Vivacious and sought after in artistic and intellectual circles, she contracted venereal disease from a Muslim aristocrat whom her increasingly unstable mother had considered a prospective son-in-law. Sher-Gil’s cousin, and lover, Victor, who was training in medicine, was summoned to treat her and then to perform an abortion. Around this time, she sent him a series of letters that seem almost written to herself, one of which focused on what she called her parents’ prophecy: that because of her rude, ungrateful, isolated, and otherwise “odious character,” she would find no happiness in love. She saw already the difficulty of reconciling a life of painting with stable companionship. “But little by little,” she said in another letter, “I realize that every person carries within herself a calling against which it is hopeless to fight.”
Bharti Kher sees in Sher-Gil’s teenage work the struggle of a young woman “desperately trying to understand her own body and her own sexuality through her own painting.” Shilpa Gupta dwells on the way she treats the body:
It’s very still, but it’s not overromanticized. There’s a kind of objectivity to it. There is space, the outlines are very thick. The object blurs. I like that style in Cézanne’s work, and I feel a bit of that is in Amrita’s work: you can look at the object from the outside. The inside is there, in any case, but there’s an external part to it.
For all Sher-Gil’s love of Cézanne, Brueghel, and Gauguin (particularly the last one’s ability to rework the archaic in contemporary ways), at the age of twenty she saw her interest in Europe and its culture start to wane. “I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,” she later recalled. Her father discouraged her from coming back, in part because her free sexuality would bring shame to the family, and in part because he felt her knowledge of Indian culture was shallow. But this was just the goad she needed. “Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture,” she protested in a letter home. “It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realized that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance!”
Before long, confident to the point of intoxication in her Indian project, she was dismissing every other Indian artist of the age. “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me,” she would say in a famous provocation in 1934. Only when revisiting the wall paintings at Ajanta’s caves did she feel genuinely silenced by the tradition she had reentered. She wrote to her parents, “I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else’s work!”
* * *
“It is slightly irritating to be always labeled as a ‘great promise’…”
—Amrita Sher-Gil, 1937
Sher-Gil once wrote that she responded artistically to sadness more than to contentment and joy, but the best of what she made of that response in India was not sad. Among my favorite of her Indian paintings is Haldi Grinders, a late work—though late is an odd term to apply to a woman who died at twenty-eight. In flat, bright colors, and with brilliant sensitivity to the fall of light, she paints a scene framed by dark trees: women at work pulverizing turmeric. An old woman dozes in the background; a young girl, in the foreground, is clad in bright red. Faces can barely be discerned, though there’s eroticism in a flash of painted toenails. The power of the painting resides in the physical posture of the women grinding, their tensile strength. The work the women do reveals their essences as individuals.
It seemed as natural to her to paint laborers, beggars, and tribal women as she earlier painted gypsies and consumptive art models. The work didn’t sell, nor did it win over critics, and some later artists glimpsed in the paintings of humble Indians a touch of the empty European sentimentalism she claimed to abhor. Khanna dismisses one of Sher-Gil’s most celebrated paintings, South Indian Villagers Going to Market, as essentially “a lie”: her servants propped up in a studio so she could paint them.
In her own view, she was responding to criticisms of the Bengal School, which was led by Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, and inspired by folk art, Mughal miniatures, and Asian traditions from Persian to Japanese. The Bengal School had dominated Indian art for decades, and became after Independence the house style of the new nation. (Nandalal Bose would be invited to illustrate the text of the Constitution.) To Sher-Gil, the romanticism and overcomplication of many of their paintings had a “cramping and crippling effect on the creative spirit.” Much of what was depicted was not essential, she felt, and the overall impression was of empty “shells” compared to the “kernel” of ancient work such as the Ajanta paintings, or the frescoes she’d studied in South India in 1937.
The form and technique of some of the wall paintings in Cochin’s Mattancherry Palace—“the drawing perhaps the most powerful I have ever seen,” she wrote to her sister—were driven by the anonymous artists’ intense powers of observation, and their sculptor-like formal confidence. Copying them, she felt she’d discovered a lost treasure whose value was infinitely greater than the enduringly popular heavy oil work of the Raja Ravi Varma School, with its glossy portraiture, mythological figures, and rubicund maidens on swings. Bride’s Toilet, which Sher-Gil later called her “best thing so far,” was made in the following months, as part of what would become her famous South Indian Trilogy. Intent on a new simplicity, and embracing the region’s local color palette, she struggled with the painting, finding flaws after she thought she had finished it and reworking it substantially. Yet the scene, of a fair-skinned, melancholy woman in a deep-red sari having her hair braided and henna applied to her palms, is a triumph of form, the thing Sher-Gil cared about most.
That she felt impelled from within was more necessary than ever now, for few collectors were buying her work. Malcolm Muggeridge, her transitory lover in the mid-1930s, was fascinated, as many before him had been, by “her vivid, forceful, direct reactions to life.” Yet he also described the Amrita of this time (a woman not as successful as she felt she should be) as wearyingly petulant, egocentric, and vain. When one or another of her paintings was recognized, she’d inevitably complain that it was the least interesting of the work she’d done. Her frustration eased only slightly after an exhibition in 1936, in Bombay, gave her her first real critical success in India. Among her new champions was Karl Khandalavala, an influential critic and collector (not to mention a renowned lawyer) whose belief in the originality of her paintings would become her ballast in her final years.
