These women look awfully glum about the ensuing wedding festivities….probably because this is an arranged marriage and neither the bride, nor the groom in the corresponding painting, Brahmacharis want to be together.

Nothing puts you down quite like being forced to marry someone you don’t love!  This was Amrita Sher-Gil’s angle though. “Sher-Gil was enthralled by common people, their beauty, sadness and struggles.” A professor of hers in Paris “had often said that, judging by the richness of [her] colouring, [she] was not really in [her] element in the grey studios of the West, that [her] artistic personality would find its true atmosphere in the colour and light of the East.” Though this is at its core pretty racist, the professor was right. Sher-Gil was no longer inspired by the mundanity of Europe and headed to South India for inspiration. And inspiration she found!

During her travels, she came across the Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra and the Mogul miniatures of South India. She was forever touched by each of these styles but deeply depressed by the neglect of art by the Indian people. So she decided to light a fire in the artistic loins of India. She began to incorporate the frescos of the Ajanta Caves and the miniatures of the Moguls into her European training, resulting in works like Bride’s Toilet. Before her trip, her work was very Gauguin-ian but when she left Paris behind, she came into her own just in time for her to die an untimely death at the age of 28. Good thing she had already created a legendary body of work or else the world would have been robbed of her badassery.