How an album of my great grandmother’s paintings helped me piece together a portrait of her

My maternal great grandmothers were named for precious things – diamonds and gold. I met Hirabai, named for diamonds, several times as a child, and never met Sonabai, named for gold. But thanks to things Sonabai left behind, I have a better sense of who she was than who Hirabai was.

Hirabai Ajinkya, my mother’s maternal grandmother, was frail, almost wraith-like. I saw her a few times a year when I’d tag along with my grandmother to visit. I don’t recall having a conversation with her . After a greeting upon arrival, I usually wandered around the house on Hughes Road and returned only when I was told it was time to leave.

Even though Sonabai Kothare, my mother’s paternal grandmother, died well before I was born, she always seemed present. I heard lots of stories about her. But more importantly, in the house in which she’d lived in Girgaon, I was surrounded by things she’d touched and changed during her life.

A beautifully embroidered tiger head. Exquisitely painted glass panes on three-paneled units that could be used as stylish room dividers. I remember spending hours wondering how on earth the eyes of the people painted on those panels followed me no matter where I stood in the room.

These and other objects provided a sensory portrait of Sonabai.

So you can imagine my joy when in 2012, my aunt, Tej, gifted me a bound collection of Sonabai’s watercolour paintings. It had been bequeathed to my aunt, and I was lucky that she thought I would be a good steward of it.

Holding the collection that I was seeing for the first time felt like I was directly communing with this not-too-distant ancestor, fragments of whose DNA I carried and have passed on to my children.

The 75-year-old album has yellowed with time and become fragile. The numerous holes in the book made it clear that it had been a feast for some sort of arthropod, so before its condition worsened I decided to photograph every page myself. I made bound copies of the photograph for my mother and each of my aunts.

There are more than 30 watercolor paintings in the book – some incomplete or abandoned, others extremely detailed, completed and signed. Of the little I know about art, I have learnt that a human form is challenging to depict in almost every medium, so it is particularly interesting that almost two-thirds of the paintings have one or more humans in them.

I wonder if all those human figures say something about the woman I’ve heard described as strong and determined.

Sonabai Kothare was part of the Pathare Prabhu community that purportedly settled in Bombay in the mid-to-late thirteenth century. It is a shrinking community that historically engaged in education, the arts, and business. Perhaps as a consequence of being close to the sea, the community is also known for its deep love for seafood .

I’ve been leaning on my mum and my aunts to share stories about Sonabai. So far, a common thread in their stories has been this woman’s fiery temper, her culinary expertise, her support for the arts and her overall elan. While I did not have the good fortune to experience her culinary expertise nor witness her panache, I’ve seen hints of that fiery temper in her descendants.

As far as I know, Sonabai was not a formally trained painter but to my lay eye, she seems to have brought some of the rigor of a professional artist to her paintings, all of which were signed “SBK” – Sonabai Balaji Kothare.

Several pages in the book have made me stop, stare and wonder.

One in particular brings together Sonabai’s talent and also her support for the arts about which my mother has spoken. It’s a scene where musicians are on stage, performing for the observer, as it were.

Who were these musicians? What was the woman singing? Where were they performing? The woman, and the musician to her left are both looking into the audience, but to their right; the other musician is almost looking straight up ahead. What caught their attention? The woman’s hands, especially her knuckles, are extremely detailed  –  was Sonabai trying to convey something through this detail?

All but two of the paintings in the book are untitled  –  “Sunrise” and “Sunset”. Curiously, she painted Sunset before Sunrise (note the numbers at the top left of each painting). I am willing to bet that her gustatory inclination towards fish prompted both these paintings. Sunrise is reminiscent of fisherfolk getting ready to go off on their home-to-home sale of early morning catches, while Sunset depicts fishermen returning from a day at sea.

Painting number 15 appears to be a more detailed depiction of sorting the catch of the day, probably before heading out to sell it. Based on the un-erased pencil lines in this painting, it’s entirely possible that her original intent was another scene altogether.

Sonabai didn’t limit herself to painting scenes favoring her palate. On page 24 of the book, we see a young woman dressed to the nines  – note her footwear  –  playing with a dog. What I think is impressive is that in this painting she has created a layered effect where one can see the woman’s arms and legs through the diaphanous material of her outfit.

Sonabai’s paintings strike me as deeply private – made for herself, with no audience beyond perhaps her family. I’m not sure she even intended Tej to be the keeper of this book until the moment she gave it to her. But in that gift, she preserved a version of herself for her descendants.

A recent exhibition about the Pathare Prabhus at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai makes an effort to document the community before its stories fade. But community histories, however carefully assembled, rarely capture the interior lives of women. Sonabai left no public record – no exhibitions, no reviews, no archive beyond what her family preserved and passed on. Her paintings are a reminder that the most intimate histories live not in museums but in families, and can be easily lost to time and arthropods.

It’s a shame I waited so long to embark on the project of learning more about this woman. Sonabai suffered from a stroke from which she never fully recovered and died in the early 1950s, a couple of years after she gave this book to her granddaughter, my aunt.

My grandfather who likely knew her better than his children did, and with whom I shared this planet until I was 31 is long gone. But thanks to my mother’s and aunts’ stories and general family lore, I do know that in addition to Sonabai’s prowess with the paintbrush and embroidery threads, she also played the dilruba.

It is the bowed stringed instrument that you can hear very clearly in the opening bars (and later too) of the Beatles Within You Without You. George Harrison’s lyrics to this song capture my sentiment “..it’s far too late/When they pass away.”

Thanks to these paintings, Sonabai Kothare has finally introduced herself to me.

Deepti Pradhan is a cancer patient and survivor advocate at Yale University.