This essay revisits the Indian “Renaissance” in art and the emergence of Parallel Modernisms in Indian art by examining the artworks of The New Andhra School of Art, a movement led by Damerla Rama Rao (1897-1925) of Rajahmundry. While the narrative of “Indian Revival” of art during the time of the Swadeshi Movement is largely centred around the artists of Bombay and Bengal Schools, in the same temporal span regional art movements such as the one in Andhra, developed their own distinct visual culture. Through the works of Artists like Damerla Rama Rao, Digumarthy Butchi Krishnamma, Damerla Satyavani, S.N Chamkur and many others from The New Andhra School of Art we can observe that the regional imagination began to speak its own distinct language within the larger story of Indian Modernism. The reflections offered here, emerge from an ongoing inquiry into the visual cultures of the region and their relationship with print culture and the larger Nationalist thought.
Damerla Rama Rao studied at the prestigious Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay between 1916 and 1920. After graduating, he returned to his hometown Rajahmundry where he established a school of art as a family enterprise with his wife, sister, and close associates. Active through the early 1920s until his untimely death in 1925, Rama Rao’s brief career left behind a striking body of work and a fragile institution that sought to evolve “a school of art in Indian tradition and yet quite different from any other art school in India” (Damerla Rama Rao: Masterpieces).
Most writings about Rama Rao emerged posthumously, beginning with his mentor O. J. Couldrey’s memorial essay “Memories of Damerla Rama Rao” (1931), which eulogized the “artistic genius” of a young protégé, cut short in his prime. Later writings in the 1950s and 1960s, including a monograph by the Damerla Memorial Art Gallery, attempted to inscribe him into a nationalist art canon by comparing his works to that of Abanindranath Tagore, Raja Ravi Varma, and Amrita Sher-Gil. Yet, despite these comparisons, Rama Rao remains largely unknown outside Andhra Pradesh today. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not produce writings or manifestos to frame his art, compelling later researchers to rely on archival traces i.e., letters and commentaries by others to reconstruct his career and social context.
From these various accounts, one can understand that the impact his art works have created are not just restricted to Andhra. A Telugu publication about his life and works by V. Kalikavatharam (2011) mentions about his travels across the length and breadth of India working and exhibiting his works in Princely states like Bhavnagar, Baroda, and cities like Calcutta and Bombay. Internationally, his works got recognition and awards in Canada and England. But the artist and his legacy were challenged by his untimely death.
Colonial Pedagogy and Artistic Lineage
Oswald Jennings Couldrey, the principal of the Government College of Arts, Rajahmundry from 1909, was himself a painter and poet. He met Rama Rao through the latter’s brother Venkat Rao, a lecturer at the same college. In his memoir, Couldrey recalls their “adventures” together, painting a world of paternal mentorship and Anglo-Indian camaraderie. He writes that “Ram’s gifts and works alike can be better understood in the light of the relevant gifts and interests of his relations and early associates,” acknowledging the presence of artistic talent in the Damerla family. This seemingly benign remark hints at a deeper genealogy—one that connects Rama Rao to a local artisanal milieu rather than a purely elite background.
Couldrey’s account suggests that before formal art education reached Andhra, visual practice thrived through theatre scenario painting. He mentions a local artist “Mr. Ram,” likely A. S. Ram, a celebrated stage designer who later worked in the Lahore theatre circuit. Rama Rao and his peers reportedly learned the techniques of photo-realism from such practitioners before pursuing institutional training. This early exposure underscores how regional craft and colonial art pedagogy intertwined in producing early modern visual idioms.
Choosing Bombay: Aesthetic and Ideological Divergence
Under Couldrey’s guidance, Rama Rao and a small group of students were encouraged to train professionally. Couldrey viewed Rama Rao as his “protégé” and aspired to make him a “distinctively Indian painter.” When considering where to send his student, he recommended Bombay over Calcutta, explicitly rejecting the Bengal School’s revivalist aesthetic, which he felt was “nearer to Japan than Ajanta”. His disdain for Bengal’s “spiritual” Indian-ness reflected a wider debate on what constituted the truly “Indian” in modern art, a debate that engaged orientalists, critics, and artists such as Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and O. C. Gangoly.
