Visualizing Literary Imagination: Nationalist Aesthetics and Regional Modernism in Ravishankar Raval’s Munjal

Abstract

The paper challenges the interdisciplinary discourse between literature and visual art as it occurred in the region of Gujarat during the twentieth century in the form of foreshadowing of the cooperation between the author Kanaiyalal Munshi and the painter Ravishankar Raval. Through interrogation of the painting Munjal Mehta by Raval, the study provides insight on how the literary version of Munshi of a minister in the Solanki period can be visualized in a complementary medium. Raval combines the Western academic realism and the Indian miniature painting canon with the effects of wash to transform the verbal images of Munshi into a symbolic cultural image. The compositional elements of the portrait, including the use of profile, its gloomy background and architectural reference and symbolic decoration make the historical figure more than a simple person and a symbol of Gujarati pride and continuity of civilizations. This visual translation is conducted in the conditions of the nationalistic milieu in the early twentieth century in India when artists tried to recover the traditions of the native land and confirm the cultural identity. The painting reflects the definition of regional modernism whereby it showed how the Gujarati artists bargained between the tradition and the modernity by synthesis and not by imitation. By providing concrete form to the imaginations of the literary, Raval, in its turn, adds to the historiography and construction of the collective memory of the culture. The Munshi-Raval dialogue in such a way exemplifies the power of intermediary translation to develop the regional identity and highlights the necessity to employ interdisciplinary tools to comprehend the Indian cultural output of the twentieth century