Kavita Deuskar: Painter, teacher, pioneer

Kavita Deuskar helped shape post-Independence Deccani art. But she was also a peculiarly Hyderabadi artist, with her art rooted in the syncretic traditions of the city.

In the arrival hall of the Hyderabad airport, there is a small gallery showcasing the city’s artists. Among them is a painting of a Muharram alam (a banner symbolising that of Hazrat Abbas and the martyrdom of Imam Hussain at the battle of Karbala) set against a backdrop of Deccani architecture and landscape. It is by the renowned Hyderabad-based artist, Kavita Deuskar, epitomising her Deccani roots and the syncretic culture of the city she called home. Born in June 1946, she would have celebrated her 80th birthday this year. Deuskar passed away in December 2025.

A key Indian artist who evolved a distinctively modernist regional style, Kavita Deuskar came to be known for her luminous egg tempera paintings and assured draughtsmanship. Her canvases are characterised by the subtle overlapping of delicate skeins of colour, with imagery drawn from her Hyderabadi milieu. Their style is eclectic, integrating diverse painting mediums.

With a career spanning several decades, Deuskar helped shape post-Independence Deccani art. She was one of India’s most recognised practitioners of the egg tempera technique, which she passed on to her students. As head of the Department of Painting, College of Fine Arts, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (now Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University), she influenced generations of students in Hyderabad, extending her artistic legacy beyond the studio.

Painting was Deuskar’s inheritance. Born into a family of artists, she left school to pursue painting, joining the College of Fine Arts in Hyderabad when she was barely 15. The college became her second home in many ways. Her earliest memories were of two of the city’s most important art institutions—the School of Art and Craft (as the College was known then), where her father, Sukumar Deuskar, was the principal; and the Dewan ki Deori (residence of one of the former prime ministers of Hyderabadi Deccan, Salar Jung III) premises of the Salar Jung Museum, where her grandfather, Ramkrishna Waman Deuskar, had his studio. Ramkrishna Waman had been instrumental in setting up the museum.

The careers of the Deuskar family members overlapped with developments in colonial and pre-Independence Indian art. Ramkrishna Waman, a major painter at the Nizam’s durbar, was a prolific artist of early 20th-centuryHyderabad. Hailing from Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, he trained as a painter at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay at the close of the 19th century, and later in Europe.

In Paris, he shared a studio with Shashi Kumar Hesh, one of the first Indian artists to study at the Royal Academy in Rome and a celebrated portraitist. There he met and later married Shashi Kumar’s sister, Muktabai Hesh. Their son, Sukumar, was born in 1910.

The family returned to India and settled in Hyderabad, where Ramkrishna Waman soon had his own studio for painting and photography. Like many artists of the time, he diversified into parallel spheres of craft and design to survive, running a carpet-weaving factory that produced fine copies of Persian designs. During the recurring plague outbreaks in early 20th-century Hyderabad,

In this period, he began his close collaboration with Salar Jung III, a keen collector and patron, who had one of the biggest private holdings of art and artefacts in the subcontinent. Ramkrishna Waman was the first curator of the Salar Jung Museum. He maintained his studio at Salar Jung’s palace, and lived and worked in the old museum premises until he died in 1957, aged 92. Ramkrishna Waman was well-known as a portraitist among the Hyderabadi nobility. He painted in oils in the European academic style: his large portrait of Salar Jung III hangs at the entrance of Salar Jung Museum. Sukumar assisted him on many of his commissions.

Sukumar grew up in Hyderabad. Following his schooling, he joined Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan against his father’s wishes and without his knowledge. Nandalal Bose’s generosity enabled him to stay on in Santiniketan, from where he completed his graduation in 1928. He then studied in Europe, exhibiting widely. On his return to India, Sukumar established himself as a painter in Hyderabad.

While he had earlier embraced the European academicism his father practised, he later defied him to train with Nandalal Bose in the revivalist, pan-Asian modes and ideas of art of the Bengal School. While he specialised in oil portraits, he also created murals on folk, mythological, and social themes—some of them can be seen at Gyan Bagh Palace in Hyderabad and Dhanraj Mahal in Bombay. Most of his work is preserved in Salar Jung Museum, Chowmahalla Palace, and important government buildings of Hyderabad. Sukumar died tragically young, at 41, in 1952.

