Tales from Travancore

 The Man Who Painted the Royal Corridor Last week, the renowned Indian classical musician Prince Rama Varma shared a four-episode series of ...

 Architectural Memory and Commercial Art in a Travancore Print Advertisement for Rally Cycles by K.R.K. Achari (early 20th century). Artist...

Dharma Rajah and the Beginnings of Court Portraiture This is perhaps one of the most challenging AI-enhanced images I have created from old ...

 Beyond the Durbar: Friendship in the Travancore Court F.C. Lewis, Grand Durbar of Travancore , oil on canvas (detail). Kuthira Malika Pala...

 The Travancore Photograph That Wasn’t the First Travancore history enthusiasts and scholars of the history of photography would be familiar...

 A Statesman in the Crowd: The Young Madhava Rao in the Travancore Durbar Sir T. Madhava Rao This rare mid-nineteenth-century depiction of t...

  When an Artist Turns Photographer A relaxed moment at C.N. Pillai's wife’s home, where relatives gather at the poomukham to pose for ...

The Warriers of Kilimanur: Artists in Ravi Varma’s Shadow A few years ago, I wrote about Kilimanur R. Madhava Warrier, a scholarly musician ...

Tracing the Painters of the Travancore Court   It was on April 18, 2025, that I completed the manuscript of my latest work, ‘The Forgotten A...

  When an Image Becomes Evidence In 1892, in a letter written from Baroda, a young monk wrote to his friend, “Of course, I have seen the lib...