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Impressions - Room I: Early Years in Paris

Father Umrao Singh and Daughter Amrita

Vivan Sundaram, Father – Daughter from the series Retake of Amrita 2001 © Vivan Sundaram
Vivan Sundaram, Father – Daughter from the series Retake of Amrita 2001 © Vivan Sundaram

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Hungarian mother and a Sikh father. Her early childhood was spent mostly in Hungary, and in 1921 the family moved to India, where she began her schooling. At the age of sixteen, Amrita was admitted to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.

The five years that she spent in Paris were a period of experimentation, of trying on different personae and exploring her own hybrid identity. Sometimes wearing western clothing and sometimes wearing a sari, Sher-Gil was fully aware of her 'exotic' beauty.

Her early work often reflected the academic style in which she was trained. However, she also began to experiment with ways of representing the non-western body in paintings such as Sleep (1933), which depicts her younger sister Indira. She admired Paul Gauguin's depictions of the South Sea Islands and his stylistically simplified, yet symbolically charged Tahitian nudes. Gauguin's influence became explicit in Self Portrait as Tahitian (1934), in which Sher-Gil appears naked to the waist, in a three-quarter profile and looking beyond the frame of the picture.

Source: Tate Modern

Umrao Singh (1870-1954), an anti-British nationalist, was a reader of philosophy and literature, as well as a talented photographer. He was first given due credit by Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy in their publication "Different" (Phaidon, 2001). In his many self-portraits Umrao Singh presents himself as a pensive Sanskrit scholar or as a practicer of yoga. His self-awareness is nurtured, thus, by a cultural tradition that was destroyed or degraded by colonial politics. He was not a conforming subject, but rather someone, who, using his education and tradition, put up resistance.

Constant Transformation of Identity

Umrao Singh also preserved Amrita Sher-Gil's radiant appearance in hundreds of photographs. Amrita used this posing for the camera as an opportunity to express her self-image, characterized by re-invention and masquerading: at times Indian, at times Hungarian and at times clothed and coiffured in the fashionable Parisian style of the 1930s. The fact that she constantly assumed new roles is not just a sign of playfulness or her ability to adopt different cultural contexts; at least since Vivan Sundaram's montages of these photographs it has become clear that the artist's constant transformation of identity harbors moments of division and crisis.

Source: Haus der Kunst, Munich