GLR May-June 2025

dalavala, Sher-Gil described the painting as “sensual ... but not sensual in the effete rather repulsive manner of some of our good Bombay Fine Art exhibitors.” Instead, she dwells upon the colors, describing the char poy’s posts as “an incandescent red ris[ing] around her like tongues of flame—a fat, dark woman in the background in green is fan ning her (ruddy blackish brown tones in the flesh, very attractive).” An everyday prac tice of care is imbued with a touch of the erotic here, suggested in the careless aban don of the figure in repose, the lassitude of the attendant, and the casual acknowledge ment of the woman as a desiring subject. Sher-Gil had learned painting in Simla as a child and during a short stay in Florence in 1924, but it was in Paris that she came into her own, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with the genre painter Pierre Vaillant. In 1929, she joined the studio with Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux Arts, where they formed the school of Nou veau Réalisme aligned with communist Sher-Gil was able to flaunt her identity as a mixed-race artist in Paris. In her self-portraits and photographs, she drew attention to her Indian origins, often shown draped in a sari, wielding a brush. In 1933, her friend Denise Proutaux wrote an article on Sher-Gil in the French journal Minerva , gushing about her as “an exquisite and mysteri ous little Hindu princess.” Sher-Gil re sponded jokingly, calling herself a “mysterious little Indian princess who is well on her way to becoming a great painter.” The Hindu princess trans formed into a Muslim Sultana in a later account by Proutaux: “The ‘Sultana Scheherazade’ speaks French like a Parisian, but the soft blue sari draped around her heightens her amber and ochre complexion, evocative not of the banks of the Seine, but the strange, dis tant shores of the Ganga.” In fact, Sher Gil was neither Hindu nor Muslim, but Sikh. In India, she took to wearing only sympathies, an early iteration of the more famous movement of the 1960s. In those heady years, she was swept into the bo hemian artistic circles of the city, taking on multiple lovers, in cluding painter Boris Taslitzky and pianist Edith Lang-Laszlo. She painted three portraits of Taslitzky as well as one of his mother, who later died in a Nazi concentration camp. Taslitzky, in turn, painted a portrait of Sher-Gil, as did Yves Brayer, who portrayed her as an elegant, exotic “Oriental” figure with a sari draped over her head, her dark hair cascading down—based on a photograph taken by her father, Umrao Singh. As Brayer’s portrayal of her Oriental background suggests,

saris, writing in a 1935 letter: “[F]rom now on I shall only wear saris and Indian dresses. First of all, they are much more beautiful. Secondly, since here in India only Eurics [Eurasians] wear European clothes and as I do not fancy this race and do not want to identify myself with them, I will not wear European clothes any more.” Sher-Gil was not only cognizant of the exoticization of her identity, but also made ironic comment upon it in her painting titled Self Portrait as Tahitian (Figure 3), which responds to Gauguin’s well-known nudes from French Polynesia. Her transformation into the prototypical primitive here—bare breasted, brown-skinned, standing rigidly tall with her hair tied into a long pony-tail— is pure masquerade and could not be further removed from the urbane Parisian world she inhabited. And yet, Sher-Gil steps purpose fully into this role as Tahitian, her brown skin dappled in hues of umber and coffee, bridging the distance between the Ganga and the South Sea waters of Tahiti, relying,

Fig. 3: Amrita Sher-Gil. Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

as always, upon the resonances and emotive possibilities of color. While her brown skin enables this impersonation, her pos ture and the forced simplicity enjoin us to understand that this is role-playing, a conscious act of self-fashioning that looks back to Gauguin and points to her fully embracing her Indian ness. She wrote to her friend Karl Khandalavala in 1938: “I don’t think I shall paint at all in Europe. I can only paint in India. Elsewhere, I am not natural, I have no self-confidence. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.” Sher-Gil’s letters make little reference to her bisexuality,

Fig. 4 (above): Amrita Sher-Gil. Mother India , 1935. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Fig. 5 (right): Abanindranath Tagore. Bharat Mata, 1905. Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata.

TheG & LR

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