture. But when it comes to erotica, which has also been part of our culture, we don't address it. The zine exposes how we have evolved as a society. I didn't want to be outright preachy because that isn't the point of this. A zine should always be cryptic."

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