How Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s Frida Kahlo, redefined modern Indian art

Their forms are sculptural and soft, as if they might dissolve into the background at any moment. There is no overt suffering, no explicit drama that you notice in their expression. And yet, their silence seems louder than words. What are they waiting for? A future already decided for them? A life they did not choose? Sher-Gil lets us feel their longing in our bones.

Amrita Sher-Gil, one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century who died at just 28, left behind a body of work that was hauntingly mature. Today, her paintings are among the most expensive and sought-after works of Indian art. She is often called “India’s Frida Kahlo,” though the comparison, while convenient, is inadequate. A painter of suffering and selfhood, Sher-Gil was a storyteller, an intellectual, and a modernist who challenged the very foundations of Indian art.

But what is it about Amrita that has turned her into a legend? Why does her influence endure in a country that often sidelines women artists? And how does her work continue to shape the discourse around identity, feminism, and postcolonial modernism?

The unsaid, the unfinished, the unresolved

Born to a Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer mother, Amrita Sher-Gil straddled cultures, continents, and conventions. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil of Majithia, belonged everywhere and nowhere. Born in 1870 into a Punjabi family, he devoted his life to intellectual pursuits — studying Sanskrit and Persian, engaging with Indian and Western philosophies, corresponding with MK Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and aligning himself with Tolstoy’s ideas. Though sympathetic to Indian nationalism, it was intellectual cosmopolitanism that became his home turf.

Photography was his true passion. Over six decades, he took 80 self-portraits, creating a visual archive of selfhood. His later works rejected the colonial gaze, replacing it with an individuated vision where the family became both subject and world. His experiments in autochrome and stereoscopic imaging positioned him as an early innovator, though his contributions remained largely unrecognised in the history of Indian photography.

Also read: Devika Rani: How Indian Cinema’s daring first lady was ahead of her time

In 1985, filmmaker Kumar Shahani proposed a feature film on Amrita Sher-Gil, enlisting her nephew, artist Vivan Sundaram, as a collaborator. Their research led them through Budapest, Paris, Shimla, Saraya, and Lahore, tracing Amrita’s journey through the landscapes that shaped her. Hers is a story is defined by longing, exile, and artistic passion; desire is integral to this story.

Amrita stripped the veneer off beauty, off tradition, off comfort. She understood that colour could hold history, that posture could hold pain, that silence could be deafening. Like Three Girls, most of her works breathe with the unsaid, the unfinished, the unresolved. They are receptacles of moments caught between time — alive, waiting, watching.

An artist looking at herself

Umrao Singh first encountered his would-be wife Marie Antoinette Gottesman in Lahore in 1911. A poet and a photographer, he courted her through images — carefully composed portraits that documented their relationship as much as they shaped it. Nearly a decade earlier, he had captured himself in a striking self-portrait: bare-chested, hair lifted in his hands, “posing at the intersection of asceticism and seduction.”

For him, photography was both an act of possession and a practice of self-inquiry. His earliest photographs of Marie Antoinette situate her within an orientalised interior, reclining in an image of conjugal intimacy — an arrangement that reflects not only their relationship but his aesthetic sensibilities.

Artists have long framed themselves in their own creations. Amrita understood this instinctively. In photographs after Young Girls, she positioned herself between or behind her paintings, dissolving into her own vision. She became both the subject and the orchestrator of her own image. Photography, like painting, manipulates light to create form. Though primarily a painter, Amrita was deeply aware of the camera’s performative power.

The portraits taken by Umrao Singh reveal her beauty and self-awareness — an understanding of the lens as both an instrument of scrutiny and self-definition. In some images, her gaze is soft but penetrating, fully engaged with the camera’s presence. In others, she looks past it, “as though seeing beyond its frame.”

Her paintings carry this same tension — emotional intensity tempered by formal restraint. Absorbing post-Cubist structuring principles, she fused European modernism with the visual grammar of Indian art. Her subjects are staged with a director’s eye, the everyday framed with a monumental presence. In one photograph, she sits before a glass bowl that distorts reflections, bending light like a divining mirror. It is an image of contemplation — an artist looking at herself and beyond herself, engaged in a silent dialogue with fate.