The Bengal School had, by the 1910s, established itself as the new national style, aligning art with Swadeshi ideology and ancient “Aryan” aesthetics (Guha-Thakurta). Yet in the southern presidencies, a different sensibility was taking shape. Regional nationalism in Andhra, coupled with exposure to Western academic realism at the J. J. School under Gladstone Solomon, led artists like Rama Rao to pursue an alternative path. The one that accepted colonial training but reimagined it through local themes and idioms.
The Couldrey–Gangoly Exchange: Modernism and Authenticity
The ideological fault lines between Western academic art and Indian revivalism came to the fore in the 1931 exchange between Couldrey and Gangoly in Triveni Journal. Gangoly’s essay “Rama Rao’s Paintings” dismissed Couldrey’s tribute as “sentimental,” arguing that the young artist’s works were “Greco-Roman absurdities”, lacking spiritual depth. In his rejoinder, Couldrey accused Gangoly of being an “early Mauryan,” mocking his antiquarian fixation on Ajanta and dismissing his authority to define Indian art (Couldrey, “Rama Rao’s Paintings: A Reply”).
While Gangoly’s criticism was rooted in orientalism, it raised a crucial issue—the social condition of artistic production in early twentieth-century India. Only the sons of elite families could afford art-school training, while many others continued as commercial painters. Rama Rao’s trajectory thus exemplifies what John Clark later theorized as a “contact-zone modernism”: an artist who never travelled abroad but absorbed global art discourses through colonial intermediaries and resident expatriates.
Artistic Formation and Early Modernist Subjectivity
Couldrey repeatedly praised Rama Rao’s technical mastery and aesthetic refinement. Formal training, access to European mentors, and exposure to exhibition circuits positioned him to construct a modern artist-figure within the colonial framework. Yet, despite his Western academic style, Rama Rao sought to localize his art through subject matter and atmosphere.
His paintings often depicted intimate scenes of Hindu social life in Andhra—Pushpalankara, Nandi Pooja, and Baavi Vadda—combining classical figuration with ethnographic detail. As Madhu Jain later observed, the paintings revealed a “sublime sensuality,” provoking public outrage in conservative circles; the decision to paint nude female figures in 1920s Rajahmundry was, in itself, radical. These figures, however, were not derivative of Greco-Roman models but echoed the sensibilities of Kakatiya sculpture, especially those at the Ramappa temple. By invoking a pre-colonial regional visuality, Rama Rao articulated a modernism that was both academic and indigenous.
Regional Nationalism and Institutional Experiment
In spirit, the New Andhra School of Art was conceived as an experiment akin to Santiniketan yet distinct from it. If Santiniketan represented an urban imagination of rural idealism, Rama Rao’s Rajahmundry venture emerged from the lived and experienced riverine culture of the Godavari delta. After Rama Rao’s death, his sister Digumarthy Butchi Krishnamma and his wife Damerla Satyavani carried forward the school’s activities, teaching, exhibiting, and contributing to Telugu print culture.
Krishnamma and Satyavani’s works frequently appeared in the women’s magazines Bharati and Gruhalakshmi (both published from Madras), visualizing Swadeshi ideals through domestic imagery. Paintings such as Noolu Theeyuta and Birth of Bharata translated nationalist symbolism into the idiom of women’s labour and devotion. As Rohini Iyengar’s doctoral study argues, these women artists not only sustained the New Andhra School but also shaped a regional modernism that negotiated gender, domesticity, and politics.
Their contribution has largely been overshadowed by the myth of the male “artistic genius.” Yet, the survival of the school’s ideals into the late 1930s owes much to their continued participation in art and social reform. Krishnamma later founded a welfare centre for destitute women and was active in the freedom movement, embodying the school’s broader social vision.
