The world may have revered Rabindranath Tagore for his romantic lyricism, but not artist Amrita Sher-Gil, who found the Nobel Laureate’s poetry “piddling”. “I have a profound contempt for it as I have for the mannerism of the man… the only thing Tagore can do is paint,” she had said after seeing an exhibition of his works in Paris. Amrita was 17 at the time. But this one remark is enough to encapsulate her entire extraordinarily unconventional being, both in love and art, which Ashwini Bhatnagar’s latest, Amrita & Victor sets out to retell.
If one goes by the title, it prepares the reader for an account of Amrita’s relationship with her cousin-turned-lover-turned-husband Victor Egan, of which little is known. Common knowledge includes: he was a Hungarian doctor; theirs was a one-of-a-kind love; and that he moved to India after they got married. The idea of having an entire book—214 pages—on the topic seemed rather path-breaking. Unfortunately, it ends up being a ruse. Even as Victor occupies half the cover, he is merely a shadowy presence throughout the tale. This is a biography of Amrita Sher-Gil alone.
After a brief introduction of her parents—Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, an Indian scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer—Bhatnagar dives straight into Amrita’s life: her growing up years, the family’s financial troubles in Hungary, their subsequent move to India and more, before getting to her artistic journey. Expectedly, the latter forms a major part of the book, and even though there’s hardly any fresh insight, reading about Amrita’s path to discovering her own genius is surreal.
Bhatnagar’s tone though is incredibly flat. It snaps the reader out of the literary reverie rendered by Amrita’s correspondence over the years with different people—Victor, art critics, political leaders, lovers, friends and family. The only exception is the chapter, ‘Breeze on Bare Body’, where we follow her on a tour of southern India. The author manages to bring to life the free, untamed spirit of the artist as she roams naked on the Kovalam beach in Kerala.
“The feel of the breeze on my bare body, the filling of my pores by the fine white sand and the caress of waves as they ebb and flow over me are something that I will continue to experience irrespective of what you think. It is the most heavenly feeling,” Amrita had told artist Barada Ukil, when he had tried to chide her over her naked disposition.
The prose lacks heavily in its evocation of vividness, which seems, at the least, imperative for a book about a painter. It fails to serve as a stimulus to help readers visualise the century-old locales of Paris, Simla and Budapest. That kind of imagery is only facilitated when the author quotes Amrita’s own words which, to no surprise, are full of colour. The dry treatment is extended also to her works of art. With only names of paintings listed one after the other, there is little room for imagination, especially for those unfamiliar with Amrita’s oeuvre. In this regard, it seems a miss on the part of the book’s editor, who should have had the better sense to complement the text with images––of the artist, her family members and, most importantly, her paintings—to aid the reading experience.
Amrita & Victor, therefore, can serve as an abridged starting point before a deep dive into the artist’s enigmatic life, but nothing more.