Abalal Rahiman (c. 1860 – 28 December, 1931) was one of the first painters to be formally educated and work out of Kolhapur and among the first students to attend Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay.
Born Abdul Aziz into a family of Quranic illuminators, he demonstrated an aptitude for drawing, earning a royal scholarship to continue his education at Bombay, where he studied under John Griffiths, subsequently winning the Viceroy’s Gold Medal.
After completing his training, he became the court painter to Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj in Kolhapur, spending three decades capturing sensitive watercolour landscapes and portraits in a characteristic style that established him as a great master painter, drawing a level of patronage that his work continued to inspire in following generations. Despite the significant impact he had on later artists, a history of personal loss beginning with the early death of his mother and a subsequent grief at the loss of Shahu Maharaj saw him become increasingly reclusive toward the end of his life.
Early Life
Abalal Rahiman was born in Kolhapur, in present-day Maharashtra. Sources disagree on the exact year of his birth — most institutional sources, including DAG and Wikipedia, cite 1860, while Sotheby’s editorial materials place it more broadly between 1856 and 1860. This range has not been definitively resolved in the available record and is noted here rather than arbitrated. He was born Abdul Aziz, and was known informally through his life by the nickname “Aba”.
His family had, for generations, been engaged in the traditional craft of hand-copying and illuminating Quranic manuscripts; his father carried on this occupation at the Kolhapur court, which lay in a princely state administratively distinct from the British-controlled Bombay Presidency. As a boy, Rahiman was set to colour in the decorative borders his father had outlined for these manuscripts. This was an early apprenticeship in patient, disciplined mark-making that would resurface later in his gold-highlighted portrait technique.
His formal introduction to painting arose almost by accident. The young Rahiman was sent to take lessons in Persian from a local scholar who also tutored the family of the English Resident at the Kolhapur court. While accompanying his teacher to the Residency and waiting between lessons, he passed the time sketching, and these drawings caught the attention of the Resident’s wife. Impressed by his talent, she interceded with the Maharaja of Kolhapur on his behalf, securing him a state scholarship to study at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, reportedly around 1880.
At the J. J. School, Rahiman studied drawing, watercolour, and oil painting, training directly under the British painter John Griffiths, then in charge of decorative and academic painting at the institution. He proved an outstanding student, particularly skilled in chalk drawing, chiaroscuro, and the charcoal “powder-shading” technique, and his teachers reportedly expected his career to develop along lines comparable to his contemporary, the Parsi painter Pestonji Bomanji. He graduated in 1888. He won the prestigious Viceroy’s Gold Medal in 1886.
The personal tragedy he suffered through the sudden death of his mother, compounded by strained relations with a step-mother, led him to cut short his cosmopolitan years in Bombay and drew him back toward Kolhapur. Thus, setting the emotional tone for the reclusive temperament that would mark much of his later life.
Artistic Journey
After graduating from the J. J. School of Art in 1888, Rahiman returned to Kolhapur and was appointed court painter to Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj. This position and patronage relationship would go on to shape the whole of his working life for over three decades. His european academic training under John Griffiths had given him a strong command of tonal modulation, anatomy, and life-painting. This he carried into a body of work built almost entirely around two genres: landscape and portraiture.
As a court painter, Rahiman travelled extensively with the Maharaja on his hunts, durbars, and state visits, while painting landscapes on location at different times of the day to study the changing quality of natural light, a working method some later writers have loosely likened to European plein-air practice. The locations associated with these landscape excursions include the Radhanagari and Dajipur forests, Kotitirtha lake and the Sandhyamath memorial on the outskirts of Kolhapur. Alongside these landscapes, he produced a number of portraits of the Kolhapur royal family, of his own relatives, and of ordinary townspeople. These were executed for both aristocratic and everyday patrons. Watercolour was his preferred and most commercially demanded medium, though he also worked competently in oil.
Rahiman’s realism has been described as deliberately “unglamorous”. An approach less concerned with decorative embellishment than with the faithful rendering of texture and natural complexion, whether of a maharaja’s face or a piece of fruit. Art historian Suhas Bahulkar has credited Rahiman’s work as instrumental in establishing what is termed the “Kolhapur School of European Naturalism”. Notably, even though Rahiman displayed marked sensitivity to portraiture during his student years, his mature practice tilted toward landscape. A shift some sources attribute to a scarcity of steady portrait commissions outside the Kolhapur court, and possibly to reservations toward figural representation rooted in his family’s Quranic-manuscript tradition.
