An extraordinary life
. UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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This is a fascinating story, elegantly told, of the development of a gifted young painter.
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Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life; Yashodhara Dalmia, Penguin Viking, Rs. 695.
"Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me."
Amrita Sher-Gil.
IN her brief but passionately fulfilling life, Sher-Gil not only laid claim to her Indian heritage, but also left her own rich legacy to Indian art. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia's biography traces the extraordinary circumstances of Amrita's life and discusses the evocative paintings she made, always keeping in mind the tumultuous decades in which she lived.
The narrative begins with the romance of Amrita's parents, an aristocratic Sikh and a Hungarian, partly Jewish, woman. Marie Antoinette was the travelling companion of Princess Bamba Sofia Jindan Dalip Singh, granddaughter of Ranjit Singh, who according to Dalmia, was attracted to Umrao Singh when they met in London. Umrao Singh, however, was attracted to Princess Bamba's friend — and they were married in Lahore according to Sikh rites in 1912.
Early days
Amrita was born in 1913 in Budapest. Here she began making her earliest drawings. But the Sher-Gils tired of the uncertainties in Europe and left for India to settle in Simla. Rebelling against the rules of her Catholic school, Amrita was expelled. She spent her time playing the piano, sketching, and dancing.
At the instance of her uncle, the Indologist Ervin Baktay, the Sher-Gil family moved to Paris in 1929 so that Amrita could study art. Unusual support, despite Umrao Singh's mixed feelings about leaving India for Europe. Amrita flourished in Paris but by 1934, she was longing to return to India: "I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter."
The young painter is drawn to her destiny, but also almost afraid of what lies ahead, as she writes to her cousin Viktor Egan (who later became her husband) in 1933: "I pray for myself, `God, please save me from the magnetic pull of this journey'."
Dalmia's narrative also takes us through Amrita's intense affairs, the sexual adventures, the independent life. In 1935, back in Simla, where Amrita met Malcolm Muggeridge, she boasted to him about her many lovers, and that they had left no scar. "I'll leave a scar," he replied. Years later, he would write of her too-young death in 1941, and of her mother's suicide, that neither death surprised him.
1936 brought Amrita to a triumphant welcome in Bombay at the Taj Mahal Hotel, with a warm review from Karl Khandalavala of the Sunday Standard pronouncing her "the most outstanding woman painter in the country". Later that year, she travelled further South, and on her return began two of her greatest works, "Bride's Toilet" and the splendid "Brahmacharis".
This is a fascinating life, elegantly told, of the development of a gifted young painter — and the moving narrative of one of the most extraordinary women of modern India. From Ajanta to the Basohli works to Mahabalipuram to Tagore's paintings, Amrita was hungry to see India and respond to its call. As Dalmia sums up: "She achieved a language, a means of negotiating different traditions, which made her a vital purveyor of the modern and set a definitive course for art in India."
Extracts
The richest colours in this life come from the many extracts from Amrita's letters and notebooks. In these, we hear her restless, spirited, honest and sometimes deliciously funny voice. She writes to Nehru in 1937: ""You are able to discard your halo occasionally. You are capable of saying `When I saw the sea for the first time' when others would say `When the sea saw me for the first time'." To Khandalavala in the same year: "I have just completed a self-portrait that will make the public mouth water. I did it as a bait for future sitters." And to her sister, in 1940: "All of us muddle through life at the very best of times, just muddle through. If you look at life from that point of view, everything will seem easier, I assure you."
One interesting detail. Dalmia mentions in her preface that Amrita's nephew Vivan Sundaram did not provide any help or information, although she was able to refer to material that Sundaram and his art historian wife Geeta Kapur had published. That seems unfortunate; yet, even so, this chronicle of an extraordinary life has much to offer.
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