GLR May-June 2025

perhaps because her mother burned some of her letters in 1938, an act that left her particularly anguished. In one letter to her mother from 1934, she responds to her mother’s questions about the nature of her relationship with the gifted painter Marie Louise Chassany (1909–1940), with whom she shared a studio at rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Taslitzky had described Chas sany as tall and thin, “like a Giacometti,” and Sher-Gil valued her artistic acumen, being attracted to her odd, reserved man nerisms. But she denied a sexual relationship: “I have never had any sexual relationship with Marie-Louise, and will not have one either.” However, she went on to acknowledge the possi bility of a lesbian relationship: Knowing how unprejudiced, objective and intelligent you are, I am going to be very frank with you. I confess that I also think as you do about the disadvantages of relationships with men. But since I need to relieve my sexuality physically somehow (because I think it is impossible to spiritualise, idealise sexu ality completely in art, and channelising it through art for a lifetime is impossible, only a stupid superstition invented for the brainless). So I thought I would start a relationship with a woman when the opportunity arises. In disassociating her own sexuality from the physicality of painting, Sher-Gil was also responding to the dominant school of anti-colonial painting in India, which adopted “spiritualism” as its defining æsthetic, celebrating figures of the Brah macharya (celibate asceticism) or chaste goddesses in their work. She dismissed these Bengal School painters as roman tics, rejecting their techniques, which dematerialized the body in evocative watercolor washes, as “feeble and emasculating.” Their idealized portraits of chaste women, drawn from mythol ogy and history, held little attraction for Sher-Gil, and she chose instead to document contemporary women and their vital pres ence in richly textured oils that registered the physicality of the body, including its deprivations. Her painting of Mother India (1935) (Figure 4), for instance, is closer to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936), with the impoverished mother em bracing her children as she faces an uncertain future, than to the Bengal school painter Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) of 1906 (Figure 5), which portrayed the mother as an asexual goddess providing succor to the nation. The closest report of Sher-Gil’s lesbian relationships comes from the research for a film on her by the noted director Kumar Shahani from 1986. Although the film was never completed, in terviews with some of her contemporaries in Paris, including Denise Proutaux and Elaine Gergely, describe her relationship with the Hungarian pianist Edith Lang-Laszlo. Laszlo’s younger brother Dombi was a classmate of her cousin, later her husband (as of 1938), Victor Egan, in medical school. According to Gergely, Laszlo and Sher-Gil shared a dramatic tension in their respective relationships with their mothers that attracted them to each other. Marie-Louise Chassany is said to have walked in on them in bed in their studio, and Laszlo was devastated when Sher-Gil moved to India in 1934, continuing to correspond with her. Proutaux pointed to a classic triangle between Laszlo, Gergely, and Sher-Gil, with Gergely wildly jealous of the inti macy of the other two women. Sher-Gil was not only promiscuous in her romantic liaisons but also careless in her sexual relationships, undergoing risky May–June 2025

abortions at least twice, as well as contracting a sexually trans mitted disease, most likely from a wealthy suitor, Yusuf Ali Khan, to whom she was engaged briefly in 1931 on the insis tence of her mother. Sher-Gil broke off the engagement soon after because, as she complained, he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. She made arrangements to be secretly treated for the venereal disease in Budapest, but it plagued her long after, and there is speculation that her early death, at 28, was linked to her sexual indiscretions. Her casual approach to sex in evitably invited the ire of many in her social circle, including the urbane, sophisticated set that she hung out with in India. One ac quaintance, Badruddin Tyabji, spoke for many as he recounted in frustration (in a 1986 letter to Kumar Shahani): Her zest was inexhaustible. ... Her need for sexual encounter was constant. Something went wrong in Paris. She would go to bed with everyone, with no distinction. I found it unbear able. Friendship didn’t depend on sex. She didn’t give a damn. She was determined to live life on her own terms. People were drawn to her, her attraction was so powerful. She got on as well with women. Women were almost enslaved by her, attractive women of the time. As scandalized as poor Tyabji was by Sher-Gil’s sexual pro clivities, he nevertheless touched upon a kernel of truth about Sher-Gil’s core beliefs. Her sexuality was an essential part of her identity, one that she was unapologetic about in her own life, and whose valences she continually sought to explore in her paintings.

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