By this point, with her parents’ finances in decline, she found herself making a “sugary” self-portrait in hopes of getting paid portrait commissions from “that rotten paper,” the Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1938 she finally married her cousin Victor, now a doctor with an uncertain career. She chose him because she had nothing to hide from him, and could live the artist’s life she wanted. The choice unhinged her mother. After having invested heavily in the cultivation of her daughter’s talent, Marie Antoinette considered it Amrita’s duty to find a wealthy husband.
Unwelcome in the family home, Sher-Gil and Victor moved between cramped quarters in Hungary and India, in search of a base for Victor to set up his medical practice. During this stretch of dislocations and tension, she could no longer reliably turn to her brush as a lifeline. Blocked artistically, she occasionally lashed out at Victor for his merely perfunctory interest in her work. Whatever the cause of her sapped inspiration, it was a dire blow to a woman who had for a lifetime painted almost as she breathed.
Her plaintive letters from this period seem to be those of an exhausted artist in midlife crisis. It’s shocking to recall that she was only in her twenties. A stay in Saraya, a village in the United Provinces, helped her recover her instinct to paint. Against the appreciation of labor evident in the Haldi Grinders is one of her more celebrated but troubling works: that of an idle, languorous woman on a charpoy, hand lying inertly on her belly as a servant fa
ns her.
In the autumn of 1941, Sher-Gil and Victor finally decided to settle in Lahore, where an earlier exhibition of her work had caused a sensation in the lively artistic community. Before the year’s end, though, she died suddenly at home, under Victor’s care, as a result of either food poisoning or a botched abortion.
Bharti Kher mourns the fact that Sher-Gil survived what are often the most arduous years for a woman artist—finding her identity as a young woman in a patriarchal art world, and then achieving some stability in her family life—but failed to reach the sustained period of focused creativity that the second half of a woman’s artistic life often allows. Sher-Gil was denied the chance to come into her own.
Some say she had a premonition of her early death, but I’m skeptical. All serious artists consider mortality. In her last works, though, I sense a new respect for the power of nature. In Elephant Promenade, the background has the formality of a Mughal miniature: a courtyard, white chhatri and ramparts. But coming implacably toward this man-built world are elephants. It’s as if they are herding the brightly dressed folk who ride and tend them, not the other way around, as the sky shivers on the verge of a violent storm.
37
SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE
A Touch of the Abnormal
1897–1945
In a backwater town three hundred miles from Calcutta, a bright, protected eight-year-old boy caught no echo of the popular agitation against the Partition of Bengal, which prompted the Swadeshi movement in 1905. Yet by early adolescence, he saw his insulation from the world become thinner, and he was cutting out newspaper pictures of Bengali revolutionaries and tacking them onto the walls of his home. His father, a minor servant of the Raj, nervously tore them down.
“I had in some respects a touch of the abnormal in my mental make-up,” Subhas Chandra Bose admitted later. You can see it in a letter to his mother, written when he was fifteen: “Will the condition of our country continue to go from bad to worse—will not any son of Mother India in distress, in total disregard of his selfish interests, dedicate his whole life to the cause of the Mother?” Not long afterward he became a freedom fighter whose patriotism Gandhi (38) himself would term “second to none.”
Bose built such a formidable political base in the Raj’s most populous province, Bengal, that from his midtwenties British officials were extending their usual backhanded tribute to an Indian’s political influence—detaining him at His Majesty’s pleasure again and again. Once, to remove him from circulation, officials sent him to Mandalay; another time, he was shipped off to Europe. But in the summer of 1940, for his eleventh incarceration, the two-time president of the Congress was holed up in Calcutta’s grim Presidency Jail. Among the few amenities granted him was access to radio and newspapers, through which Bose followed the dramatic developments of the new war in Europe.
Paris had fallen to Hitler’s armies, and that summer, Britain teetered on the edge as the German Luftwaffe bombarded British airfields, ordnance factories, and whole cities. Bose found himself thrilled and inspired. Gandhi and Nehru had been pressing toward freedom too demurely, in his view. To turn the distant vulnerability of Britain to India’s local advantage required action, not passive resistance. To expel the British once and for all, Indians should collaborate with Mussolini and Hitler.
Britain’s enemies were no abstraction to Bose. During his European exile, in the 1930s, he had befriended Nazi officials and met Il Duce. Bose was a man of immense self-belief, who thought he could persuade the totalitarians to help him gather troops and direct, from Europe, the decisive war for Indian independence. First, though, he had to get out of jail. Fortunately, as a regular tenant of such institutions, he had learned that the system could be manipulated. If his health was at stake, he calculated, the British might transfer him to internment at his home. At this fraught moment in the freedom movement, the British didn’t want heroes perishing in prison. “The blood of the martyr is the seed of the church,” Bose wrote to the authorities, invoking Tertullian to tell them he was going on a hunger strike. Within a week, the agitator had been shifted to house arrest at his three-story Calcutta mansion, ringed by multiple layers of security.
