1896
Plague in Bombay and Pune: national famine until 1897. F.B.Havell, one of the figureheads of the Bengal School of Painting, is appointed superintendent of the Government School of Art, Calcutta. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Vande Mataram ( Hail to the Mother) one of India's National Anthems later appropriated by Hindu chauvinists, is recited for the very first time at the Indian National Congress. Bal Gangadhar Tilak inaugrates a festival around the figure of the 17th century Maratha emperor Shivaji to generate nationalist sentiment. B.R.Rajaram Aiyer publishes the social reform novel, Kamalampal Charitram, in Tamil. The singer Vishnu Digambar Paluskar leaves the Miraj court to popularise classical music.
First film screening at Watson's Hotel, Bombay on 7 july, by the Lumiere cameraman Mauris Sestier. The Madras Photographic Stores advertises imported 'animated photographs', reviewed in the Journal of the Amateur Photographic Society of Madras.
[1]gouhar jaan with gramaphone
Young Ganpatrao Mhatre had enrolled as a painting student in the Bombay art school, but was soon taken up by sculpture. He would often absent himself from class, to the ire of the authorities who asked him to report with an explaination. Mhatre carried the plaster cast he had been working on, of a woman on her way to the temple, and carried it into class and placed it so it would stand in the direct path of the lecturer who walked in. His 'explaination' astounds the principal, Greenwood, who cannot imagine how Mhatre has so seamlessly absorbed the conventions of Greco Roman sculpture while all the while training as a painter? Ravi Varma declared it to be " The most beautiful production of its kind I have ever seen by a native" It was a great vindication for art schools who were often threatened with extinction.
After 1896, Ravi Varma press starts printing oleographs of Shivaji, Tilak, Ranade
![[1]](http://www.the-south-asian.com/Oct2003/images/gauhar5%20-%20c%201896.jpg){kind=link}