1873
Dada sits writing in his air borne studio, it is night at the windows. Opposite him, Saraswati Bai is winding rolls of film. Pages flutter in the breeze and the book 'speaks'.
[1]( swapnil rishikant shete's video)
Outside the window, at a contrast to the working Sarswati, the Nair Lady at her Toilet floats by like a constellation. The Malyalee woman, looking exactly as she does on Ravi Varma's canvas, is slowly arranging her hair in a bun to one side of her head. She passes till only her toes hang behind in the space where Dada sits writing. Then they too disappear.
Twins were born that year, unlikely twins, the typewriter and the chromosome. The one an invention, the other a discovery. The invention was more evidently beautiful, designed, ornate, a carrier of language on the full moons of its keys. The chromosome was the silent younger sister, who contained a more dangerous, secret language. She was a soothsayer, she was a scroll, much like the one that is inserted into the tabeez and strung around the neck of a child. Only this scroll did not protect, it decreed..some fingers had typed onto that long cell called the dna, what kind of life the organism must live.
Typewriter. Discovery of chromosomes.
Ravi Varma's work comes to the notice of R Chisholm of the Madras Art School, who urges the Maharaja of Travancore to enter the paintings for the Madras Fine Arts Exhibiton. Ravi Varma gets the Governor's gold medal for his painting Nair Lady at her Toilet, he gets to meet the Governor of Madras in a private appointment. The foundations for the figure of the 'gentleman artist', native, yet friendly with the British.. are being laid, in the person of a young man, who, ironically, never attended any of the newly founded academies of British art. The work is later presented by the King of Travancore to the visiting king, Edward VII
phrenology
