Transformation Stories on the Danube Bank

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was born in Budapest on 30 January 1913. Amrita – who was given the Hungarian first name Dalma – came from a family of artists, whose creativity manifested itself in a variety of styles and fields of art. All these influences came together in Amrita Sher-Gil’s painted oeuvre, which has become a shared treasure not only of Indian and Hungarian art history, but of humankind as a whole.

Her art was continuously affected by the philosophical studies and photographic art of her Indian father, Umrao Sher-Gil. In the transformative moments of her life, however, she was also influenced by her uncle, Ervin Baktay, an experienced travel writer, who instructed her on painting techniques and on the in-depth study of reality. In his autobiography, Baktay wrote that a considerable role in expanding his own knowledge had been played by his eldest sister, Marie-Antoinette, whom everyone called just “Mici”. “She was the greatest reader in the family, and she was driven by an irresistible urge to occupy herself with all sorts of studies.” Amrita therefore likely derived her wide-ranging erudition and self-assurance from her mother’s example, and inherited her delicate sensitivity.

Umrao Sher-Gil’s self-portraits and his portraits of family members, as well as his family photographs, record, with few exceptions, snapshots of some sort of transformation story: the life of the family was accompanied by theatricality, role play, and attempts to summon up ancestors and honorary masters, all the way through to the point where Amrita’s fully matured into the sense of having a mission.

Ervin Baktay likewise transformed into different figures, in the noble sense of the word, in both his scientific and his private life. As an Indologist, between 1926 and 1929 in India he followed the path of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, he visited the camp of the archaeological and exploratory expedition of Sir Aurél Stein, and in his so-called Letters from the East, published in Hungarian weeklies, he shared his experiences with the wider public. In 1931, he and his friends created an (American) “Indian” camp, exemplifying his role in building communities.

The defining driving forces in the lives of Umrao Sher-Gil, Marie-Antoinette, Indira (Amrita’s elder sister), Amrita, and Ervin Baktay were playfulness, search for one’s roots, for identity, and pioneering work carried out in different fields of the arts. In the art and activities of all of them, a common endeavour was to record images and episodes from the lives of simple people, and they placed great emphasis on coming to know the creatures who lived together with humans. One such creature was the elephant, a defining figure in Indic mythology and in both the Hindu and the Buddhist pantheon. The creative work of the Baktay and Sher-Gil family of artists was imbued with the spirit contained within the “Greater Discourse on the Elephant-footprint simile”:

“Friends, just as the footprint of any breathing thing that walks can be placed within an elephant’s footprint, and so the elephant’s footprint is declared the chief of them because of its great size, so too, whatever beneficial ideas there are can all be included in the four Noble Truths.”

(Mahāhatthipadopama Sutta, MN 28. | Translated by Nyanaponika Thera)