Filmmaker Mira Nair has long sought to portray the cultures and nuances of South Asia for global audiences—to show the real, raw India. Her films, including Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding, A Suitable Boy, The Namesake, and Mississippi Masala, have explored themes of identity, memory, displacement, gender, and politics. This time, Nair is making a film called Amri about the life and work of the Indian-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Indian actor Anjali Sivaraman is playing Amrita Sher-Gil. Priyanka Chopra-Jonas is also in the film and is producing it. The film is slated to release next year.
In a recent New York Times interview, Nair discusses how profoundly Gil’s paintings have influenced her films. Gil’s bold canvases, depicting Indian villages and women in muted colors and deep melancholy, have influenced and shaped Nair’s lens. “She taught me how to see,” Nair says in the interview. As a student in the 1970s, Nair says she would visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, which showcases Gil’s works, and sit before Gil’s paintings for hours. The way Gil’s paintings portray the many worlds she inhabited mirrors Nair’s, and the way Gil’s paintings defy categorization resonates with Nair’s approach to storytelling. By delving deeply into Sher-Gil’s life through her film, Nair seems to seek to bring out the complexities of identity and the deep emotional currents that run through both their lives and works. This exploration not only honors Sher-Gil’s legacy but also enriches Nair’s ongoing quest to unpack the intricate and often challenging narratives that define the South Asian experience.
Sher-Gil’s paintings reflected the influences of her multicultural life. Born to a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer mother and a Sikh aristocrat father, Sher-Gil was raised in European culture and moved to Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, in colonial India in 1921. In India, she began her formal art training and later moved to Paris to study fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, she struggled to find a distinct artistic voice and decided to return to India to explore its art, cities, and villages. However, what inspired her most were the lives of rural women in India—the ways their lives intersected with poverty, traditions, labor, rejection, and isolation, as well as sisterhood, sensuality, and cultural wisdom.
Sher-Gil’s unapologetic paintings of nude women (such as Sleeping Woman), of herself half-naked as a Tahitian woman, and of half-naked brides were not only ahead of their time but also dared to alter how women were seen then—a much-needed female gaze in a man’s world. To think of the kind of work that embraces women’s sensuality without objectifying them, at a time when decisions about women were primarily centered on their bodies, when they were expected to “keep their bodies in mind” before anything else, is truly revolutionary, and perhaps this was what compelled Nair to approach her life.
Sher-Gil is often called the Frida Kahlo of India. Nair doesn’t like this label but admits that a Western lens on Indian artists’ works gives them the attention they need. Nevertheless, with this film, Nair continues her long-standing commitment to telling stories that challenge established narratives surrounding South Asians and reveal the complexity that has always existed within the region’s histories and identities.