Bose and his family discreetly analyzed the movements of the armed guards, waiting for a window of opportunity. Just after midnight, on January 17, 1941, he pulled off one of the boldest political escapes of the twentieth century. Swapping his owlish, black-rimmed signature spectacles for an old pair and donning a false beard and fez, he jumped into a waiting car in the disguise of a Pathan Muslim merchant. He was in Peshawar, heading for Kabul, before the British realized he was gone. Then it was on to Moscow and, in a second disguise (as an Italian businessman), to Berlin. Now he could seek out Hitler, raise an army, and start a war.
In the four years that followed, Bose’s life would have as many twists and turns as the caper that brought him to Berlin. Yet it would end in failure: death in a plane crash just days after the surrender of his final ally, Japan.
George Orwell felt the world was well rid of him, rating Bose as a quisling comparable to the French politician Laval, whose Vichy government welcomed the Führer. Yet Bose, who had been driven by magical thinking, inspired magical ideas in others. Outside India, the reputation he had gained seemed decidedly off: a man who sought to work with the Nazis and who later chose to fight alongside the Japanese Imperial Army, rates today as a national hero, his name affixed to airports, schools, and stamps. The vitality of his hold on the national imagination is manifest in other ways: after his death, he was periodically “discovered” alive—as a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp, as a Chinese military officer, and as an Indian sadhu, a holy man with miraculous powers. It took three official commissions, the last one in 2006, to certify that he had actually died in 1945.
Nor did Bose’s influence on India’s international choices cease with his death. Enduring lessons of his war—lessons in political realism, great power strategy, and India’s place in the hierarchy of states—were absorbed and implemented by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and by his diplomatic adviser, V. K. Krishna Menon (44), to produce a more subtle Indian stance toward the world.
* * *
When Bose’s father named his ninth child Subhas, meaning “one of good speech,” he wasn’t imagining that the boy would apply an oratorical gift to fervent radicalism. But, in Bose’s telling, he was changed by the work of Vivekananda (28), whose teachings of sacrifice, service, and religious scientism he encountered as a teenager. While his parents’ household tried to keep a cordon sanitaire around popular politics, this aspect of the era’s cultural revivalism couldn’t be kept out. When he moved to Calcutta to attend Presidency College, he could more freely follow his interests. He read German idealist philosophy and Henri Bergson, and came directly to politics through the works of the spiritual nationalist Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Aurobindo, twenty-five years older than Bose, was a hero of Calcutta’s radical youth. He had abandoned the Indian Civil Service to become a leader of the Swadeshi movement until, disillusioned by its moderation, he turned to plotting terrorist acts. “It was in the voice of Aurobindo,” Bose later said, “that we heard the message of political freedom for the first time.”
Aurobindo and other Bengali thinkers made Bose confident in the face of British racial arrogance. In 1916, having retaliated physically against a British professor’s maltreatment of a classmate, Bose was chucked out of college. Still, after getting his degree at another college, he traveled to the dark heart of England to cram for the Indian Civil Service examinations. It was his father’s idea, and while he derived some pleasure from the experience—“Nothing makes me happier than to be served by the whites and to watch them clean my shoes,” he wrote to a friend—he resigned from the service just weeks after securing a coveted post.
“Life loses half its interest if there is no struggle—if there are no risks to be taken,” he wrote to his brother Sarat, before returning to India in 1921. Fortunately for
Bose, he was stepping into a new phase in India’s history, defined by Gandhi’s invention of Indian mass politics and marked by disillusionment with the Raj’s post–World War policies. He’d have no shortage of interesting struggles, with the British and with Gandhi, from now on.
* * *
“No taxation without representation” had been the banner of another historic anti-British uprising. In the years following the Treaty of Versailles, “No loyal service without representation” was the Indian equivalent. One million Indians had served the British in the First World War, during which they were treated as second class, and now it rankled that they had no more say than before in the decisions of the colonial government. The freedom movement, led by Gandhi, who had loyally run an ambulance unit in the war, gained momentum.
Gandhi liked to call the Congress party a family, with all the internal tensions the term implied. He was, of course, the father surrogate—a slightly embarrassing, dictatorial one in the opinion of Bose, who joined the party in 1921. As much as he admired Gandhi’s ability to enthuse huge crowds, he was infuriated by the older man’s religiously inflected speech and habits, his love for artisanal simplicity, and above all his willingness to compromise with the British. “The younger generation in India are all impatient,” Bose told a German admirer in 1930s Berlin. “They think with me that Gandhi is too good—too moderate—in his ideas and actions. We want a more radical and more militant policy.”
In Nehru, Bose initially found an ideological brother: committed to socialism and industrialization, to secular politics, and to building India’s international profile as a progressive state—and also, Bose thought, in a hurry. In the late 1920s, the two emerged as the voice of a new generation in Congress. Until then, the organization had demanded from the British only dominion status (equal to the settler colonies of the Commonwealth, such as Canada and Australia). Over Gandhi’s objections, Bose and Nehru got the Congress to dedicate itself to the cause of full independence for India, which included sovereign powers over military affairs.