Twentieth-Century Women Artists From Subcontinental India

The Modernist art movement emerged during the late 19th century, mainly in the West. Under its umbrella were several other movements such as Cubism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism pioneered by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Monet. The modernist artists made a shift in the way in which art was procured and the movement had a strong political origin. 

Modernism arrived in India during the 1920s when Rabindranath Tagore gathered the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, and other painters associated with the German school of art, Bauhaus. In 1922, an exhibition was held in Calcutta which introduced these artworks to the public and which, in a way, provoked the modernist art movement in the country.  The late 1800s and the early 1900s were an exceptional time for the world, considering the major events that took place during the period. The nationalist and anti-colonial movement for Independence that freed India from the shackles of British Rule, remains the most important one in the history of South Asia. Modernist artists played important roles in the struggle against the colonizers. While there have been wide discussions of the works by male modernist artists from India such as Tagore, Jamini Roy and M.F Husain, women artists of the period have remained in shadow for quite a long time. Here is a list of Indian women who revolutionized the field of art and sculptor with their work during the 20th Century.       

Amrita Shergill:

Born in Budapest to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, Amrita Shergill is regarded as the mother of modernism in India. She grew up in Budapest, Shimla, and spent a considerable amount of time in Paris as well. Her art is a reflection of the versatile life she lived. From a very young age, Amrita Shergill discovered and explored her aptitude for painting. She drew inspiration from the European modernist painters on one hand, and the Ajanta paintings and Ellora sculpture on the other hand during the later years. In 1934, at the age of 21, she felt a deep longing for India and by the end of the year, she was back in the country. She said, “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and many others. India belongs only to me.”. 

After her return to India, she spent some time in Amritsar, her ancestral home. Thereafter, she traveled the Indian subcontinent extensively. It was during this time that she discovered the real India. Distinct changes took place in her works, which affected her perception of India's poverty and sadness, especially Indian women of the time. Her visit to the Ajanta Ellora and the various temples of South India also had an astounding impact on her paintings. It also made her realize the cultural diversity of the country she belonged to. Shergill believed that poverty and suffering shouldn’t be romanticized under any circumstances. Her travels across the Indian villages and exposure to the lives of the women greatly influenced her later works,

Amrita Shergill died at the young age of 28, under some rather perplexing conditions. She lived a life with no regrets and her candid nature made her a favorite to many, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of Independent India. Her fierce and honest art legacy remains alive and keeps on inspiring artists and women from the subcontinent to live an untied and free life.

Nasreen Mohamedi:

Born in Karachi (now in Pakistan) in 1937 to an elite family, Nasreen Mohamedi is one of the most underrated modernist artists in the country. Her work can be described as minimalist and abstract. Lines, intersections, grids, and patterns played an important role in the art she created. Nasreen Mohamedi studied art in London, from 1954 to 1957 and in Paris from 1961 to 1963. She also travelled through Bahrain, Kuwait, the USA, and Japan, the inspirations from which are reflected in her artworks. One of the most interesting things about Nasreen Mohamedi is the fact that she never signed her name in any of the pieces she produced. In a letter to Peggy Henry Mathews (1963), a collector of her works, she explained why she never puts a signature on her painting but always signs on the back. She said, “ I feel that the signature on the painting hinders the form and so I put it on the back”.

Mohamedi was intrigued by light and being a frequent traveller between the desert (Bahrain) and the sea (Mumbai), she explored how it worked. Shadow played an important role in her perception and thereafter the creation of her art. Minimalism was not only an element of her paintings but also of her life. Her studio was clutter-free and the walls were left bare for her to study the shadow of the tree outside the window. Her works have often been confused with that of VS Gaitonde, whom she knew from her days at the Bhulabhai Institute of Arts in Mumbai. Mohamedi’s work always draws inspiration from the Russian abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich as she often mentions in her diary.    

Mohamedi died comparatively young, at the age of 53, ten years after she was diagnosed with Huntington's Chorea, a neurological disorder. At the time of her death, she was a teacher of Fine Art at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. 

Meera Mukherjee:

Born to Dwijendramohan Mukherjee and Binapani Devi, in 1923 Kolkata, Meera Mukherjee started as a painter. She had her basic training from the Indian Society of Oriental Art School where she enrolled at the young age of 14. However, with time she moved on from the art of painting to the art of sculpting which eventually became her predominant identity. Mukherjee was also a writer, an activist, and an art teacher.

Meera Mukherjee studied paintings, graphics, and sculpting at the Delhi Polytechnic (present-day Delhi Technological University) and earned her diploma in 1951. In 1952 she held her solo exhibition. She received a scholarship and spent three years, from 1953 to 1956, studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Germany. Thereafter she made a major shift in her career, from painting to sculpting. When she returned to India, she undertook a project for the Anthropological Survey of India to document the metal crafts of Madhya Pradesh. As she spent more and more time with the art of sculpting, she realized her calling. 

