The female gaze

Some like Anjolie Ela Menon question slotting artists into male and female

Women artists, like chefs, have been few and far on the ground till recent decades. In fact, it was only a century ago that the earliest woman painter began to sign her name to her work, having learned to paint in the wash style from her brother, Abanindranath Tagore. Sunayani Devi was a mostly hobby painter, sitting amidst her paints and brushes in the large and airy kitchen of the household, something she began in her 30s, but few outside the rarefied world of art have heard about her, or seen her work.

It was her contemporary, the feisty and glamorous Amrita Sher-Gil who, therefore, is perceived to be India’s first woman artist — at least of merit. Sher-Gil changed the art landscape of India, such was her influence, and though she was barely successful in her lifetime, her work today is regarded as a benchmark for the manner in which it breached and reinvented what was considered contemporary in those times, before her tragic death in 1941. 
 

There was a scattering of women artists thereafter, among them Ambika Dhurandhar, artist M V Dhurandhar’s daughter, but it would be a little while before they began to make a mark. Pilloo Pochkhanawala in Bombay (now Mumbai) was a rarity in being a sculptor, and very few have followed in her footsteps, of whom Mrinalini Mukherjee, who died days ahead of her retrospective at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art was probably the best known. In Bombay too, B Prabha came to be well known for her sentimental paintings of fisherwomen and other fringe folk, paralleling the times of Devayani Krishna in New Delhi best known as a printmaker.

Yet, the mantle was picked up at different levels as more and more women began to join art colleges, among them Nalini Malani, Navjot Altaf, Arpita Singh, or the self-taught Madhvi Parekh, all of them bringing fresh discourse into the churning cauldron of art. Earlier movements had no women as members, whether the Progressives or the likes of Group 1890, but women claimed a position beyond collectives. Most of them did take a position on the politics of feminism, but their articulation was usually a different one from the other.

The debate was joined by those such as New Delhi’s Gogi Saroj Pal and Vadodara-based Rekha Rodwittiya, but recent years have seen a more confident, acerbic, humourous as well as poignant language of women artists who have devoted their practice to straddle the bridge between aesthetics and their environment. 

From Shilpa Gupta to Anita Dube (who has been appointed curator of the 2018-19 Kochi Biennale), and Bharti Kher to Anju Dodiya, they are part of the force of women artists who look at politics and society and want to provoke reactions on issues based on their inheritance and understanding of gender, class, caste and environmental disparity. Interestingly, two women artists who have brought attention to these concerns, including alternative readings of history and geography, are Nasreen Mohamedi and Zarina Hashmi, working in sparse parameters that are usually understood to be the domain of male artists.

Anjolie Ela Menon’s Untitled, oil on canvas

Some, like Anjolie Ela Menon, question the slotting of artists into male and female, and have been forceful against being located into such confined space. 
 

Meanwhile, women artists who are said to paint in a decorative mould object to the classification on grounds that their art may be women-centric but it is not romantic. From Jayasri Burman to Seema Kohli and Naina Kanodia, they argue that their concern is with the woman as an agency of change, whether in a mythical or an intimate setting. Whatever the position, the growing presence of women’s voices has energised the debate in our times in more ways than we can imagine.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated