Before 1894, a devotional picture of a great teacher was something you commissioned, inherited, or saw on a temple wall. It was not something you owned. Raja Ravi Varma changed that calculus for millions of households when he opened a lithographic press outside Bombay, printing his own paintings of gods, goddesses and sages by the thousand and selling them cheaply enough for an ordinary family shrine. This image of Adi Shankara, seated with the four disciples tradition credits with founding his teaching's four cardinal monastic centers, is one of those prints, made around 1904, two years before Ravi Varma's death.
What the press sold was never a single object. It was a shared visual vocabulary. Before mass printing, a Bengali household and a Tamil household might picture their teachers quite differently, shaped by regional workshop styles with little contact between them. Ravi Varma's prints, reproduced identically across the subcontinent, gave millions of people the same face for the same figure for the first time. Adi Shankara looks like this today, in no small part, because a press in Bombay decided he should.
The print now survives in the collection of the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, a Bengaluru based archive built specifically around documenting the Press's output, which by the early twentieth century had grown large enough to shape how entire regions pictured their gods regardless of local painting traditions that predated it by centuries. A single Bombay workshop, running for barely a generation, left a visual fingerprint on devotional imagery that outlasted the workshop itself by well over a hundred years.