Stringing a canvas of Amrita Sher-Gil’s life
Puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee’s latest directorial is a vibrant celebration of artist Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil died at the age of 28, leaving behind barely 172 documented works of art. A blend of Indian and western aesthetics, these works placed her high on the pedestal of modern art in India. Avant-garde yet stylistically simple, these were declared a national treasure in 1976, prohibiting their export. It is this enigmatic life that India’s leading puppeteer, Dadi Pudumjee, is capturing in his latest work, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life Lived’. It is being staged at the 22nd Ishara International Puppet Theatre Festival in New Delhi on February 22.
Dadi Pudumjee wanted to capture the movement in the artist Amrita Sher-Gil's life.
Dadi’s last directorial venture was ‘Rumiyana’, which told stories from the Sufi poet’s most famous work, ‘Masnavi’. This time, he says, he wanted to explore something around art and colour and was led to the story of Amrita Sher-Gil. “A biographer will always talk about what she did, how she did it, where she did it, etc. But how do we say the same thing in a visual narrative? That was a challenge we took.”
Amrita is an icon, known to anyone who cares about art. Dadi wanted to go beyond the cursory details, selecting certain aspects of her character, her life and her movement. Research followed: meeting people, reading books and consulting definitive volumes such as those by Vivan Sundaram, an artist and nephew of Amrita, as well as Yashodhara Dalmia’s biography. What emerged was an engaging and colourful portrait of a fiercely independent and rebellious young woman in colonial India. Instead of following the regular trajectory of a biographical show, the team decided to explore Amrita’s life through five students brainstorming over a project on the artist at a cafe in Paris. The artist manifests as a puppet and takes them along on her journey.
The many facets of Amrita Sher-Gil.
The show marries theatre and puppetry. There are monologues too — such as one by her father, scholar Umrao Singh, speaking about her birth, and another by her husband, Victor, who was also her first cousin and whom she married to the displeasure of her mother, Marie Antoinette Gottesman.
Dadi says Amrita was a rebel, both in her personal life and in her art. “All that subtly comes into the story,” he says. Various departments at Ishara came together to create ‘Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life Lived’. “We work with puppets, actors, masks and music, and we saw all of them fit into this one person’s narrative.”
The show uses a lot of music, one reason behind which was that Amrita’s mother was an opera singer. “We read about a piece by Giacomo Puccini that she would sing and have used that in the play as well,” says Dadi. In addition, there is classical Baroque music, a Hungarian song and live singing by the actors.
Dadi is known as the father of modern puppetry in India. To tell this story, however, he has made a stylistic deviation. Known for his larger-than-life puppets, he has created realistic faces of Amrita, her father and her mother with the help of a sculptor.
Amrita travelled frequently between India, Hungary and Paris, and these journeys deeply impacted her work. While studying in Paris and earning herself a reputation and awards, she began to feel drawn back to India. She returned towards the end of 1934 and found “the inspiration she needed as she travelled around the country and reconnected with its people”.
For Dadi, this movement is intriguing. “She was never in one place. What’s most interesting,” he says, “is that she was born under the Aquarian sign. Whether you like it or not, if you read the Aquarian horoscope, it’s almost exactly like what Amrita was — like flowing water, never in one place. This was discussed a lot in the beginning. Some people laughed about it. But when you read that, it somehow fits into place.”
In his five-decade career as a puppeteer, Dadi has created shows based on popular stories, but his oeuvre does not include many biographical productions. The only other one he directed was ‘Images of Truth’, a play on Mahatma Gandhi for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. That production relied heavily on music, whereas this one makes use of text from Amrita’s letters and diaries, as well as books.
Dadi says the show could not have been made without support from the Hungarian Cultural Centre, Delhi, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and the National Gallery of Modern Art. However, he adds that they need collaborators to take it to other places. It was not part of the line-up at the puppet theatre festival which has simultaneously been held at Chandigarh’s Tagore Theatre for many editions. The last large show he brought there was ‘Heer ke Waris’ more than a decade back.
“I would love to bring it to Chandigarh and Punjab,” he says, adding, “but we cannot do everything ourselves. We need someone to support us”.
