How the Female Body Forbids the Colonial Gaze: The Case of Amrita Sher-Gil's Bride's Toilet
"Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me."- Amrita Sher-Gil
Introduction
This article aims to explore how Amrita Shergil placed the female body at the centre of Indian Modern Art and politics post-independence, by critically analysing her painting Bride’s Toilet, currently located at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. The two main arguments attempt to understand Shergil’s feminization of post-colonial modern art and its relevance as well as how the female body subverted the colonial gaze. Through the historical contextualisation of the site National Gallery and the rise of Modern Art in India, Bride’s Toilet’s impact on present ways of seeing and the construction of narratives of the past is understood.
Historical Background
Since 1850 and up to 1920, the Indian art scene was categorically overwhelmed with mythological characters and Gods. With the rise of the Bengal School of Art, Rabindranath Tagore’s art played a decisive role during the 1920s and 1930s. As a critic of nationalist ideology, Tagore brought in ideas of experimentation and focus on the local rather than the national. With the freedom movement raging during this period, primitivism in art, celebrating tribal and folk life started growing. It was a sharp critique of British modernity and wanted to shape a different style of modernity, suited to the subcontinent. However, there were many contradictions and problems within the movement, it showcased a singular vision of India and was not diverse in its representation. Needless to say, it left behind the Indian woman and her story.
This brought forth one of the most cherished artists of the twentieth century- Amrita Shergil- to the forefront. She created a hybridised version of modern art- inspired by her education in European Art as well as her fascination with Indian miniature paintings and murals at Ajanta Caves. Cultural identity is a production, a way of being and becoming. Particularly in a post-colonial society, art becomes important to retell the past by unearthing submerged histories. Sher-Gil dove into this revolutionary act of “imaginative rediscovery” of what we would now look back at as part of the Indian freedom movement- by placing the Indian woman at the helm of her oeuvre.
The National Gallery of Modern Art was set up in 1954 and played a key role in deciding and constructing national art as modern. It brought forth new visual languages, linking nationalism, modernism, tradition and internationalism. Amrita Shergil-Gil’s art very much spoke to the same gaze being trying to be politically conveyed. Jawaharlal Nehru personally ensured the purchase of her art collection, making the desire to nationalise and institutionalise modern art through the museum model even more evident. To further Nehru’s statist utopia of India, the Sher-Gil collection is at the centre of the gallery. The state was constantly attempting to control the modern and the national, balancing the tension between the two Sher-Gil’s artwork beautifully captures the Indian mood under the British state by making the female body the site of colonial violence. However, reflectively her paintings, can now even challenge the Indian state’s mandate of how one sees the country’s present and future.
Bride's Toilet, Amrita Sher-Gil, 1937.
Feminization of Modern Art and the Female Body as a Site of Resistance
The painting Bride’s Toilet is from 1937, the year characterised by the Indian National Congress’s significant victories in the Provincial elections and the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement. However, the mood captured by Sher-Gil of the bride and her relatives is that of an undeniable melancholy. The women are in a vulnerable and intimate part of their homes, sharing a moment of reflection as the bride gets ready and puts on her mehendi. Sher-Gil’s artwork constantly, as in this piece, put forth women, villages and the masses as carriers of histories who built narratives of the people of the subcontinent. It displayed a “cosmopolitan modernism” in the sense of claiming a space with global art and not being bounded by the nation.
The closeness of the bride with her counterparts represents a familiarity and a bond the women share. One of them soothes the bride’s hair and the other seemingly helps with her mehendi. The painting captures a silence that while creating a calming feeling, is extremely loud. It is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s book “A Room of One’s Own” which discusses the social and political importance of a woman having a physical space of her own. It is not just to educate herself, but to be liberated from societal norms of becoming a demure housewife, and to be able to think and introspect. The title is a utopian desire for a simple room- it displays how the forbidden idea of a woman having a room to herself signifies the vilification of women occupying space of their own. Sher-Gil shows how the female body can become a site of resistance to eroticisation by the colonial gaze.
Anti-colonial Modern Art and Subverting the Colonial Gaze
Sher-Gil’s artwork, especially her self-portraits, is an inspiration and critique of Gaugin’s artwork which would paint the “primitive” as a more natural way of life, contrasted by industrialisation. Gaugin would popularly paint visual imagery and women's bodies from South America, India, Egypt etc. The women portrayed would be nude and presume to entice the male viewer with exposed breasts, and plates of exotic fruits and recreate the exotic fantasies of sexually inviting indigenous women, awaiting their colonial masters. Sher-Gil takes this very imagery and flips it by bringing in the “Otherness” of brown women as more prevalent than alienated.With the use of brown- skin, walls, terracotta figures- she showcases the omnipresence of the colour and truly naturalises it instead of exotic uses Sher-Gil’s women are in contrast not meeting the eyes of the viewer, they offer no invitation, refusing eroticisation. She challenges the idea that primitivism in art can be deduced to white male imagination. It is a remarkable criticism of Western art history and exoticisation by male artists and the global market it has produced for the same. In contrast, The Bride’s Toilet tells us the real stories and impact of colonisation on the body and mind of the women.
It is possible that Sher-Gil saw herself as the Bride in the painting, given her fairer skin tone than the rest. It showcases her acceptance of her hybridised identity- half Hungarian and half Indian- in the landscape she painted. Her very presence in the painting complicates the ideas of boundaries between West and East by challenging notions of cultural purity and national authenticity. Shared cultures and histories are an active resistance in post-colonial societies. By self-orientalising herself and the cultural and national identity as fluid, she counters the British colonial gaze. Her identity is a threat to British art’s primitivism which actively wishes to erase such cross-cultural existence.
As an artist, it had become clear to her towards the second half of her life, that she had to be accepted as an Indian modernist and not fall in the Western category of Avant- grades of modernism such as Picasso, Matisse etc for she would not find a space for herself or a room of her own, one might say. She was famously quoted by Deepak Ananth in his 2007 book saying, “India belongs to me.”
Conclusion
It is that very sentiment that is reproduced in Indian politics today- calling for the reclamation of the female body which has over and over become a site of violence. Female protest is characterised by visibilizing the same body, they are claims for a territory and an attempt to recover subaltern voices. This argument can be grounded in the case of the nude Manipuri women protests, that took place in 2004. It was in firm solidarity with the late Manorama Thangjam, allegedly raped by members of the Assam Rifles. Chants such as “Indian Army Take Our Flesh” were loud. They too refused to be exoticised and controlled by the state. Sher-Gil’s painting Bride’s Toilet is a call to retell our histories by seeing through the eyes of the woman and actively resisting state-dominant narratives.
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