By Suman Tarafdar

Jaipur Watch Co. (JWC). Over the past decade, Indian watch collectors have followed the trajectory of JWC with great fascination – especially as the indie watch company offered unique time pieces each time they came up with new collections. Starting with the remarkable coin watches, JWC has over the years presented a fascinating collection of dials – from engraved ones and jumping hour ones. Painted dials have struck a chord amongst collectors too, from hand painted ones to beautiful Pichwai motif dials.

To coincide with its tenth anniversary then, it was no surprise then that Gaurav Mehta, CEO, JWC, went even bolder with his choice of theme – the art of Raja Ravi Varma. Incidentally, this year marks the 175th birth anniversary of the artist, who passed away in 1906, but not before he had initiated many changes in the way Indians relate to art. 

“Divinity or the use of divine iconography has been a popular subject for the Jaipur Watch Company,” says Mehta. “Sometime back, I was discussing art and artists with a group of friends. I brought up a reference to Raja Ravi Varma’s art and to my surprise I found almost 70 per cent of them were clueless, which made me think that as Indians, we have heard of Monalisa but not about Damayanti. We don’t know who created the iconic image of Saraswati Mata, but we worship her. This led us to the idea of creating the Raja Ravi Varma collection.”

The Jaipur Watch Co’s Raja Ravi Varma Collection comprises 14 of his artworks and oleographs with seven units per design, making it a total of 98 watches. They are priced at Rs65,000 each. The watches include Radha in the Moonlight Automatic Watch, Saraswati Automatic Watch, Vishnu Automatic Watch and so on. JWC collaborated with the artist’s estate in Kerala to select and reproduce the rather large original paintings to a watch dial.