Raja Ravi Verma

Indian frescoes and Murals contrary to western ones seldom exhibited realism.  This is true for the entire Orient.

Realsim as a genre of art entered Indian art scene in the colonial era and it was widely propagated by the British art schools. The objective of this genre was recording of life and times of the British in India. The art school pass-outs got easy employment in the British companies and hence most of this form of art is often referred to as the Company School of art. Most of these paintings look at Indian life from t he British point of view. Also while most of these Indian artists were paid well, the names of these artists were never revealed and often the name of the British artist overseeing a particular piece was giver prominence by the Companies.

Most of the important Indian artists of this time Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy stayed away from this genre of art and instead had established an alternative school of art called the Bengal School with its centre at Santiniketan.  It is only in late nineteenth century that some Indian artists had infused the techniques of realism  to depict Indian subjects using Indian motifs and from Indian view points. The pioneer in the new school of Indian realism was Raja Ravi Verma. Raja Ravi Verma depicted scenes from Indian mythologies and presented them in a realist-romanticist  format.

Hemen  Majumdar

Two other painters had also been instrumental in initiating realism into Indian fine arts. They were Babu Rao Painter and Hemen Majumdar. Amrita Shergil also had produced many realistic artworks during this time.

Realism was given a new fillip in the post-independence era by Bikash Bhattacharya and practiced by some other artists like Anjolie Ela Menon. 

However realism is more of a technique and less of a genre as most of the artists using this form had often mixed elements of fantasy and surreaslism in the subjects.

The advent of photography and in the post-liberalization era, computer graphics has reduced the role of artist as a realistic recorder of scenes. New forms of art, like Pseudorealism are now having more adherent than pure realism.