Artist Amrita Sher-Gil's story comes to life in a novel puppet show

Capturing the essence of Amrita Sher-Gil’s life in a matter of 60 minutes is no easy feat. In spite of the volumes written about the avantgarde modernist, her life remains an enigma—a woman at the intersection of geographies, cultures and identities. This was a challenge for Dadi D. Pudumjee, the founder of Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust. The puppeteer was looking for a premise for his show on Sher-Gil but was not content with making a typical, formal treatise. He hit upon it after his co-writer, Shankajeet De, chanced upon a photograph of the artist at a Paris café. “In the photograph, Amrita is sitting and talking and there are a couple of men sitting around her, and I thought of using something similar for the premise,” he says.

In the show, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life Lived, one of the highlights of the ongoing annual Ishara International Puppet Theatre Festival in Delhi, five friends gather in a café to tackle a looming deadline. Their task? A project on Sher-Gil. But as they sift through the overwhelming documentation, they find themselves lost, until the artist herself emerges in puppet form to invite them into her world. The show uses live action, puppets, objects, music, video projections and storytelling to recount the story of the artist, who was born in Budapest in 1913 to an aristocratic Sikh father and a Hungarian mother. She lived in Europe for many years and died at the young age of 28 in Lahore.

The theatrical tapestry comes alive with the help of research, including two books written by her nephew and artist, the late Vivan Sundaram, and curator-historian Yashodhara Dalmia’s book Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life. “The Hungarian Cultural Centre also joined us in support because of her Hungarian roots,” adds Pudumjee. Institutional support came from The Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and the National Gallery of Modern Art. “Through the show, we are trying to explore who Amrita really was... She was also really focused, which becomes clear in the letters she wrote to her parents and friends, as well as through her diary notes. Her likes and dislikes, even as a young girl, were extremely clear. She also critiqued her own work,” he says.

Much of what Sher-Gil says (through her puppet) has been taken from her own texts. There are video montages of her paintings, interspersed with songs such as Hymn to Love by Edith Piaf and I Want to be Loved by Endre Edy sung live by the actors. “There’s also a bit of corny humour in the dialogues, else it would become too much of a eulogy,” feels Pudumjee, whose Ishara International Puppet Theatre Festival is in its 22nd year. “Although my initial studies in puppetry were traditional, my philosophy behind working with youth and with adults comes from Swedish puppeteer Michael Meschke, who believed puppets should be a medium for expression rather than the focal point of the spectacle,” he says.

At Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, Delhi, 4pm and 7.30pm, 22 February. Age: 15 plus.

Deepali Dhingra is a Delhi-based independent journalist.