Chapter 3 - Amrita Sher-Gil’s Passive Figures

Summary

Sher-Gil declared her ambition to be India’s first modern artist, yet her melancholic portraits elicited complaint about her representational choices and share a more than passing interest in the passive as an aesthetic stance. The most challenging aspect of Sher-Gil’s work is its resolute interest in passivity. In representing her subjects’ listlessness (or their object-ness), the painter is able to focus on aesthetic relationships very broadly, recasting subjects and objects from an oppositional to a more inextricably relational or mutually constituting state. Sher-Gil’s paintings make passivity an aesthetic stance. Stepping away from the immediate demands of the socio-political world in which she lives, and in which her models are placed, Sher-Gil revises experience along aesthetic lines. She doesn’t forfeit political agency so much as investigate what it cannot include as she explores the sensual possibilities made available through her haunted and dreaming figures.