Soap, Sacred Art, and the Soapbox: How Colonial Advertisers Repurposed Ravi Varma's Chromolithographs

When British consumer-goods titan Lever Brothers released its 1935 advertising calendar for Sunlight Soap in colonial India, the focal image was not a pristine English laundry room or a corporate trademark. Instead, the calendar displayed Vishnu resting upon the cosmic serpent Ananta. Below the iconographic scene, physical bars of Sunlight Soap were rendered alongside the monthly dates—placed right at the feet of the deity like a votive offering (puja offering).

The design was not an original commission created from scratch by a British corporate artist. It was adapted from a composition originally produced around 1900 by the press of Raja Ravi Varma, the Travancore painter who had introduced oil-painting realism to traditional Hindu iconography.

The 1935 calendar represents a documented moment in modern Indian visual culture: the transition of sacred mass-printed art from domestic altars to multi-national corporate marketing campaigns.

From Royal Canvases to Mass Print Culture

Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) built his early reputation painting oil portraits and mythological scenes for Indian royalty. Advised by Sir T. Madhava Rao, former Diwan (chief minister) of Travancore, Varma realized that his oil paintings reached only an elite circle of patrons. In 1894, Varma founded the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press in Ghatkopar, Bombay, later moving operations to Lonavala.

To operate the machinery, Varma imported heavy lithographic limestone blocks and hired German technicians. The press produced chromolithographs—often called oleographs—which used oil-based inks applied in multiple layers to mimic the texture of oil paintings.

Before the advent of these mass prints, visual access to deities was largely controlled by temple access and caste norms. Mass lithography allowed households across economic spectrums to buy color prints of Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Vishnu. As art historian Kajri Jain notes in her study of Indian popular visual culture, Gods in the Bazaar, these mass prints transformed how sacred imagery circulated throughout the Indian subcontinent.

When Varma died in 1906, the press continued under the ownership of his German partner, Fritz Schleicher. The press issued prints of Varma’s compositions well into the 1930s, maintaining distribution networks handled by agencies such as Anant Shivaji Desai in Bombay.

The Commercial Pivot: Gods as Brand Ambassadors

By the 1920s and 1930s, foreign and domestic corporations operating in India recognized the reach of these familiar visual motifs. Advertisers faced a distinct challenge: marketing imported consumer goods, such as machine-made soaps, packaged baby foods, and chemical dyes, to a vastly multilingual population.

Print calendars offered an ideal medium. Unlike discarded newspaper ads, wall calendars remained inside homes and shops for a full year. Rather than creating entirely new imagery, advertising departments purchased rights to existing lithographic plates or commissioned print shops to add corporate branding around established Ravi Varma compositions.

The adaptations were direct:

• Sunlight Soap (Lever Brothers): Lever Brothers issued calendars featuring Varma's Lakshmi in 1933, Vishnu on Garuda in 1934, and Vishnu on Ananta in 1935.
• Vinolia Soap: Calendars printed for Vinolia Soap incorporated Varma's iconic 1894 depiction of goddess Saraswati seated beside a river with a veena (stringed instrument).
• C.E. Morton Food Products: Advertisements for imported jams used Varma’s Vishnu Garuda Vahan (Vishnu riding the divine eagle Garuda) to declare product quality.
• Mellin's Food: The American infant food manufacturer used Varma's Birth of Shakuntala composition in promotional prints.

The visual strategy tied the concept of ritual purity (shuddhi) to commercial cleanliness. By embedding an image of a soap bar directly into a devotional print, advertisers suggested that hygiene products were aligned with traditional daily rituals.

Domestic Shrines and Commercial Survival

The repurposing of religious imagery created a unique pattern of domestic consumption. In many Indian households and storefronts, commercial calendars were not discarded at the end of the year. Consumers routinely cut out the date grid, framed the central image of the deity, and installed it in domestic shrines or shop altars.

Scholarship on South Asian visual ephemera—including archival work documented by the Tasveer Ghar visual archive collective and collector Priya Paul—demonstrates that many surviving 1930s commercial prints still carry traces of ritual use, such as marks of vermilion powder (kumkuma) applied directly to the paper.

While British firms used chromolithographs to expand consumer markets, Indian nationalists simultaneously adapted calendar art for swadeshi (self-reliance) campaigns, placing images of textiles produced in Indian mills alongside patriotic deities.

Eventually, corporate calendar art moved away from lithographic stones toward offset printing and photographic collage, a transition led in later decades by South Indian printing hubs like Sivakasi. Yet the template set by Lever Brothers and the Ravi Varma Press in the 1930s permanently altered the visual landscape of South Asia—proving that when modern advertising arrived on the subcontinent, it did so by borrowing the visual language of the sacred.