Drawn to the little things: A Wknd interview with Ganjifa artist Raghupathi Bhat

When Raghupathi Bhat was seven years old, he was sent from his childhood home near Udupi, Karnataka, to the marital home of his elder sister, seven hours away.

His parents, who earned a living cooking and cleaning at a local temple, were so poor that there often wasn’t enough food for the large family (they had seven children in all). Their daughter’s in-laws ran an eatery; at least there, his parents reasoned, the boy wouldn’t go hungry.

Raghupathi Bhat’s early years were full of such decisions. A family dispute forced his father, who was born into a wealthy landowning family, to leave his ancestral home with his wife and children. Without land to farm, manual labour became their only livelihood. “We never had enough clothes,” Bhat recalls.
Today, the 67-year-old is a celebrated Ganjifa artist in Mysuru. He recently received the prestigious Kalidas Samman Award from the Madhya Pradesh government. (The ₹5 lakh prize recognises those who promote classical arts, literature and culture.)
“I am very, very happy about the honour,” he says.
His area of expertise is the Mysore style of Ganjifa art.
Ganjifa is an intricate miniature art form practised on round or oval cards typically about four inches in diameter. On the flip side of these cards are numbers that hark back to an ancient Persian game of bluff, meant to be played over several rounds, by groups of three.
The game came to India via the Mughals, in the 15th century. The original miniature paintings featured floral motifs or scenes from Persian folk tales. As with ivory chess sets and bejewelled hookahs, the cards were also status symbols, and as such were sometimes crafted in sandalwood and ivory, and embellished with gold and silver.
In India, princely patronage saw Ganjifa flourish from the 16th century on. New styles emerged in different regions. There is Sawantwadi Ganjifa in Maharashtra, Navadurga Ganjifa in Odisha; Rajasthan Ganjifa, Gujarat Ganjifa, and styles endemic to Kashmir and Nepal.
The floral motifs and Persian lore began to be replaced by intricate paintings of Hindu deities, and scenes from Hindu myth.
Mysore Ganjifa flourished under the patronage of king Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799-1868), and came to be typified by symbols associated with this dynasty. These include the elephant (an abiding icon of strength) and the mythical gandaberunda or two-headed eagle, an avatar of Vishnu, and an image that was stamped on all Wodeyar currency and still makes an appearance in the logos of government institutions in Karnataka.
Then came colonialism, industrialisation, the decline of the princely states. Ganjifa went the way of so much of India’s traditional arts and handicrafts. We are still struggling to find ways to preserve and promote forms with far deeper roots, ranging from Pattachitra to leather puppetry.
Among those at the forefront of the struggle to save Ganjifa, is Bhat.
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He grew up fascinated by art, he says. As a child, he was drawn to the temples near his sister’s home, and started out painting the deities he saw there. Priests took to the boy and began to tell him the stories behind what he was drawing. From there came a deep love of myth, and an early knowledge of symbolism.
At 14, he dropped out of Class 9 to study under a priest-painter guru. Over 10 years, Bhat studied under six such teachers.
It wasn’t until he was 21 that he saw his first piece of Ganjifa art. A friend who worked as a tour guide at the Mysore Palace showed him an exquisite little card. “He told me no one was creating this work any more. Since I was an artist, he said, I should try to make some.”
Bhat was mesmerised. He went home and began to paint scenes from the Ramayana, which he was studying at the time, onto little circles of paper. He scoured museums and old bookstores for references to Ganjifa art, and studied them closely.
He was now earning a living as a professional artist, making his money mainly from magazine commissions, much to his parents’ dismay. They would have preferred a more lucrative profession, he says, and the early years were a struggle. But he had found his calling.
By 1981, a 24-year-old Bhat was teaching Mysore Ganjifa, at special workshops for artists and art students. In most of his magazine commissions as well, he used the Mysore Ganjifa style.
He began to be written about as the man reviving a dying form.
In 1991, he was invited to show his Ganjifa art at an exhibition at the London outpost of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan art and cultural institute. He flew over with 100 art works, “All my paintings sold out in three days,” he says. He earned about 1,500 pounds, which was a tremendous amount of money then, he adds.
That same year, he and the Karnataka directorate of archaeology and museums set up a museum of Ganjifa art in Srirangapatna. In 1993, Bhat won a National Award for his efforts to revive Mysore Ganjifa.
In 1994, the museum he was so proud of moved to Mysuru, and so did he. He began to receive commissions to create Kannada film posters, and was much in demand as an illustrator for magazines too.
Then, in 2000, the museum closed due to a lack of funding. It has been like this through his efforts, he says; a few steps forward, a few steps back.
A particularly jarring blow came in 2014. Amid restoration work at the Mysore Palace, he was appointed to restore some of the gold leaf. He was then named in a case that alleged that he and nine others used inferior materials instead of gold leaf.
“For a while, some of my family and friends thought I was in the wrong,” Bhat says. “I was anxious and disoriented. But my patrons, particularly the scholars who know me, here and overseas, stood by me. And my art helped me through, as it always has.”
The case was dismissed this year. Since then, he has been at peace again.
At his Mysuru home, he paints every day. His wife Ramya Bhat, a homemaker, helps make the natural dyes for his art. “Even my daughter and 10-year-old granddaughter paint. That makes me very happy,” he says.
He is currently working to tell the story of the Mahabharata in a series of line drawings.
His eyesight has suffered from the strain of decades of miniature art, so he cannot work on his beloved tiny cards any more. But 30 of his one-time students are now Ganjifa artists. So, maybe he doesn’t need to.