Amrita Sher-Gil and the Construction of a Global Modernity

Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpiece Woman Resting on Charpoy (1937/1938) (see fig. 1) has captivated admirers for nearly nine decades. The painting portrays a reclining woman on a charpoy, or traditional bed, attended by another woman fanning her with a hand fan. The fan, the pot of water, and the steel glass in the backdrop indicate the oppressive heat of the day, prompting the women to seek refuge indoors.

Figure 1. Amrita Sher-Gil, Woman Resting on Charpoy (1940)

Much ink has been spilled on whether Amrita Sher-Gil’s work was “modernist” or “realist,” Eastern or Western, modern or traditional. These debates have overshadowed discussions about the subjects she chose to depict, especially in her later work, which is admired for its technique and unique style. In these later series of paintings, including Woman Resting on Charpoy, Sher-Gil depicts the intimate details of the daily lives of South Asian women, a decision which challenges how women have historically been represented in South Asian art.

Viewing this painting was a delightful experience, and its subtle humor caught my attention. For me, the painting suggests a classic trope in portrayals of Indian households: the newlywed bride, without a care in the world, sprawls across the bed while her mother-in-law, deployed as an attendant, rolls her eyes in dismay as her daughter-in-law sleeps comfortably in the heat. A more solemn interpretation could be that the lady in red fainted due to the heat, and the maternal figure is now looking after her as she rests. In this reading, the painting invites the viewer into the intimate relationship of nurture and care that these two women share.

Both readings require a certain familiarity with the cultural context of South Asia. The reclining woman is adorned in a vibrant red tunic, leggings, and a red dupatta, which signifies her marital status—as does the sindoor (traditional vermilion red powder) on her forehead and hands. With one hand on her stomach and the other beside her head, her shawl lies discarded on the floor. In contrast, the second woman wielding the fan wears white clothes beneath a light green covering cloth imitating the gauzy fabric of muslin. One of her legs is visible from under the bed, and she sits comfortably with her legs splayed, her eyes expressing a sense of dismay or disenchantment. The pose of the reclining lady exudes comfort, carelessness, and a freedom to self-nurture. In the other woman, we witness a nurturing caregiver. Within the confines of South Asian traditional culture, the household, including the women, would be the property of the man of the house. Sher-Gil transforms this highly patriarchal space into a space for women, where they can experience the comfort of the bed, the afternoon nap, and even take care of fellow women in the household.

Figure 2. Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

Figure 3. Paul Gaugin, Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892

The question arises: why did Amrita Sher-Gil choose to paint such a scene? While her provocative self-portraits, nudes, and depictions of elite circles are more commonly known, during the period when she painted Woman Resting on Charpoy, Sher-Gil had found inspiration in the lives of common people, especially women. Many admirers of this painting have described it as “expressing a passive sexuality in the female form represented” and “representing desire—the diagonal positioning of her body across the canvas and the positioning of the legs are highly suggestive and provocative.”

Figure 4. Virahotkanthita Nayika Yearning for her Lover, opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on paper, c.1770, Rajasthani, Harvard Art Museums, 1972.352

On the one hand, Sher-Gil, who was trained in France under Pierre Vaillant and Lucien Simon, might have drawn from the classic image of the reclining nude and the odalisque figures of Titian, Manet, and Gaugin. She was deeply influenced by Gaugin’s work, often directly mimicking his work, as seen in her work Self-portrait as Tahitian. On the other hand, during her time in India, she was exposed to Indian miniature painting and has often been quoted praising the exquisite qualities of paintings from the Pahari region. She was most taken with their use of bright primary colors and often used them in her own work. These disparate influences have come together in Woman Resting on Charpoy—an elegant combination of modernist female figures such as Manet’s Olympia (see fig. 2), Gaugin’s Manaò tupapaú (see fig. 3), and the traditional beauties depicted in Indian painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see fig. 4). Sher-Gil herself talked about the Woman Resting on Charpoy painting in a similar way in her letters, affirming her inspiration for the reclining figure in the many Indian paintings she viewed during this time.

