Hamari Amrita

Different strokes

“Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.” — Amrita Sher-Gil Amrita Sher-Gil was only 28 when she slipped into a coma and died around midnight of December 6, 1941 in Lahore (part of the then undivided India). The real cause of death is unclear to this day. One account says it was food poisoning while another calls it a case of botched up abortion.

The funeral procession comprised no more than a handful of mourners. Her body, covered with a Kashmiri shawl, was carried in a black hearse to the burning ghat on the left bank of River Ravi.

Her grieving father, Umrao Singh, later recorded: “Those fingers which had painted and that brain which had conceived her works, receiving its inspiration from the deathless spirit, were dissolving into the elements before our eyes. She had entered the prenatal world at Lahore and death seemed to have conspired with life to release her spirit from its physical chrysalis in the same city.”

Thirty-five years after her death, Sher-Gil’s works (along with those of Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose) were declared National Art Treasures by the Government of India.

Sher-Gil’s artistic life spanned just about a decade during which she produced 150-odd paintings. Often nicknamed ‘India’s Frida Kahlo’ (after the famous Mexican painter who was born six years earlier and died 13 years after Amrita), she came to be considered as one of the pioneers of modern Indian art.

Art critic and collector Karl Khandalavala, who was her friend, mentor and chronicler, hailed Sher-Gil as the most vital force in modern Indian painting of her time. “The sheer power of her finest canvases,” he wrote, “transcended anything that had hitherto been achieved in modern painting even by the most notable pioneers of Bengal Renaissance.”

More recently, in an essay titled ‘Shockingly Modern’ (TIME magazine / June 26, 2006), writer Aravind Adiga had this to say: “Every artistic movement needs a Romantic hero, a precociously gifted individual who lives by different rules, paints or writes or sculpts outrageously well, and dies at a shockingly young age. Sher-Gil is modern Indian art’s great Romantic.”

Mixed parentage

Sher-Gil, who was of mixed parentage (Sikh father; Hungarian mother), had the benefit of training in Paris and being familiar with European painting techniques.

Her first important work, ‘Young Girls’ (1932), paved the way for her election as an associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, the youngest ever and the only Asian to have received this recognition at that time.

Many of her subsequent works bore remarkable stylistic affinities with those of French Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), whom she immensely admired.

In particular, her ‘Self Portrait as Tahitian’ (1934), where she appeared naked to the waist, Gauguin’s influence is unmistakably evident. Artist-scholar K G Subramanyan has observed that “her paintings like ‘Woman with Fan’, ‘Nude Group’ or ‘On the Terrace’ are deeply Gauguinesque (even to the extent of sporting some of his mannerisms — like the Polynesian head-type, the stiff background figures with hieratic gestures).”

Sher-Gil returned to India in 1934 — “feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter”. She travelled widely within the country and painted intensely, particularly about the life in rural India which was full “of dark-bodied, sad-faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently, looking almost like silhouettes.”

She set out to keenly observe and represent “the life of Indians, particularly the poor, pictorially” and employ “a new technique, my own technique”, which was “not technically Indian, in the traditional sense of the word, yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.”
Her paintings of the rural folk, bride’s toilets, camel drivers, and isolated women living on feudal estates are easily recognised to this day. She was also deeply affected by her visits to the caves of Ajanta whose “vital, vibrant, subtle and unutterably lovely frescoes” made her exclaim:  “A fresco from Ajanta… is worth more than the whole Renaissance!”
She also travelled through southern India and produced significant works like ‘Bride’s Toilet’, ‘Brahmacharis’ and ‘The South Indian Villagers’.

Critics have observed that in her best paintings, brilliant details combined to create a timeless monumentality; and the contemporary became elevated to the level of the classical. Adiga points out that “in a tragically brief career, she did much to introduce her country to the idea of the free-spirited artist, and to show them that art could interpret Indian life for Indians.”

Sher-gil was known to have urged her fellow artists not to cling to “traditions that were once vital, sincere and splendid and which are now merely empty formulae”, and not to imitate fifth rate western art slavishly. She pleaded with them to “break away from both and produce something vital, connected with the soil, something essentially Indian.”

Controversies

With her stunning looks and unconventional ways, Sher-Gil caused many a ripple in the social circles of her day. She had a sharp tongue and freely aired her views, unmindful of their impact on the listener.

She also never hesitated to paint an occasional but highly charged nude. ‘Sleep’ (1933), featuring her younger sister Indira in a stunning diagonal composition, is among the most erotic and energetic paintings of Sher-Gil.

An incorrigible romantic, she was also known to have taken many lovers. “I am always in love,” Sher-Gil wrote, “but fortunately for me and unfortunately for the party concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any damage can be done!”
English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had a brief but intense affair with Sher-Gil, recalled “the animal intensity of her concentration, making her short of breath, with beads of sweat appearing on the faint moustache on her upper lip. It was this animality which she somehow transferred to the colours as she mixed them and splashed them on her canvas.”

In 2006, Sher-Gil’s painting, ‘Village Scene’ (1938), set a record  for sale of a painting in India when it was auctioned for Rs 6.9 crore in Delhi.