The letters, loves and literature of Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) was very fond of literature, poetry in particular. This fondness figured midway between her passion for painting and interest in music.

During her early childhood in war-torn Hungary, drawing interested her a lot. She was able to draw figures on her own. But reading needed help. With help from her parents, she took to reading short pieces, lyrical poems in particular. Hungarian was her mother tongue and appealed to her.

She read not only to pass time but also to enjoy and refine her feelings. The poems of Endre Ady charmed her a lot. He was a symbolist who sought to award new meanings to social and political concerns. They were in tune with the risks that had begun to lurk over human life with the advent of industrial changes. She might not have grasped the full import of such poems then.

Her interest grew into profound concern when, as a young lass, she started to live in Paris, the centre of modernism in Europe. It was only a matter of time before French became her primary mode of communication and literary expression. Charles Baudelaire shone over the literary and artistic world at the time. He wrote poems in the modern mode, setting a trend in Europe. Under his influence, love poetry turned its back on nostalgia, swooning in union and the bliss of solitude. Their place was taken up by cynicism, loneliness, nihilism and abandon. Evidences of all these factors were to be seen and encountered in every nook and corner of Paris.

Amrita did swim with the tide, but she also set her aim high. While Picasso and Braque painted Europe, she resolved to paint India in a modern way.

India was then ruled by the British. It was pertinent for her to be adept in the use of the English language and also to have sufficient knowledge of its literature. Her letters, which escaped burning at the hands of her parents, bear witness to the fact that her writing skills in English grew very fast. Her earlier letters to her admirers and lovers show that she was labouring a lot. Words and phrases were jumbled together. Her later letters show how cogent she had become in their usage. Surely, towards the end of her short and tragic life, English blossomed as her literary language with as much felicity as French had figured earlier.

Regarding Punjabi and Urdu, she could converse in these languages, probably not so fluently.

What about her study of English literature? As compared to her grasp of French literature, it was less in extent and depth. She relished DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Like Lawrence, she believed that sensuality was the root of the creative process in a language and more so in music and painting. In its absence, the creative urge met with a false and facile end.

Virginia Woolf gave her the insight to paint from more than one perspective.

The first creative work to celebrate her art is a play in Punjabi written by Sant Singh Sekhon. Named Kalakar (artist), its protagonist is a male artist who feels that Amrita Sher-Gil is destined to raise the art scene in Punjab to the level it is enjoyed elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Her great concerns — seeing versus looking, sex versus sexuality, nakedness versus nudity — figure a lot in it.

Then, a Pakistani poet of great promise penned a poem, Jamurd, on her celebrated painting, The Three Sisters. He invokes the memory of Amrita to take birth again and turn the enraptured silence of the three sisters into an eloquent experience.

Slender and short, but charming, Amrita fascinated Salman Rushdie, who introduced the spell of magical realism in the Indo-English fiction. In The Moor's Last Sigh, he both inflates her being and deflates her becoming. Its heroine, born and brought up in Europe, turns into a painter of diverse talent. She is married and her husband is a mismatch. Though she bears several children, her charm stays intact.

Even Jawaharlal Nehru gets close to Amrita Sher-Gil. He would often voice his affection for her.

Rushdie's definition of Amrita as a "line of beauty" glows as a rainbow in the play, Tumhari Amrita, starring Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh. It was the Urdu translation of an American play, Love Letters, penned by AR Gurney in 1889. It had nothing to do with Amrita's life, except that she was also very fond of writing and receiving letters. Her letters hinged on the recognition of the other along with of her own self. No wonder. she was full of remorse when her parents consigned most of her letters, including several from Nehru, to the flames.

Tumhari Amrita deals with the illusion and disillusion caused by letter-writing, with the lovers getting close just for a short while. With Amrita, it was otherwise. Amrita had a choice of lovers and she exercised it daringly, at times, even defiantly. She had the creative urge to realise her potential through sexual union. There was none who charmed her for long. Most persons with whom she cohabited failed to understand how sex, turning into a play of senses, invigorated her art of painting. Rather than getting intrigued, which regrettably enough they did, it was essential for them to grasp this factor.

This was the core of her being-cum-becoming and it is yet to be grasped in full. The leitmotif, lost in the past, should be elaborated, recognised and applauded.