I love your interpretation of this painting, and I was going to highlight things here, but realised that I’d just end up painting the whole thing brown. There’s a maxim in Sanskrit literature that interpretation is what gives meaning to a text, and that’s certainly seems to be true for paintings as well. In essence, what you would have are more or less interesting interpretations (rather than more or less true deconstructions); yours is one of the most interesting interpretations this paintings could have been given, especially insofar as you’ve juxtaposed the painter with Raja Ravi Varma.

But just on the point that Ravi Varma was pan-Indian because his painting women from an idealised notion of Hindu mythology, I am not sure it’s entirely that simple. Ravi Varma took a very South Indian interpretation of the Sanskrit literature on which he was basing his ouvre. His Sakuntala is a Malayali, not a Madhya Pradeshi, even though that’s exactly what she was in the Mahabharata and in the Abhijnana Sakuntalam. The same can be said for Menaka & Visvamitra, etc. So essentially his characters are very particularly regional, Malayali interpretations of these ‘pan-Indian’ characters.

Anyway, I really look forward to your expositions of the other paintings. I think you are seriously skilled at this genre!