Whenever I read the term Bengal Renaissance, it usually occurs to me that what happened in Bengal was the gradual development of Indian painting, music, or literature and not the rebirth of any. When compared to ancient Indian paintings and sculptures, Modern Indian art lacks several aspects, including space, illusion, perspective, and even anatomy. It happened because Indian painters largely remained ignorant or decisively foolish in making contact with the Eastern art of the prominent movements or the developments they witnessed. Had our artists taken inspiration from Western art, as they discovered several means of self-expression through Eastern sculpture and paintings, there might have been a different revolution in Indian paintings. For instance, Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings could have been too intelligent if they had followed the rules of anatomy, or Abanindranath’s paintings could have felt more connected if they had norms of impressionism in them. However, there were a few artists who combined the techniques of India with the artistic movements to form some of the exceptional paintings. One among them is Amrita Sher-Gil, who combined several techniques to form an Indian expression of art. Today, in this article, I am going to discuss one of her perfect paintings, The Story Teller (painting), which is an artwork that narrates several passages from the lives of femininity and has an exceptional focus on engaging the viewers through its varied techniques of crafting.
A Little Background.
When Amrita painted the composition The Story Teller, she was increasingly sought for individual commissions or solo exhibitions from different parts of the world. And it is not wrong to say that her work was getting more recognized. Her paintings were compared with those of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, the two artists she valued in her life. Though her paintings were lauded for representing poverty and misery at that time, they were criticized for portraying the dark side of Indian history. But Amrita’s paintings never spoke about these aspects. In fact, the essential aspects of her artworks were ignored, and those illustrations were largely misunderstood.
The Year 1937…
The year 1937 marked a change in Amrita’s life as it was in Delhi that she met Jawaharlal Nehru. She described this meeting in a letter to Karl,
“I think he liked me too, as much as I liked him. He came to my exhibition, and we had a long chat. He wrote to me sometime back:
‘I liked your pictures because they showed so much strength and perception. You have both these qualities. How different these pictures were from the pasty-faced lifeless efforts that one sees so frequently in India?’”
There were several letters exchanged between them, but those letters were burnt by Amrita’s family in 1938 while she was away in Budapest getting married. It is really difficult to comprehend the type of relationship they had. There were several good friends of Amrita at this time, including Muzaffar Ali Khan Qizilbash, Helen Chamanlal, and Jamil Ashgar, who continued to inspire her artworks. Amrita painted steadily at this time, but something changed in her artwork. From composing large and monumental works she transitioned to concentrate on experimenting with the miniature form. The artist described this as her plein-air series as it was majorly composed in the open-air setting instead of her studio setting.
Looking at The Story Teller Painting.
Amrita painted the South Indian Trilogy at this time, including pictures like Brahmacharis and Bride’s Toilet. In October 1937, she painted Story Teller and Siesta. The Story Teller painting shows a warm and domestic scene in the courtyard of a village home. A woman sitting on a clot is narrating stories to a group of village women squatting on the floor with a cow and calf alongside. A man observes the scene from behind, peeking through a doorway. The painting is significant because this was the first time when the artist painted animals. Just after this artwork, Amrita embedded these animals in her painting oeuvre. In fact, the artist found this oeuvre so convincing that she even commented to Karl that she found cows painting ‘very soothing.’ The expressions of every woman here are different though there is a sense of union in the storytelling of the canvas. In some cases, this gathering serves as a gossip session, while in others, it serves as a kind of rest session in which the women share their daily stories. Amrita used local colors like hues of red, green, blues, and warm earthen colors to fill the canvas with Indianness.
When talking about the art style of the artist in this composition, several features must be seen. Since Amrita had an extended tour of India in 1937, she attempted to do several summations of indigenous painting traditions. Firstly, she foregrounded the voluptuous organicity of Ajanta caves where she learned to keep her subject’s gender identity polymorphous and sanguine. But Amrita did not want to just copy the style of Ajanta paintings, instead, she wanted to create something of her own. Further, she had difficulty dealing with the classical tradition and immanent energies of the Ajanta artworks, so she then embedded the qualities of Mughal medieval art and Pahari styles to give a more structured form to her domestic subjects.
Amrita was able to understand how those historical or everyday scenes within an ornamental structure gave the Mughal miniatures a moment of wit and relief, further converting them into contemporary chronicles. This aspect of aesthetics made these artworks systematic social paintings. Amrita took this part in miniature, but she translated this quality to embedding domesticity with ornamentation with oils. She did this so that she could record the subjects in terms of modernizing the consciousness of an ambiguous balance in the feminine world. In The Story Teller painting, Sher-Gil explored the themes of gossip, village romance, and daily submission through these combined techniques with the Post-Impressionist color application. She chose her subjects carefully, further romanticizing the reverie. There is a stillness in the painting and the female subjects of the artwork are contained within their feudal seclusion instead of being used as a symbol of sexual gratification.
Geeta Kapur states that the artworks of the artist explore the realm of domestic life with an aesthetic beauty and nuanced social commentary. This painting is a remarkable example of her statement as it shows women engaged in themselves within a relaxed atmosphere. Whether they are eating paan, talking or listening, waving a hand fan, or communicating affection with the animals, the gestures and positions of each figure show a sense of naturalness as if there is no observer and the artist composed the painting in such a way that the women were not models of her canvas.
Deepak Ananth writes, that Amrita is
“opting for a less grandiose, more relaxed attitude to her Indian subjects: the affecting complicity between the village women informally grouped in a courtyard with a calf nosing its way in their midst (Story Teller)…” (Deepak Ananth, Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2007, p. 24)
The painting has deliberate shades of white to form the background wall, imitating a fundamental element for mural and miniature painting traditions. Being the most honest and expressive composition of the artist, the dominant subjects are women, similar to many of Amrita’s works,
“primarily because she could lend her empathetic self most easily to their condition. Her emergent forms were those in which women’s very essence could be communicated so that they represented a persona and a will of their own. Perhaps her own personality infused many of them as she archived their subterranean selves–their circumscribed lives, the grittiness of their existence, their surrender to a fate that could not be changed, and yet their passionate yearning for the other.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, pp. 145-146)
There is a detachment in the canvas, which is directed through the gaze of figures as if the group is introspecting themselves, even when they are engaged in their activities and communication. There is seclusion within the figures on the canvas, and a male figure is deliberately excluded from engaging in the women’s discussion.
Resources.
- Featured Image: The Story Teller by Amrita Sher-Gil; Public Domain, Tallenge Store.
- Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life by Yashodhara Dalmia.
- When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India by Geeta Kapur.
- Indian Art (Oxford History of Art) by Partha Mitter.
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