As Bengaluru’s green fades, its ‘painter laureate’ feels newly urgent

Every afternoon for three weeks, a spry man trekked hundreds of feet down Karnataka’s Ghats to paint a waterfall.

One day, the gates of the dam built across the cascading river opened without warning, causing the mist rising from the water to blur the familiar vista. The artist now faced a challenge: with the painting nearly complete, how might he depict the transformed natural mise en scène with optical fidelity?

Before long, he improvised a technique. Using a razor, he scratched the painting’s surface, evocatively capturing the waterfall’s hazy, moist shimmer.

This is an account of one of independent India’s most important landscapists, Rumale Chennabasaviah, painting the majestic Jog Falls in 1956. While that particular piece was gifted to the United States embassy a decade later, another work from the same period and of a similar mood was recently on view at Hyderabad’s Salar Jung Museum as part of the latest iteration of Chennabasaviah’s long-term retrospective series Varna Mythri . Titled Karighatta Hill near Srirangapattana (1952), the watercolour uses dapples of greens, blues and browns to evoke, from a distance, the tranquil environs of the titular hill and the Lokapavani river winding past its base.

The story about Chennabasaviah painting Jog Falls was originally excerpted from his autobiography by curator KS Srinivasa Murthy in an essay for the inaugural Varna Mythri exhibition in 2011 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru. A subsequent, slightly updated iteration was mounted at NGMA Mumbai in 2024. Together, these exhibitions mark some of the most significant moments in the artist’s gradual re-emergence from regional prominence into the national mainstream over the past 15 years. This renewed visibility has been driven in large part by Sanjay and Shabala Kabe, current administrators of the Rumale Art House, which Chennabasaviah founded in 1973 and which loaned the works exhibited at both venues.

Karighatta Hills. 1952. Watercolour on Paper | 34 cm X 49 cm. Collection: Rumale Art House. Satyagraha and silence

A chronicler of nature, primarily in his home state of Karnataka, Chennabasaviah painted a range of landscapes: rivers, forests, coastlines and hills. Yet, his compositions frequently hint at human intervention, whether in government-commissioned documentation of large-scale waterworks or in urban scenes where trees interact with architecture.

Particularly celebrated for his late 20th-century depictions of Bengaluru’s vibrant flora, Chennabasaviah was dubbed the Garden City’s “painter laureate” by Kannada writer and educationist VK Gokak. Today, much of the artist’s oeuvre, encompassing both watercolours and oils, remains on display in Bengaluru’s Rajajinagar neighbourhood, at Rumale Art House, the gallery he founded to house his works.

Murthy’s 2011 essay remains perhaps the most accessible and comprehensive English-language account of Chennabasaviah’s life and practice. Born in 1910 into a family of jewellers in Doddaballapura, around 50 kilometres north of Bengaluru, he completed his schooling there before studying at two of the region’s foremost art institutions. In 1931, he trained in watercolour and oil painting at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute, established by Mysore’s Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar as part of his modernising agenda. But it was the preceding year that Chennabasaviah had spent at Kalamandira that may have influenced his trajectory more profoundly. A pioneering swadeshi art school founded by artist AN Subbarao in 1919 – the same year Rabindranath Tagore set up Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan – Kalamandira was where, as a student, Chennabasaviah decided to join MK Gandhi’s Satyagraha against the British empire.

For nearly 25 years, beginning in the mid-1930s, Chennabasaviah painted only sporadically. During this period, he was a freedom fighter with the Hindustani Seva Dala, then a political prisoner in various Deccan jails and, eventually, after independence, a member of the Mysore State Legislative Council, where he campaigned for financial and housing support for artists. From 1960 onwards, he started making up for lost creative time: between 1962 and 1978, he held a dozen solo exhibitions and went on to win several prestigious honours, including Mysore state’s Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 1972.

Through My Room, Dodballapur with sign, R.C. Basavaiah. August 26, 1931. Watercolour on paper | 48 cm X 33 cm. Collection: Rumale Art House. Among the works on display at the Salar Jung Museum were Chennabasaviah’s earliest watercolours from the 1930s and 1940s. Through My Room (1931), made in Doddaballapura, and an untitled circular vignette depicting what appears to be the mosque at Srirangapatna, anticipate the combination of trees and built structures that would become his hallmark. Another watercolour, titled Pump Shed (1947), features lush green foliage, with an orange-clad figure operating a tube well in the foreground, an open well behind him and a village…