Rediscovery and Afterlife
For decades after Independence, the New Andhra School of Art faded from national memory. It resurfaced only with Madhu Jain’s 1990 article “A Forgotten Treasure” in India Today, which lamented the neglected state of the Damerla Art Gallery and compared its decay to “a cruel mockery of the past dreams of a mini-Santiniketan”. Jain’s comparison to Amrita Sher-Gil was less about stylistic similarity than about the erasure of regional modernists from art history. Sher-Gil’s legacy had gained institutional visibility and market value, while Rama Rao’s remained confined to local archives.
Today, the Damerla Art Gallery in Rajahmundry survives, Ignored by the local authorities and people and in dire need of restoration. The lack of institutional support has relegated the school’s history to obscurity. Nevertheless, the story of the New Andhra School of Art challenges the linear narrative of Indian modernism centered around Bombay and Bengal.
Rama Rao’s art and pedagogy complicates the binaries of Indian art. His practice demonstrates how regional modernisms absorbed, resisted, and reconfigured metropolitan paradigms. The New Andhra School of Art, though short-lived, offered an alternative genealogy of Indian modernism, one grounded in regional aesthetics, artisanal lineage, and local social reform.
By recovering figures like Butchi Krishnamma and Damerla Satyavani, we recognize that the modernist imagination in Andhra was not a derivative echo but a vibrant articulation of its own. To borrow Couldrey’s words, Rama Rao’s works were indeed “unique to their time and place of birth” and it is precisely in this uniqueness that the history of Indian art must find its plurality.
This essay is part of an ongoing research into those overlapping worlds of image, pedagogy, and print. I am extending the archival and visual work presented here to examine the later phases of the Andhra art movement and its entanglements with nationalist print cultures; the larger study aims to reframe these regional trajectories within broader narratives of Indian modernism as the research progresses.
References:
- Couldrey, O. J. “Memories of Damerla Rama Rao.” Triveni Journal of Indian Renaissance, vol.4, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 1931, pp. 2–14.
- “Rama Rao’s Paintings: A Reply to Mr. Gangoly.” Triveni Journal of Indian Renaissance, Sep.–Oct. 1931.
- Gangoly, O. C. “Rama Rao’s Paintings.” Triveni Journal of Indian Renaissance, vol. 4, no. 6, 1931, pp. 121–23.
- Damerla Rama Rao: Masterpieces. Rajahmundry: Damerla Rama Rao Memorial Art Gallery and School, 1969.
- Jain, Madhu. “A Forgotten Treasure.” India Today, 15 Nov. 1990. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/story/19901115-works-of-painter-damerala-rama-rao-await-attention-and-rediscovery-813216-1990-11-14
- Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Reddy, B. Sudha. Cultural Production under Colonial Rule: A Study of the Development of Painting in Modern Andhra, 1900–1947. PhD diss., University of Hyderabad, 1996.
- Mitter, Partha. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Iyengar, B. S. Rohini. Figuring Regional Aesthetics: Women Artists via Regional Histories and Modernisms. PhD diss., Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 2008.
- Kalikavatharam, V. Navyandhra Chitrakala Vaithalikudu, Damerla Rama Rao (1897-1925). C.P Brown Academy, 2011.
- Clark, John. “The Worlding of the Asian Modern.” Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibition: Connectivity and World-Making, 2014.
- Sawant, Shukla Vinayak. Imaging Land, Imagining Landscape: Painting in Colonial India (1793–1947). PhD diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2015.
- Kodidala, Sai Priya. “Forgotten by Time, 20th Century Andhra Art Renaissance Nurtured Local Styles and Produced Prolific Female Artists.” Firstpost, 25 June 2020, https://www.firstpost.com/art-and-culture/andhra-art-renaissance-forgotten-by-time-carved-a-distinct-identity-and-produced-prolific-female-artists-8483451.html