An inheritance of exile

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913, Amrita Sher-Gil was a child prodigy. By the time she was eight, she was already painting, encouraged by her mother’s artistic sensibilities. Her early training in Budapest and later in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts exposed her to the techniques of the European masters. She was drawn to the works of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Modigliani, absorbing their use of form and colour. But unlike many Indian artists of her time, she did not merely imitate Western styles — she infused them with her own sensibility, creating a language that was uniquely her own.

In 1929, the Sher-Gil family moved to Paris, where Amrita’s artistic practice flourished. In Paris, she painted bohemians, beggars, and nude studies of women that challenged traditional depictions of femininity. Her famous Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934) is a striking example of her confidence and artistic self-awareness — she was both the subject and the creator, the muse and the master. But despite the acclaim she received in Europe, she felt a growing alienation from the art world there. The themes of European modernism were not enough. She yearned for something deeper, something more rooted in her own heritage.

In 1934, at the age of 21, she returned to India — a decision that would define her artistic legacy. Here, she encountered a country on the brink of political and cultural transformation. The nationalist movement was in full swing, and artists were grappling with questions of identity, colonialism, and the role of art in a rapidly changing society. Amrita Sher-Gil rediscovered India.

A mew modernism

Traveling through the villages of Punjab, Bengal, and South India, she immersed herself in the everyday lives of ordinary people. This marked a turning point in her work. She abandoned the lush sensuality of her Parisian works for a more sombre, introspective palette. Like Three Girls, her other works like Bride’s Toilet (1937) and The Village Scene (1938) depict Indian women in moments of reflection. These were not the idealized, decorative women of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings; Amrita Sher-Gil’s women were real — thinking, yearning.

What makes these paintings remarkable is their synthesis of the personal and the political. Sher-Gil’s gaze was neither exoticising nor sentimental. She saw the women of rural India not as subjects of pity but individuals with interior lives. At a time when Indian art was still dominated by either colonial academic realism or revivalist nationalism, Sher-Gil’s work was a radical departure. She did not seek to glorify India’s past; she sought to engage with its present.

Also read: Olympe Ramakrishna interview: ‘My work aims to tell a universal story of femininity’

Her technique, too, evolved. The flat planes of colour, the earthy reds and ochres, the elongated bodies — these were reminiscent of Pahari miniature paintings, Ajanta frescoes and miniature paintings, but rendered with the modernist sensibility of a Gauguin or a Matisse. She was forging a new Indian modernism hat was neither entirely Western nor entirely traditional.

The myth of Amrita Sher-Gil

Part of Sher-Gil’s enduring appeal lies in her persona. She was flamboyant, fiercely independent, and unapologetically unconventional. She had numerous lovers — men and women—at a time when such openness was scandalous. She spoke her mind with a sharpness that unsettled the Indian art establishment. She was both admired and resented, celebrated and dismissed.

Her letters, filled with wit and irreverence, reveal a woman who refused to be confined by social expectations. She saw herself as a genius, and she lived like one. Her presence was electrifying — whether at art salons in Paris or in the feudal estates of Punjab. In a country where women were expected to be demure, she was bold. In a world that demanded conformity, she was a rebel.

In 1938, Amrita married her cousin, Victor Egan, and moved to her family estate in Saraya (Uttar Pradesh). Two years later, the couple relocated to Lahore, where she planned a major exhibition for December 1941. However, she fell ill in early December. Despite Egan’s medical treatment, her condition worsened. She died on the night of December 5, 1941.

Marie Antoinette never recovered. She attempted suicide twice before succeeding on July 31, 1948 — using Umrao Singh’s gun in his study in Shimla. Indira Sher-Gil, Amrita’s sister, married K.V.K. Sundaram in 1937 and led a more conventional life, though she carried the weight of her family’s legacy. Her children, including Vivan Sundaram, grew up with this layered history, inheriting its visual and emotional residues.