Yet, to focus too much on Sher-Gil’s artistic influences or the technical intricacies of composition risks neglecting the subject matter of her paintings, which provides us with a profound glimpse into Sher-Gil’s identity as an artist during the latter phase of her life.

Looking at Sher-Gil’s painting today, I’m struck by the way the reclining woman transcends the conventional role of women as objects of desire in both Indian miniatures and modernist nudes. I perceive her not as a passive subject posed for the viewer’s gaze but as a woman engrossed in her own activity—in this instance, the act of sleeping. She remains unaffected by the expectations of how she might present herself to the viewer or a potential lover. This stands in stark contrast to Manet’s iconic painting Olympia, where the titular figure boldly claims ownership of her body by the emphatic placement of her hand hiding her sex. Similarly, it diverges from the portrayal of women in Indian miniature art, who were often depicted oscillating between yearning and longing for absent lovers.

Fig 5: Amrita Sher-Gil, Haldi Grinders (1940)

Fig 6: Amrita Sher-Gil, Resting (late 1930s)

Fig 7: Amrita Sher-Gil, Hill Women (1935)

This is true for many of Sher-Gil’s later works, especially the paintings she made during her time in Saraya, a little-known village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur district in the late 1930s. Her paintings from the Saraya series construct an identity for the Indian woman in a domestic setting—Haldi Grinders (Fig 5) to Resting (Fig 6)—and reveal scenes from the lives of South Asian women often ignored by other artists of the time. Sher-Gil’s depictions of female lives, such as Hill Women (Fig 7), would have been especially refreshing at a time when there was a proliferation of goddess imagery, with many artists consumed with the task of deifying the nation itself as a woman and a goddess in the form of “Mother India.” It is also interesting that Sher-Gil chose to paint them in moments where they are engrossed in their tasks, be it sleeping, resting after a long day of work, or grinding turmeric. Her paintings reflect a new take on modernity, especially in South Asia, one that disentangles femininity from both the notion of the goddess and the sensuous body and makes the Indian woman a real human presence.

Fig 8: Amrita painting In the Ladies’ Enclosure, Saraya, Gorakhpur, 1938 | Image courtesy: Vivan Sundaram

Of course, Sher-Gil’s images themselves were heavily constructed and fashioned to fit her vision for the paintings (Fig 8). This complicates the situation: what can we really say about Sher-Gil capturing women in intimate spaces if the space itself was constructed? Although she departs from the notion of woman as an object or a sensuous presence in art, the artist’s gaze remains. This time, it is Sher-Gil’s gaze that is complicated due to her own ethnicity (she was half-Indian, half-Hungarian). Was she looking at these people as “objects”? Was she considering them as “fetishes”? Her letters reveal her sentiments toward the people she was meeting in Saraya; she wanted “to interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor Indians pictorially; to paint those images of infinite submission and patience; to depict their angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness, to reproduce the impression their sad eyes created in me.” There is an uncomfortable dynamic at play here: Despite her desire to reveal the lives of people living in poverty, it is a world she is looking at as an outsider, and in some ways, she perhaps also fetishizes it much like the ethnographers and photographers of colonial India.

Notwithstanding these caveats, Sher-Gil’s enduring achievement, as seen in masterpieces such as Woman Resting on Charpoy, lies in her contribution to the construction of a “global modernity.” Transcending cultural boundaries with her unique style, Sher-Gil brought the intimate lives and emotions of women of India in paintings like Woman Resting on Charpoy to the forefront by freeing them from their roles as sensuous or divine objects that they had been confined to in the past.

Vaishnavi Patil is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her current research is on the origins and development of the mother goddess in South Asia, particularly her representations and the popular practices centered on her. Instagram: @travelingmatrika.