Colours of Passion is, as its name says, both colourful and passionate. Ketan Mehta, whose last film The Rising tackled the 1857 revolt of pre-independence India, has chosen for his next venture the story of one of India’s greatest artists, Raja Ravi Varma. It was as ambitious a project as the previous one, and to his credit, it is as engaging and more importantly, well-timed, given the controversy over M.S. University art student Chandra Mohan’s work in Baroda last year.
Randeep Hooda portrays the celebrated Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma, and we see his emergence as a national artist of prominence from his roots as the husband to a princess from a Kerala royal family. This film is about art – from beginning to end. Varma lives and breathes art, and Mehta must have a lot of that in him as well, for some of the scenes are truly like moving paintings. As with most artists, Raja Ravi Varma needs a muse, and he finds his in Sugandha (Nandana Sen). Sugandha is so beautiful that when Varma sets eyes on her, he sees, as is mentioned in one of the last scenes of the film, the divine in her. And so Sugandha becomes Kali Ma, Durga, and a hundred other deities as he embarks upon his works of art, for which she willingly poses once she is convinced of his talent. Later, when Varma is contracted to paint a series of works for the Royal Palace of Baroda, he decides to travel around the country in order to find inspiration. These paintings bring him even more fame, but he is unhappy – because the works of art he saw in Khajuraho, among other places, made him want to paint people in their ‘true form-naked’. Sugandha acutely believes in him – so much that she agrees to pose for those paintings as well. There begins their heated relationship. But Sugandha to Varma is never more than that – a muse, or so he thinks.
When a German friend introduces him to the printing press, he decides to invest in it so that his paintings can be reproduced for the benefit of the larger public. As a rabid Hindu group decides to take it upon themselves to guard Indian culture and decides to protest against Varma’s works, all hell breaks loose. The film then hurtles to an engrossing end. Nandana Sen is particularly brilliant in her role as Sugandha.
There is one huge argument I have with Mehta – and that is that the early scenes of the film which follow Varma in his hometown in Kerala, are shot in Hindi, as are the scenes in Bombay. That completely takes away from the authenticity of those scenes, because shooting them in Malayalam instead would have added that touch that would have made the film almost perfect. Mehta defended this by saying that it was in the interest of continuity, but there were enough scenes in English as well, to warrant those scenes being shot in their language of origin. Interestingly, the producers, Deepa Sahi and Aannd Mahendroo, announced that the film had been passed without any cuts by the censor boards, and that distribution rights had already been bought in India. That is good news, because Colours of Passion is a lovely work of art that, as Ketan Mehta said really serves to spread the message that intolerance cannot and should not be brooked in a country that is as multicultural as India. The public of India deserve to see this film.
