Look at the painting
This is Shakuntala, painted by Ravi Varma sometime around 1870, when he was twenty-two. It illustrates a moment from Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam, Shakuntala, a forest-hermitage girl, has fallen in love with King Dushyanta, who is hidden somewhere in the trees behind her. She would very much like to look at him.
So she pretends she's been pricked by a thorn. She bends to inspect her foot. The thorn does not exist.
Her glance
The whole painting hinges on her eyes. They do not look at her foot. They are aimed past her own shoulder, into the trees, toward the man we cannot quite see, somewhere just beyond the frame.
"The eye in this canvas is not a window onto the soul. It is a hinge. The body says one thing, bends to a thorn, and the eye says another."
The pretended thorn
Notice how Ravi Varma renders her raised foot. She has lifted it back behind her, ankle bent, as if to inspect a sting. There is no break in the skin, no injury, no real concern. It is the choreography of a small, deliberate lie.
Ravi Varma painted Shakuntala three times across his career. The 1870 version is the one that travelled to Vienna; later versions repeat the gesture almost exactly. He understood that this was the painting's whole machinery.
The companions
Two friends, Anasuya and Priyamvada, stand beside her. They are in on the joke. One, her back to us, has paused mid-walk; the other leans in over her shoulder, looking at Shakuntala with something like complicity. Ravi Varma's compositions almost always include this kind of audience-within-the-painting, a reader who is reading the scene with us.
It is one of the signatures of his art: insert a witness, and the viewer becomes a witness too.
The window-light
Look at the way light falls on her shoulder and the line of her neck. It is luminous, modelled light, a single window-source from the upper left, the chiaroscuro Ravi Varma had made his own after studying Theodore Jensen and the salon painters of London and Vienna.
This kind of luminosity was almost unknown in Indian painting before him. Mughal miniatures gave you flat, even light; Tanjore painting glimmered with gold leaf. Ravi Varma's bodies are lit.
The drape
Her sari is rendered with the obsessive textile detail Ravi Varma was famous for, the gold border at the hem, the soft hatching of the weave, the way silk folds at the hip. He travelled the country, studying regional dress; he kept his own collection of saris in the studio and pinned them to wooden mannequins.
"He clothed Indian gods and women in the saris of his own time. The Lakshmi a peasant in Mysore prayed to in 1900 was, technically, a portrait of fabric Ravi Varma owned."
The figure walking off
At the far left of the canvas, half-turned, walking out of the frame with a staff, is a figure in cream, the painting's only other person. Read him as Sage Kanva withdrawing into the grove, and the scene becomes a chaperone leaving the girls to themselves. Read him as Dushyanta in a sage's robe, and you have the lover already inside the painting, watching.
Ravi Varma understood that the lover should not arrive in the painting. The romance is in the looking, not the meeting. Shakuntala is a painting about anticipation.
And so
This was the painting that won at Vienna in 1873 and made Ravi Varma's name. It was reproduced in oleograph by his press in the late 1890s and hung on a million Indian walls for a generation. It became, eventually, the visual shorthand for romance in early Indian cinema, a woman bent demurely to her foot, glancing back, became a film-grammar.
It was his thesis, proven on canvas: that he could marshal every tool the world's painters had developed and make them tell an Indian story more powerfully than any tradition could on its own.