A brilliant painter with a brazen lifestyle

Shriniwas Joshi

At the end of January we will be remembering Amrita Shergill on her 107th ‘jayanti’. Amrita lived for 28 years only. She was born at Budapest (Hungary) as Amrita Dalma Shergill on January 30, 1913 and died at Lahore on December 5, 1941, as Amrita Shergill. She was put to flames on December 7, according to the Sikh rites. “Art in India was never the same after her comet-like appearance,” says Ruby von Leiden while Mulk Raj Anand acknowledges: “For the first time an Indian painter had the courage to paint ordinary people, human beings even of the down-trodden world of hill states of North India”.

Amrita had started drawing and water colouring at the age of five. The Shergill family sailed for India early in 1921 to settle at ‘The Holme’ at Summer Hill, purchased from a Swedish family. It has a cosy-looking outhouse where Amrita did most of her painting and named it ‘The Studio’. Her mother wanted her to be a musician but Amrita had other designs. She started learning piano and violin and at the age of nine played a role in a pantomime, Pan and the Little Girl, at The Gaiety.

Creative people are ‘out-of-the-box’ type, non-conformist and even a little bit of rebellious. They are both traditional and iconoclastic. So was Amrita Shergill — incontrollable and slapdash.

Amrita was doing excellently well in painting in Shimla but Hell Bevan Pettman, her teacher here, thought that she should go to France to learn more and better. In January 1924, the family left for Florence and Amrita found herself in Santa Annunziata School of Art run by Roman Catholics known for strict discipline. Amrita disliked regimentation and wrote that it was an ‘enormous, elegant but hateful school’. Five months later, they were back in Shimla.

She was admitted to Convent of Jesus and Mary, Shimla, for general education. Here, too, Amrita faced the same strictness. She wrote a letter to her father that she was an atheist, did not believe in God and, therefore, the Roman Catholic Church had no function for her. The letter fell into the hands of Mother Superior, who expelled Amrita from the school.

There was a Fine Art Society functioning in Shimla in 1935. Amrita sent 10 of her paintings for the September opening of an exhibition by the society. Her five paintings were rejected and one of the accepted paintings ‘Conversation Peace’ was awarded HH Raja of Faridkot’s prize for a portrait. Amrita, however, was upset due to the rejection of the paintings and wrote a sarcastic letter to the society, refusing to accept the award and the cheque.

Meeting with Khushwant Singh

The rendezvous of Amrita Shergill with Khushwant Singh was, in a way, disastrous. Khushwant Singh writes: “It was in the month of June 1941. My wife had taken our seven-month-old son to my parents’ house ‘Sunderban’ in Mashobra, seven miles beyond Simla… One afternoon I came home to find my flat full of the aroma of French perfume. In my sitting room-cum-library on the table was a silver tankard of chilled beer. I tiptoed to the kitchen, asked my cook about the visitor. ‘A memsahib in a sari,’ he informed me”. Amrita, waiting for Khushwant, had helped herself to a bottle of beer from the fridge and was in the bathroom to freshen up. She came out of the bathroom and without any apology for having a beer without asking for it, she introduced herself to Khushwant and defined the work for which she had come. She then moved around the room. Khushwant Singh pointed to some of the paintings and said that these were by his wife who was an amateur. Amrita scoffed: “That is obvious”. Khushwant was taken aback by her disdain and could think of nothing to retort.

He writes: “Amrita was staying with Chaman Lal and his wife Helen, who had rented out a house above my father’s. I invited them for lunch. The three of them came at midday”. Khushwant’s seven-month-old son, Rahul Singh, who is a known journalist and author today, was in the playpen teaching himself how to stand on his legs. Khushwant describes his son as a lovely child with curly brown locks and large questioning eyes. Chaman and Helen complimented Khushwant’s wife for having a good-looking son while Amrita was lost in her beer mug. After sometime she gave a long look at the child and remarked, “What an ugly little boy”. The remaining gathering froze and Lals protested at the unkind remarks but Amrita remained drowned in the beer mug.

She may have been brash in her lifestyle but showed brilliance in Indian art by painting those silent images of infinite submission and patience, to depict their angular brown bodies, reproduce on canvas the impression their eyes created on me; to interpret them with a new technique, my own technique. And she created one of her best paintings, ‘Group of Three Ladies’ in 1935.

Tailpiece

“Make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good Art.” — Neil Gaiman