Madri or the Maharashtrian Lady with Fruit

Madri, or the Maharashtrian Lady with Fruit is a 71 × 50 cm oil painting on canvas by Raja Ravi Varma. A woman stands facing us in a deep red sari, holding a tray of fruit. The Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation’s record says the canvas was used as the model for a colour print called Madri, which the Ravi Varma Press published. The print took its name from a woman in the Mahabharata. The painting itself was known simply as the Maharashtrian lady. Ravi Varma never had much formal training in oil painting. He taught himself a good deal, and he went on to become the Indian artist most associated with the Western academic style. Tapati Guha-Thakurta writes that he came from the Travancore aristocracy and that his career shows painting in India turning toward Western methods and toward illustrating Hindu myths (Studies in History, 1986). He sent work to Madras and won a prize there at the Madras Fine Arts Exhibition for Nair Lady at Toilet, yet he stayed largely apart from the city’s art school (South Asian Studies, 2025). His method can be seen in this picture. The subject is Indian, though, and the clothing matters. A Maharashtrian sari and its jewellery tell us where she is from. Costume does a lot of the work in his paintings generally (ShodhKosh). Scholars also describe his art as a mix of Western style and Indian subject matter, and the women he painted went on to become familiar figures in Indian visual culture (ShodhKosh, 2026). She isn’t a known person or a regional type, shown with a gift of fruit. The name Madri gives her a link to the epic, but the picture itself shows no scene from it.