A further, less commercial strand of his practice surfaced in still-life painting, evident in a small body of oil-on-paper studies (such as “Fruits,” 1912) that appear to have been personal exercises rather than commissioned work. Still life as a self-sufficient genre with objects painted for their own sake, without narrative or devotional purpose. This had little precedent in earlier Indian painting traditions, and entered local practice largely through the pedagogical exercises of colonial-era art schools such as J. J. School, where rendering objects on a table was used to train students in light, volume, and texture before they progressed to figure painting. For Rahiman, this genre offered a rare outlet for unmediated, private observation, distinct from the demands of court and market that shaped his watercolour output.
Rahiman’s most productive and mature period is generally placed in the 1920s. This career arc, however, was brought to an effective close by the death of his patron, Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, in 1922. This event triggered a severe personal and financial decline, after which Rahiman produced little new work before his own death in 1931.
Notable Patrons
The single most significant relationship of Rahiman’s professional life was with Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur (r. 1894–1922), under whose patronage he served as court painter from 1888 until the Maharaja’s death in 1922. This was not merely an honorary post: secondary accounts describe Rahiman as central to the visual culture of the Kolhapur court, crediting him with decorative painted-glass panels used in the windows and doors of the New Palace at Kolhapur, in addition to his portrait and landscape commissions. During his working life from around 1890 onward, Rahiman produced an estimated 20,000 paintings. This volume of output illustrates how heavily his livelihood, and his artistic practice as a whole, depended on sustained court patronage rather than a broader private market.
A chronological subtlety is worth flagging here, one that secondary sources tend to elide. The scholarship that first sent Rahiman to the Sir J. J. School of Art around 1880 was granted, in the sources’ own words, “by the Maharaja of Kolhapur”. However, Shahu Maharaj was not formally invested with ruling powers until 1894 which was six years after Rahiman had already completed his training in 1888. The identity of this earlier royal patron, likely the reigning Chhatrapati of the time or the state’s regency administration, is not specified with precision in any source consulted, and should not be casually conflated with Shahu Maharaj, even though popular accounts often use “the Maharaja” throughout without drawing this distinction. This gap in the record is noted rather than filled speculatively.
Beyond the royal patronage, Rahiman’s principal artistic mentor was John Griffiths, who headed the decorative painting at the J. J. School. Who also succeeded George Wilkins Terry as the school’s principal in 1882. John Griffiths was also engaged in a major project documenting the Ajanta cave murals. It was his academic-realist sensibility that is understood to have shaped Rahiman’s approach to tone, light, and technique. Rahiman’s school teachers reportedly saw in him the promise to develop along lines comparable to his contemporary Pestonji Bomanji. Outside the royal court, Rahiman’s most consistent institutional association was with the Bombay Art Society, through whose exhibitions a small number of his works which include “A Maratha Lady” and “Landscape” were occasionally shown and later catalogued.
Signature Works
1. Fruits (Untitled)
Date: 1912 · Medium: Oil on oil paper
Collection: DAG Museum Collection, New Delhi
Published in: Roobina Karode (ed.), Still-Life: Adaptations in 20th Century Indian Art (DAG, 2007), p. 29; Kishore Singh (ed.), Manifestations VII: 75 Artists (DAG, 2012), p. 149; Kishore Singh (ed.), A Visual History of Indian Modern Art, Vol. II (DAG, 2015), p. 305
Note: A rare personal, apparently non-commissioned still-life study, distinct from his commissioned portrait and landscape output.
2. Durbar from Kathiawad
Date: circa 1895 · Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Anil Relia Collection, “The Indian Portrait”
3. Pottery, Sir J. J. School of Art
Date: 1887 · Medium: Lithograph,
published in The Journal of Indian Art, Vol. II (London: W. Griggs and Sons, 1887)
Institution: Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum
Note: The earliest securely dated published work by Rahiman located in this research; documents his role illustrating the J. J. School’s experimental ceramics workshop.
