As much curiosity has been dispensed on Amrita Sher-Gil after her death as in her 29-year-old lifetime, but these twin-set volumes of her correspondence, complete with annotations and notes by nephew Vivan Sundaram, come closest to what she might have considered an autobiography. Amrita’s extraordinary life across Hungary, France, India, Italy and Great Britain begins with her drawings as a seven-year-old, and in her dairies and, later, her letters, that tended to be exhaustive in their details, almost as if she intended to leave them behind as memoirs. Nor could anyone accuse her of lacking focus, so apart from her devotion to her art, and perhaps her obsession with clothes, there is no political or social referencing — and yet, she lived through a period of extreme political turmoil. If there is a third strand in her letters, it is about money — or the lack of it — in a family with an elite lifestyle but an impoverished allowance. “Now to the accounts” seemed to be a running thread in Amrita’s correspondence.
Marie Antoinette, Amrita’s mother, who must take credit for her daughters’ love of literature, music and, in Amrita’s case, painting, later blamed her nephew and Amrita’s husband, Victor Egan, for their growing estrangement. To this, Amrita had retorted, "if our marriage is not a success as you both seem to fear, you will have no one to blame but us", pooh-poohing any suggestion her father made that Jawaharlal Nehru might make a better provider, “even supposing JN proposed to me, which I hardly think he would”. She does, however, inform her father that “I met (Nehru) yesterday at a dinner party, afterwards Chamanlal brought him to Faletti’s & we all sat talking till 1 A.M. this morning... He evinced pleasure at seeing me again & needless to say, so did I”, but could not help castigating him, “But what an idea, what an idea all the same!!!”
If Nehru was fascinated by Amrita, she accused him of not being interested in her paintings — “You looked at my pictures without seeing them,” she wrote to him, but acknowledging, “You are able to discard your halo occasionally”, and adding, “I should like to have known you better”. Four months after her death — of acute dysentery? pneumonia? an abortion gone wrong? miscarriage? venereal disease? — Nehru wrote to Marie to say he was “struck by her genius and her charm” and “I was greatly attracted to her and we became friends”.
Things within the family took a turn for the worse when a showdown caused her to complain to her father about “Mummy in her usual hostile & prejudiced manner”, accusing Victor of “laziness, irresponsibility & desire for shirking work”, as a result of which “(the) old wounds in our hearts are still festering…” Marie used every emotional means at her disposal to achieve compliance, so Amrita often signed off letters to her parents as their “ungrateful” or “evil” daughter. Among the indiscretions Amrita accused her parents of was going through her correspondence, and Sundaram notes that after her death, “Marie Antoinette and Victor destroyed all of Amrita’s letters sent to her by her friends and family”. That the family was dysfunctional must have caused no little scandal at the time, and Marie Antoinette, who had attempted to take her life during Amrita’s lifetime, finally succeeded in killing herself in 1948.
Promiscuity does not seem to have been alien to the family — her mother’s affair with sculptor Giulio Cesare Pasquinelli was rather well-known — but to art critic Karl Khandalavala, Amrita wrote:
“I am always in love, 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!”
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“He is afraid of scandal,” Amrita wrote to her sister Indira about her father Umrao Singh, “and consequently of the possible ruin of his good name. (And India is really pretty rotten from this point of view.)”
To RC Tandan, she wrote to explain her abhorrence of Indian art as “putrid specimens of fifth-rate western academic painting”, though she found Ajanta inspirational — “when it’s good, I don’t think I have ever seen anything that can equal it”. In an article in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, she wrote of her mission of wanting “to paint those silent images of infinite submission and patience; to depict their angular brown bodies strangely beautiful in their ugliness… .” Travelling across India, in a letter to her parents, she observes that “a fresco from Ajanta… is worth more than the whole Renaissance!” When Karl wrote what was considered an iconic book, she commented that had he not been “writing for ignoramuses”, he might have done better: “The knowledge cramped you — a little.”
She enjoyed only moderate success while she was alive, but about her posthumous triumph she might have been less surprised, so sure was she of her greatness. To Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad who had “millions of rupees worth of junk”, she is said to have retorted “how on earth anybody with any taste could buy Leightons, Bouguereaus & Watts when there were Cezannes, Van Goghs & Gauguins in the market” as a result of which outburst he did not buy any of her “cubist paintings”, leaving her to wonder how she might have fared “if I were a sycophant”.
AMRITA SHER-GIL
A self-portrait in letters & writings
Edited by Vivan Sundaram
Tulika Books
900 pages in two volumes
Rs 5,750