The Women Who Painted India First

Every history of Indian painting begins with a roll call of men. Ravi Varma, the Tagores, the Progressives. But standing just outside the frame, in the same rooms, holding the same brushes, were women the record almost forgot. Two of them deserve to open the story.

The first is Mangala Bai Tampuratty of Travancore, born in 1866, Raja Ravi Varma's younger sister. She learned oil painting in the same palace, worked in the same academic style, and painted portraits and mythological scenes of real accomplishment. But she was a woman of a royal household, so exhibition and reputation belonged to her brothers. Her surviving works are few, signed evidence of a career that was never allowed to become one.

The second taught herself in stolen hours. Sunayani Devi, born in 1875 into the Tagore family, was a housewife in a grand Calcutta household; her brothers Abanindranath and Gaganendranath were busy founding modern Indian art downstairs. Around the age of thirty, with no training whatsoever, she began to paint: Radhas and Krishnas, women at rest, saints and myths, in luminous washes with the direct, wide-eyed grace of folk pata painting.

The men built movements. She built a world, between the kitchen and the prayer room.

Critics later called her India's first woman modernist, and the label is less important than the fact it gestures at: her simplified, intuitive style anticipated exactly the values, directness, flatness, folk memory, that celebrated male modernists would be praised for decades later. Her work was exhibited in Calcutta in the 1920s, in the same milieu that brought the Bauhaus to India, and was admired by European critics of the day.

Neither woman fits the romantic myth of the artist, the studio, the manifesto, the public career. They painted around their lives, not instead of them. Which makes the achievement larger, not smaller: art history's usual excuse for forgetting women is that they were not 'professional'. These two made lasting pictures without ever being permitted a profession.

A generation later, Amrita Sher-Gil would arrive, Paris-trained and blazing, and become the first woman inside the canon's front door. She is rightly celebrated. But doors have hinges, and the hinges were made by women like Mangala Bai and Sunayani Devi, painting first and being remembered later, if at all.

Nazaria will keep returning to these recovered names, because 'in perspective' means the whole picture. The cover of this piece is a Radha by Sunayani Devi: self-taught, unsigned by any movement, and entirely, defiantly hers.