Mukherjee was influenced by the craftsmanship of the Dhokra artists of the Bastar region. Dhokra art originally belongs to the tribals of Chattisgarh, Odisha, and West Bengal. The process of Dhokra sculpture making is extensive and demands a lot of effort. It is a form of casting non-ferrous metals, the base of which is prepared with the help of the lost wax technique. Meera Mukherjee spent a considerable amount of her time learning and excelling her skills in this complicated form of sculpting. Her works were mostly based on daily life, ordinary people, and human sentiments. Being a lover of the arts and environment, her sculptures also reflected music, dance, and nature. The subjects of her sculptures often ranged from fishermen to weavers, people she had met, and stories she had known during her travels as an anthropologist.
In 1968 she was awarded the Press Award for the Master Craftsman by the President of India and the Abanindranath Award was presented to her by the Government of West Bengal in 1981. She was also honored with the Padma Shri, from the Government of India in 1992. In 1998, Meera Mukherjee died at the age of 75. 

Zubeida Agha:

Zubeida Agha was born in 1922 in Faisalabad (now in Pakistan), Punjab, undivided India. Although she started her career as a modernist painter in 1940s India, she spent most of her life in Pakistan after the Independence of India and its division in 1947. She is regarded as “The grande dame of Pakistani art” and considered to be the one who introduced modern art in Pakistan. 

Agha worked with BC Sanyal, one of the pioneers of modern art in India soon after she graduated from Lahore’s Kinnaird College for Women. She was greatly influenced by the global modernist movement. She was also instructed by Mario Perlingeiri, a former student of Pablo Picasso and an Italian prisoner of war in Lahore, to whom she was introduced by her brother. Her elaborative set of work reflects the inspiration she drew from Picasso and western modern art. In 1950 she became a part of St.Martin’s School of Art in London and the next year she joined the Ecole de Beaux in Paris. Zubeida Agha’s art is colorful and vibrant. It is known that many of her paintings were derived from her dreams. 

Agha should be remembered for being one of the foremost modernist painters of Pakistan and should be studied in the context of the society in which she lived and practiced her art. Zubeida Agha’s first solo exhibition was held in 1949 in Karachi at such a time that it was instrumental in changing the perception of art for the Pakistani society, a part of which even labeled her as unskilled owing to the elements of abstraction in them. In 1965 she was awarded the President’s Award, Pride for Performance. Agha is also remembered for her contribution to creating a space for Pakistani artists with activities such as her involvement in the establishment of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Islamabad. She died in 1997.

 Novera Ahmed:

Novera Ahmed was born in 1939 in the Sunderbans in Bengal and her family originally belonged to Chittagong (now in Bangladesh). From a very early age, Novera’s mother, who made dolls and houses from clay, inspired her. At the time, East Pakistan did not have colleges or institutions of design and art, especially for women. Novera Ahmed traveled to London, and from 1951 to 1955, she studied the art of sculpture in Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts under the guidance of the famous Czech sculptor, Dr. Karel Vogel. After collecting the National Diploma in Design from the same institute, she moved on to Florence to train under Venturino Venturi. Having spent a significant amount of time in Europe, studying under European artists and learning about Western art and sculpture, she was heavily influenced by it.  

Ahmed’s works are elegant combinations of her affinity towards Western modernist sculpting and folk traditions aligned with her life experiences in East Bengal. The frieze in the Central Public Library (now Dhaka University Library) was her first public work. Her artworks were heavily influenced by rural Bengal and its people. She came into the public eye with her 1960 solo exhibition “Inner Gaze” which was held on the ground floor of the Central Public Library. In fact, she had also collaborated with Hamidur Rahman in designing the Shaheed Minar. The murals created by the two artists in the room under the Minar were destroyed during the war of 1971.  

Novera Ahmed and her art was political and always made a strong statement. She moved to Paris in 1960 and lived there till her death. She also traveled through East Asia and during her stay in Thailand from 1968 to 1970 a solo exhibition was held with association to the Bangkok Alliance Française, in which her artworks were made of the remains of the American planes which crashed during the Vietnam war. In 1997, Ahmed was awarded the Ekushey Padak in absentia. She died in Paris in 2015.

The world of art, much like any other field, is dominated by men. Historical and systematic oppression has kept women away from chasing their dreams and establishing themselves in their domain. However, these are women, who have fought the turbulent social and political conditions of 20th century India and made their mark in the long list of modernist artists of the subcontinent. Their artworks are highly political and it is important to engage in broader discussions and recognize the brilliance with which they have been created.