Introduction — why Galaxy of Musicians matters
Galaxy of Musicians
Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore, Karnataka.
Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Raja Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians (1889) is one of the artist’s most iconic group portraits: a richly colored, large-scale oil tableau that gathers eleven women from different regions and communities of India, each playing a traditional instrument.
The painting performs a careful balancing act — ethnographic pageant and aesthetic synthesis, nationalist allegory and domestic intimacy — and has become an emblematic image for debates about modern Indian identity, the visualization of gender, and the reproduction of high art into popular culture.
The work is traditionally associated with the royal collections of Mysore (Jaganmohan Palace / Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery) where it has been displayed for generations.
The painting: description and first impressions
At first glance, Galaxy of Musicians reads like a stage set: a semicircle of seated and standing women arranged against a deep, dark backdrop that heightens the jewel-like tones of their saris, jewelry, and instruments. Varma’s academic training — exposure to European oil technique, glazing, and compositional conventions — is evident in the painting’s realistic modeling of faces, the fall of light across fabrics, and a careful attention to texture.
Yet the subject matter is distinctly Indian: veena, sarangi, and other regionally specific instruments are identified, while the sitters’ costumes and hairstyles point to different caste, regional, and religious identities. The painting is at once a catalog of musical tradition and an invoked image of harmonious multiculturalism.
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| Galaxy of Musicians Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore, Karnataka. Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Artistic specialities — technique, composition, color, and iconography
Technical command and studio practice
Varma’s mastery of oil paint allowed him to fuse European academic finish with indigenous subjects. He used layered glazes to achieve luminous skin tones and soft transitions of light and shadow; careful brushwork records the sheen of silk and the reflective surfaces of metal jewelry.
The artist’s studio in Travancore produced multiple variants and oleographs of popular works — a commercial innovation that helped disseminate his images widely. The studio practice also meant that finished canvases were often workshop productions to some extent, with Varma supervising and finalizing compositions.
Composition and narrative staging
The semicircular, concert-like arrangement creates a focal center while allowing peripheral figures to provide texture and narrative detail. The visual rhythm — alternating bright saris and darker clothing, upward glances and bowed heads, seated and standing figures — creates an ebb and flow that mimics musical phrasing.
Varma composes the scene to read well both at a distance (as a decorative tableau) and up close (for the connoisseur interested in costume detail). This flexibility helped the painting become a popular visual reference for calendars, prints, and decorative reproductions.
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| Galaxy of Musicians Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore, Karnataka. Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Color, light, and the politics of portraiture
The palette is warm and saturated: reds, golds, and deep ochres dominate against a neutral-dark background. Light is selective—faces and instruments catch the eye—while many details recede into modeled shadow.
This approach does not merely flatter the sitter; it stages a certain ideal of feminine beauty and of national concord.
The painting’s title — Galaxy — evokes cosmological order, suggesting that the varied musical traditions of India together form a harmonious cultural firmament. Critics have read this as both a celebratory image of cultural unity and, more sceptically, as a visual construction that romanticizes diversity under a single aestheticized gaze.
Religious, cultural, and social meaning
Although not overtly religious, the painting participates in the cultural project of making Indian mythic and ritual life legible through visual form. Women musically invoking regional styles also evoke devotional practices (temple music, courtesan performance traditions, folk singing), so the canvas implies both secular entertainment and a sacred acoustic world.
The diverse cast of musicians — from a courtesan figure at one edge to a veena-playing Nair woman at the other — makes a subtle social statement about the vehicle of music as both elite-performing art and popular cultural memory. Scholars have used Galaxy of Musicians to discuss gendering of the nation: the nation visualized as a feminine ensemble in which regional identities are eroticized, codified, and displayed.
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| Galaxy of Musicians Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore, Karnataka. Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Provenance and collections history
Original commissioning and early location
The painting is recorded as being executed in 1889 and associated with the princely house of Mysore; it became part of the Jaganmohan Palace collection (later the Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery) in Mysore, a repository of the Maharaja’s tastes and a locus for Varma’s royal patronage.
Varma’s long relationship with South Indian courts and affluent patrons facilitated the painting’s commission and early placement in royal interiors.
Museum and public collection
For much of the 20th century the canvas remained within the Mysore palace gallery context, where it functioned as a public-facing emblem of princely taste and cultural curation. After the palace’s conversion into an art gallery and over decades of display, the painting became part of the canonical repertoire of Indian art shown to national and international visitors; curatorial records and campus tours note its presence as a highlight of the gallery’s Raja Ravi Varma holdings.
Reproductions and popular dissemination
One crucial element of Galaxy of Musicians’ afterlife is its reproduction: Varma’s studio issued oleographs and chromolithographs that circulated widely in the early 20th century and beyond, embedding the image in domestic altars, calendar art, and commercial décor.