Kavita Deuskar, his eldest daughter and the only one among his five children to pursue a career in art, was just six at the time of his death. Haunted by the loss, she aspired to be like him. She later recounted that when one of her teachers at art school—her father’s former colleague—had asked her to choose the palette for a life-class demonstration, she had instinctively picked the colours that were her father’s staples for portrait painting.

Perhaps painting came naturally to her. She had posed—often fretfully—for portraits for her father, who allowed her a free run of his studio. She remembered doodling over paintings she disliked and Sukumar indulging her whims. The sudden loss of her father brought great hardships to the family, but her mother encouraged her inclination to draw. Kavita joined the College of Fine Arts in 1961.

Each generation after of the family after Ramkrishna Waman quietly immersed itself in the next wave of Indian art. Ramkrishna Waman had clung to European naturalism of the colonial era and resisted the nationalist revival. His son

Kavita Deuskar’s education at the College of Fine Arts laid the foundation of her practice. In the art school curriculum of the time, there was great emphasis on drawing and anatomy. She trained in oils, the Japanese wash, and wasli techniques, portraiture, as well as in academic genres like still life, which she continued to paint throughout her career.

Among her teachers, Professor Vidya Bhushan, head of the Department of Painting, had the strongest influence on her art. She imbibed his style of painting, particularly his egg tempera technique, which became her favoured medium. She assisted him in creating the large painting of Gautama Buddha in egg tempera that still hangs on a wall of College of Fine Arts.

After her painting course, Kavita joined the sculpture department. By the time she left art school, she had developed a strong hand, sound technical skills, a refined sensibility, and a determination to make an artist of herself. She studied next at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda for two years under the most influential artist-teachers of the time, including K.G. Subramanyan, and trained in fresco painting under Gyarsilal Varma, one of the finest mural artists of India.

At Baroda, her work changed considerably, growing larger and darker. She produced towering charcoal drawings, eight or ten feet in height, focussing only on form and space. Colour disappeared from her work. She began her brooding Owl series with its doomsday imagery of gigantic owls in human form foreboding disaster.

This was a time of resurgence and rethinking in Indian art, and Kavita’s Baroda experience was entirely different from her Hyderabad years. In her own words, “In Hyderabad it was pure academic study. When I went to specialise in Baroda, I realised that I knew how to draw well and understood colour, composition, texture, and technique. But how was I going to put it all together in ways meaningful to me?” Exposed to new ideas, she experimented with different approaches in Baroda. However, it was only on her return to Hyderabad that Kavita found her idiom as a painter.

She exhibited her work in Hyderabad in 1970, winning a gold medal from the Hyderabad Art Society in 1971, and the State Lalit Kala Akademi Award the following year. Meanwhile, she had begun teaching at the College of Fine Arts. In 1978, she exhibited her work in Germany, travelling widely in this period across Europe and America, in pursuit of the modern in art.

Back in India, exhausted by her travels and ill health, she had to give up painting for a while. But she remained an energetic teacher, even going on a gruelling field trip to Bastar with her students in 1979 to study metal casting. She gradually returned to painting in the early 1980s, producing intricately layered colour-pencil work and miniatures.

Like her family members, she excelled in portraiture. Her mature work brought together her grounding in portraiture and landscape, and her predilection for still life. She produced closely observed portraits of the people who made up her world—a street vendor, an eccentric maulvi, a lady chewing pan. Her distinctively Hyderabadi characters reflect the graceful, unhurried way of life in the city with humour and delicacy. A painting of two burqa-clad women sharing a cup of tea—one sipping from the cup and the other from the saucer—reveals her as an artist with an eye for the quotidian and overlooked details of life. Paintings such as Girl with a Watermelon, Stone-cutters, or the figures from the Labourers series bring out her talent for depicting marginalised lives with attention and empathy.

Kavita Deuskar belongs to the generation of pioneering post-Independence women artists. The style she developed together with her contemporary luminaries like Laxma Goud and Thota Vaikuntam—figural work defined by landscape and cultural specificities, a Deccani palette of bright, luminous colours, along with a strong emphasis on linearity and technical mastery—influenced subsequent painting by Hyderabadi artists and underlines her importance to the city as a painter and beloved teacher.

Kavita is equally remembered for her warmth and kindness. Her home in Basheer Bagh was a refuge for all living beings, human and animal—from her students for whom she regularly rustled up delicacies, to crows, cats, and dogs. In her later years, much of her time was given to caring for the city’s animals. She looked after them with the same loving spirit with which she had once sketched them.

Srinayani Lankala is an art historian and painter based in Hyderabad, specialising in Deccani art.