In Amrita Sher-Gil’s rare sculpture, the secret strength of tigers and women at rest

In a rare sculpture of tigers, the manifold skills of the artist Amrita Sher-Gil reveal themselves. Known mainly for her luminous paintings, her work changed the face of modern art and paved the course it was to take in India. She was able to bring her Western training to the existing traditions of Indian art and melded them together to express contemporary reality.

Born in Budapest on 30 January 1913 of a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, Sher-Gil left India for Paris in 1929 when she was only sixteen. She studied for some months at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and was then admitted to École des Beaux-Arts, the primary art institute in Paris at the time. Here, she went through the drill from studio portraits to nudes to landscapes. Indeed, her painting of a nude (Nude, 1933) won her the Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in 1933, and she became an associate of the Salon – quite an honour for a young student from Asia. It was primarily for the sake of the artistic development that she felt she was destined for that Sher-Gil decided to abandon her fairly active café and night life in Paris to return to India.

She reached the country in December 1934 but did not immediately join her parents in Simla, staying, instead, for a while in her ancestral home in Amritsar, Punjab. While still there, Sher-Gil made the painting Group of Three Girls (1935) which depicts young women in bright clothes. Their flamboyant costumes contrast sharply with their melancholic expressions and reflect the state of their existence.

Back in the lofty surroundings of Simla, ensconced within the family home where she had a studio, the beauty and desolation of the hilly landscape struck her. But she felt that the real India lay outside the sheltered realms of her existence, and so she decided to make a trip to the south. The works that came out of this trip were to mark a watershed in her oeuvre. Some of her masterpieces like The Bride’s Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers Going to the Market were made during this visit. With their burnt sienna bodies and brilliant clothes, the figures appear to have stepped down from the Ajanta cave walls to go about their everyday affairs.

After her marriage in Budapest, Sher-Gil returned to India and spent a considerable period at the family estate in Saraya in Uttar Pradesh where her doctor husband, Victor Egan, ran a clinic. She had an opportunity to watch village women go about their daily routine and to comprehend the rhythms of their lives. She was also able to observe women’s ennui and longing within the four walls of their cloistered existence, their feudal seclusion, and the pastimes they devised to while away the hours.

In Woman Resting on a Charpoy (1940), the plunging view of the woman lying on a bed, one hand thrown back, her legs in a position of abandon, expresses all the lassitude of her existence which contrasts with her bright clothes. The captivating duality of inertia and sensuality touch upon the essential aspects of women’s lives in India.

It was while Amrita was based in Saraya that the awareness of the unity of all creation began to enter her paintings. While watching village women at work, going on hunting expeditions with her family, or simply watching her husband at his clinic, a wider ensemble of man, nature and animal became the subject of her paintings.

The rhythmic notations of life began to enter her work in paintings like The Ancient Story Teller (1940), where the venerable old man with his raised hand relates timeless tales while the woman pounds grain in an earthen pot. The painting speaks of cyclical rhythms. In Elephants Bathing in a Pool (1938), the animals move their tusks up and down wallowing in the whirling waters under the blazing sun.

In a compressed work like Camels (1940), man, animal and nature are situated as part of a wider scheme of things. But Saraya was also part of tiger country. And Amrita had ample opportunity to watch them at close quarters. As mentioned in her biography, ‘Accompanied by family members on various shikars, she was able to watch tigers at close quarters. …Victor [Victor Egan, her husband] shot a tiger and she witnessed it, sitting with him in the machan…It was the sight of tigers silently strutting about the forest in their sinuous grace that made her do her first modelling in bas relief: two large tigers and a small elephant. ...A world was opening up for Amrita as she slowly took in other forms of life.’ Not far off in the Kumaon hills, for example, we have Jim Corbett’s account of the man-eating tigers of the jungles who roamed about freely.

According to his biographer, Martin Booth, in Corbett’s book, The Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the content consisted of the stories of the Chowgarh tigers, the Pipal Pani tiger, the Kanda man-eater…to these were added the stories of the Champawat, Mohan and Thak man-eaters, and the shooting of a record ‘trophy’ tiger known as the ‘Bachelor of Powalgarh.’

Corbett, however, describes the situation of the man-eating tiger as one of desperation because it could not get its regular prey. As he wrote, ‘A tiger when killing its natural prey, which it does either by stalking or lying in wait for it, depends for the success of its attack on its speed and, to a lesser extent, on the condition of its teeth and claws. When, therefore, a tiger is suffering from one or more painful wounds, or when its teeth are missing or defective and its claws worn down and it is unable to catch the animals it has been accustomed to eating, it is driven by necessity to killing human beings.’

These bilateral qualities of the animal are reflected in Amrita’s sculpture. We see the fluid grace of the pair as they blend curvaceously into each other. Their long, flowing lines create a symphony of the forests, as it were. The tigers are interlocked with each other and in their stately demeanour occupy a privileged position for they are the royalty of the forests. The tigers’ recumbent position, however, belies their stance for they will spring into action on spying their prey.

Their seemingly relaxed postures contrast with their alert and agile expression which will be activated at a moment’s notice. And this, then, is the surprising twist to the narrative which is contained within the form. The intertwining of lassitude and strength which was evident in her delineation of women such as in the painting Woman Resting on a Charpoy, is again deciphered in the majestic tigers. The tigers, made in low relief in plaster of paris, are, in fact, a means of conveying the subtle and surprising energy of the apparently calm work. The sculpture is aptly suited to her formulation of the feline at the top of the food chain whose agile skill she attempts to convey.

The reserve of power and dignity contained within their stance lies at the core of the work and is the secret of its strength. Poignantly enough, it was made in the last year of her life and could also be expressive of her own inner abilities of resistance when faced with turmoil and struggle. Soon after this, Sher-Gil and her husband were to leave for Lahore where she settled in more urbane settings to her satisfaction. But the stay did not last long for a critical illness ended her short life soon after.

This is an excerpt from the publication accompanying the DAG exhibit, Iconic Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art, Edition 5, on view at Art Mumbai from November 13-16.