4. Ambabai Temple, Kolhapur
Medium: Watercolour on paper,
Note: Depicts Kolhapur’s Mahalakshmi (Ambabai) Temple, consistent with his documented practice of painting local Kolhapur landmarks on location.
5. Town Hall, Kolhapur
Medium: Watercolour on paper.
6. Landscape – oil; courtesy S. K. Chavan (cited in Mitter, 1994, p. 86).
7. A Maratha Lady – Department of Archaeology & Museums, Maharashtra State / Bombay Art Society (cited in Mitter, 1994, p. 89).
8. Untitled (depicting the 1803 Bombay fire) – 1912, oil on oil paper; DAG Museum Collection, New Delhi.
9. Untitled (portrait with gold illumination, reflecting his Quranic-manuscript training),
medium: oil on oil paper pasted on canvas; DAG Museum Collection, New Delhi.
10. Rest & Hucca – watercolour on paper, IndiaArt.com gallery listing.
11. Untitled (Boy); Untitled (Gentleman) – sold at auction, March 2022; recorded via Artnet.
12. Portrait – sold at auction, June 2000; recorded via Artnet.
Awards and Recognition
Rahiman’s most concretely documented honour dates to his student years at the Sir J. J. School of Art: DAG records that he won the prestigious Viceroy’s Gold Medal in 1886, for a set of works that remain today in the school’s own collection.
A commercial-gallery source additionally credits Rahiman with a “Governor’s Gold Medal” from Lord Dufferin (Viceroy of India, 1884–88) for a set of black-and-white works; since Dufferin’s viceregal tenure overlaps precisely with the Viceroy’s Gold Medal already discussed, it is unclear from the available record whether this is a second, distinct award or an imprecise secondary description of the same medal.
Beyond prizes won in his lifetime, Rahiman’s more lasting recognition has been institutional and posthumous.
DAG has featured his work in three major group exhibitions and accompanying scholarly catalogues:
Still-Life: Adaptations in 20th Century Indian Art (2007),
the Manifestations series (Editions VII and IX, New Delhi, 2012–13), and
Indian Portraits: The Face of a People (New Delhi, 2013; Mumbai, 2014),
with further inclusion in A Visual History of Indian Modern Art, Volume II (2015).
In 2015, Shivaji University in Kolhapur dedicated a gallery to the city’s pioneering modern artists, giving Rahiman’s work renewed public visibility. His paintings are today held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, DAG, and the Kolhapur Palace Collection, among others.
Impact
Despite the personal obscurity that overtook Rahiman in the last decade of his life, his practice left a discernible mark on the artists who came after him. Wikipedia’s biographical account credits Rahiman as a mentor to Baburao Painter and S. Fatelal, the Kolhapur-based artists who went on to found the pioneering Maharashtra Film Company and, later, the influential Prabhat Film Company. A link that ties Rahiman’s academic-realist training directly to the visual foundations of early Marathi and Indian cinema.
DAG’s own profile of the painter M. K. Parandekar identifies Rahiman as a strong formative influence on Parandekar’s art, while auction-house scholarship on M. V. Dhurandhar suggests Rahiman may have offered the younger artist informal guidance in Kolhapur even before Dhurandhar’s own formal enrolment at the J. J. School of Art in 1890. Dhurandhar himself held Rahiman in evident esteem, later reflecting that adverse circumstances alone had denied Rahiman the wider fame he might otherwise have earned as a leading artist of his generation, who otherwise “would have basked in the limelight as a leading artist”.
At a regional level, art historian Suhas Bahulkar has credited Rahiman’s body of work as instrumental in establishing what is termed the “Kolhapur School of European Naturalism”, situating him as a foundational figure in a distinct regional strand of India’s early academic-realist painting, alongside the more widely studied metropolitan Bombay School. This regional legacy has seen renewed institutional attention in the twenty-first century, through DAG’s exhibitions and catalogues (2007–2015) and Shivaji University’s dedicated gallery for Kolhapur’s early modern artists (2015).
No substantial evidence of international critical reception or scholarship on Rahiman surfaced in the sources consulted for this biography; his documented impact remains chiefly regional and national. All this embedded in the history of Kolhapur’s artistic and, by extension, early Marathi cinematic culture, rather than in any global art-historical conversation. This gap is noted rather than filled speculatively.