Because of these reproductions, the painting’s visual vocabulary has been massively influential in shaping popular images of the “Indian woman” and of musical tradition. This reproduction economy also complicates provenance research: workshop copies and later reproductions can be mistaken for originals, and many commercial prints surfaced in sales and bazaars across the subcontinent and abroad.
Auction history and market context
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| Galaxy of Musicians Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore, Karnataka. Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Unlike some Varma canvases that have reached major auction houses, the canonical original Galaxy of Musicians has a long institutional history and has not been a headline auction lot in recent decades.
What the market does record, however, is a booming trade in Varma oleographs, later copies, and workshop variants — many of which appear regularly on auction platforms and in dealer catalogues.
Auction houses and online sale records show vintage c.1920 copies and authorized reproductions selling periodically; collectors seeking original, studio-signed Varma canvases can face high demand and complex attribution debates.
Significant sales of other Varma paintings (for instance a major Varma mythological canvas that realized multi-million rupee prices at a global auction) indicate that the market for well-provenanced, museum-quality Varma originals is active and can be strong. Yet the prevalence of reproductions keeps the secondary market noisy; buyers must rely on museum records, scientific examinations, and provenance documentation to distinguish a studio reproduction from a primary masterpiece.
Critical comparison with two contemporary artists
Nalini Malani — Unity in Diversity (2003)
Nalini Malani’s Unity in Diversity is a video play / installation that takes Galaxy of Musicians as its central visual source. Malani reproduces the composition of Varma’s eleven women but inverts its meaning: where Varma’s canvas idealizes communal harmony, Malani’s moving image introduces disjunction, fragmentation, and historical violence to question the myth of a serene national accord. Her work uses projected animation and sound to animate the women — sometimes as victims, sometimes as witnesses — thereby transforming the static allegory into a contested narrative about memory, gendered vulnerability, and the politics of national unity.
Comparison: Varma’s painting is a polished, static tableau; Malani disperses it into moving sequences and sound, introducing rupture where Varma had harmony. Both rely on the same group of female figures as an organizing principle, but the artists’ aims diverge: Varma frames music as unifying; Malani uses that frame to test and problematize the political rhetoric of unity.
Atul Dodiya — Gangavataran: after Raja Ravi Varma (1998)
Atul Dodiya’s work frequently dialogues with canonical Indian paintings; in Gangavataran: after Raja Ravi Varma he re-presents a famous religious tableau by Varma, inserting modern art histories and visual disruptions. While not a direct reworking of Galaxy of Musicians, Dodiya’s practice exemplifies a contemporary strategy of ‘after-Varma’ interventions: he appropriates, fragments, and reassembles Varma’s imagery to expose its modern iconographies and the tensions between popular sacred imagery and postcolonial critique.
Comparison: Varma’s authority comes from polished realism and cultural cataloguing; Dodiya’s authority comes from juxtaposition, material layering, and intertextual references to modern art. Dodiya’s interventions invite viewers to rethink Varma’s images as historical constructs with afterlives in popular culture and institutional critique.
Gangavataran Raja Ravi Varma[signed]
Paper Jewels, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Conclusion
Paper Jewels, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Galaxy of Musicians endures because it sits at the intersection of skilled academic painting, social display, and mass circulation.
Raja Ravi Varma created an image that could be deployed in palaces, printed in calendars, and later reworked by contemporary artists into critical media.
The painting’s elegiac compositions, lush surfaces, and orchestrated diversity make it visually compelling; its history of royal patronage, studio reproduction, and modern reinterpretation make it culturally and politically resonant.
As Nalini Malani and Atul Dodiya show, Varma’s canvases are not museum fossils but active participants in ongoing conversations — about who is shown, how they are shown, and what images of nationhood we inherit and question.
Sources (websites consulted — listed here as requested)
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Wikipedia — Galaxy of Musicians (Raja Ravi Varma)
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Smarthistory — A Galaxy of Musicians (Raja Ravi Varma)
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Wikimedia Commons — image and file page for Galaxy of Musicians
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Jaganmohan Palace / Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery (museum pages / tourism pages)
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Khan Academy — Raja Ravi Varma: A Galaxy of Musicians (teaching essay)
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LiveAuctioneers — auction listings for copies / “after Raja Ravi Varma” works
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Invaluable / auction-price aggregators (Varma auction records)
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Economic Times coverage of major Raja Ravi Varma auction results
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Nalini Malani — museum entries for Unity in Diversity
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Atul Dodiya — gallery notes for Gangavataran: after Raja Ravi Varma
