From Stone to Canvas: How Hindu Gods Got the Faces We Know Today

Subject: History & Culture  ·  Tag: Established

In July 1894, in Girgaum, Bombay, the first sheet came off a lithographic press shipped from Germany two years earlier and run by German technicians, among them Fritz Schleicher. The picture was Shakuntala, painted by Raja Ravi Varma. Lakshmi and Saraswati followed the same year, and the story usually stops there: the painter who gave the gods their modern faces. He did not, and the press stayed in his hands for only seven years.

The earliest sustained sculpture of Vishnu and Shiva in human form comes from Mathura under the Kushan kings, roughly the first to third centuries CE. A human-form Vasudeva-Krishna had appeared on coins two centuries earlier, but sculpture took the idea up here in earnest. Mathura’s carvers already knew how to cut a yaksha, a local nature spirit, and the Ashmolean Museum’s account of the period says the new gods were first modelled on the sturdy, warrior-like build of those figures.

What made a god recognisable was never the body but the attributes: Vishnu’s conch, discus, mace, and lotus; Shiva’s matted hair and trident; Krishna’s flute and peacock feather. The Sanskrit texts known as the Shilpa Shastras eventually wrote down proportions for these figures, but they were many texts, not one, and every region and workshop read them its own way. A Chola bronze of Krishna, cast to be carried in procession, and a Pahari miniature of Krishna with Radha, painted to be held close, are plainly the same god and share almost nothing else. For a thousand years no single image was emerging.

Copying changed that. Chromolithography (colour printing from stone plates, one plate per colour) let a picture be reproduced by the thousand at a price a pilgrim could pay, and the trade did not begin in Bombay. Woodblock prints of the gods were being cut in Calcutta’s Battala district by the 1840s; Kalighat painters sold quick watercolours outside the Kali temple. In 1878 Annada Prasad Bagchi and four fellow art-school students founded the Calcutta Art Studio and soon had a lithographic press turning out gods shaded and rounded like figures in a European painting. The same year Vishnushastri Chiplunkar founded the Chitrashala Press in Poona. Varma’s press was sixteen years behind both.

What Varma added was a name. A celebrated painter’s own compositions, in the realist style of the European art academies, came off an industrial press under his signature, and that combination travelled. It did not pay. Rival presses pirated the images, the venture lost money, and in 1901 the Varma brothers sold it to Schleicher and a partner along with the right to reproduce about a hundred paintings. Under the German it grew into one of the largest picture-printing houses in India, and the catalogue grew to take in other artists’ work, postcards, and matchbox labels. By 1920, Christopher Pinney records, cheap Ravi Varma Press images were undercutting the Calcutta Art Studio that had preceded them. Pinney’s history of the printed image in India was the first comprehensive account of the subject, and it sets Varma beside the presses that came before him precisely to take the legend apart.

The proof is what came next. S.S. Brijbasi and Sons, a Karachi firm that moved from photo-framing into publishing, built its catalogue not on Varma but on painters from Nathdwara, the Krishna pilgrimage town in Rajasthan: Narottam Narayan Sharma, Ghasiram Hardev Sharma, Khubiram Gopilal. Their work was printed in Germany in the 1930s. Narottam Narayan’s Murli Manohar of 1934, a flute-playing child Krishna in a moonlit landscape, is reputed, the Metropolitan Museum notes, to be the best-selling image in the history of the trade. That is the Krishna a great many people picture today: a 1930s painting from Rajasthan, printed in Germany, sold from Karachi.

From there the image only changed carriers: calendar art, cinema, television epics, animation, phone stickers.

None of this touches whether the gods are real, or what happens in darshan, the act of seeing and being seen by a temple image. A believer can hold the deity to be eternal and still recognise that a particular face, colour, and pose has a date. The tradition is ancient. The picture is not, and it never claimed otherwise.

Glossary

Yaksha — A nature-spirit figure in early Indian sculpture, unconnected to Vishnu or Shiva, whose body type the first god-images borrowed.

Kushan — A dynasty of Central Asian origin that ruled much of north India in roughly the 1st–3rd centuries CE.

Shilpa Shastra — A family of Sanskrit texts, composed across different periods and regions, giving guideline proportions and attributes for religious images.

Chola / Pahari — Chola: the south Indian dynasty (9th–13th century) whose workshops cast bronze temple images. Pahari: the miniature-painting tradition of the Himalayan foothills (roughly 17th–19th century).

Chromolithography — A 19th-century colour-printing process using one stone plate per colour.

Battala / Kalighat — Battala: a Calcutta printing district producing cheap woodblock prints of deities from at least the 1840s. Kalighat: a nearby style of quick watercolour paintings sold to temple pilgrims.

Nathdwara — A Krishna pilgrimage town in Rajasthan with its own hereditary painting tradition, whose artists supplied the Brijbasi firm.

Darshan — The act of seeing and being seen by a deity or holy image in Hindu practice.

Sources

1. Ashmolean Museum, Jameel Centre, “Mathura sculpture in the Kushan period, AD 1–300,” Eastern Art Online gallery text. jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/4/6739/6743. Accessed September 2026.
2. K. Narain, “Two Hindu Divinities on the Coins of Agathocles from Ai-Khanum,” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, 1973.
3. N. Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography, 2nd ed. University of Calcutta, 1956.
4. A. Gopinatha Rao, Elements of Hindu Iconography, 2 vols. in 4 parts. Madras: Law Printing House, 1914–1916.
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, Chola bronze “Yashoda with the Infant Krishna.” metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39331. Accessed September 2026.
6. Kurt Behrendt, “Poetic Allusions in the Rajput and Pahari Painting of India,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016.
7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930,” exhibition and gallery text, January 2026–June 2027.
8. Andrew Raftery, “When India Reinvented Prints,” The New York Review of Books, 23 July 2026 (review of the Met and MFA Boston exhibitions). Paywalled.
9. Art Gallery of New South Wales, collection record, Calcutta Art Studio, “Durga slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura,” late 19th century. artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/105.2011. Accessed September 2026.
10. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
11. MAP Academy, encyclopaedia entry “Raja Ravi Varma Press,” 2023. mapacademy.io/article/raja-ravi-varma-press/.
12. Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, “Wanderers Between Worlds: Story of the Ravi Varma Press,” Google Arts & Culture. Undated; accessed September 2026.
13. Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, “The Ravi Varma Press — The 125 Year Commemorative,” Google Arts & Culture, 2019.
14. MAP Academy (Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru), encyclopaedia entries “Poona Chitrashala” and “SS Brijbasi and Sons,” 2023.
15. Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
16. Deepali Dewan, review of Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’, CAA Reviews, 2 December 2004.
17. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Duke University Press, 2007.
18. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, Narottam Narayan Sharma, “Murli Manohar.” metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/838326. Accessed September 2026.