Women grind turmeric in the deep shade of village trees

In the deep green shade between tree trunks, a woman in a lime-green veil and crimson blouse turns a grindstone, a companion shrouded in cream-white kneels beside her, and a third figure in bright red crouches with a silver bracelet at her ankle, turmeric roots scattered on the ground. A fourth, in black with a red hand raised, watches from the left. Painted at Saraya in 1940, the trees themselves become flat green columns framing pools of white and red — village labour turned into pure pattern.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was born in Budapest to a Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and returned to India in 1934 determined to paint the country's people rather than its picturesque surface. In the seven years left to her she fused the flat colour and frontal stillness of Ajanta murals and Pahari miniatures with the Post-Impressionist lessons of Gauguin and Cézanne, producing the foundation of modern Indian painting. She died in Lahore at twenty-eight; her work is declared a National Art Treasure by the Government of India and is held chiefly by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

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