"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

The 20th century was a time of great contradictions across the world. On one hand, the colonial era was coming to an end and post-colonial nation states were rising from of the dying embers of the British Empire; and on the other hand, it was a time of great wars, and mass migrations caused by partitions. In the UK and the USA, the suffragette and civil rights movements had reached a crescendo.

In India, too, the struggle for independence gained an unstoppable momentum in the 20th century. With questions of self-rule, individual autonomy, rights, agency, and liberation dominating the social, political, and cultural milieu, the freedom movement also created space for women's participation in politics, education, science, literature, and the arts.

Springing from the emancipatory spirit of the freedom movement, the informal education spaces of the antahpur, andarmahal, or inner quarters, and griha-vidyalayas or home schools finally allowed Indian women to break out of domestic spaces and occupy the public domain in the early 20th century. India's earliest women artists emerged from these domestic folds, before Kala Bhavana at the Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan created an inclusive institutional space for women art students and artists. With the gradual development of these inclusive, progressive spaces and pre and post-Independence progressive socio-political movements, women artists like Ambika Dhurandhar, Amrita Sher-Gil, Meera Mukherjee, and Zarina Hashmi joined and contributed to India's nascent modern art movement.

Of Spaces of Their Own: Women Artists in 20th Century India, an exhibition of early to mid-20th-century women artists across India currently on view at Akar Prakar, Kolkata, celebrates these early Indian women artists from Ambika Dhurandhar to Zarina Hashmi.

Sunayani Devi (18 June 1875 – 23 February 1962)

Sunayani Devi, the younger sister of Gaganendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, was, like her brothers, an artist in her own right. A self-taught artist without formal training or education in art, she drew inspiration from the patachitra folk art form of Bengal and painted scenes from Indian myths and epics in the folk tradition. In 1922, her paintings were part of the Bauhaus artists' exhibition in Kolkata. According to American art historian Stella Kramrisch, she was among the first modern painters in India. As a Tagore woman, she was at the epicentre of India's 20th-century women's empowerment and emancipation movement.

Ambika Dhurandhar (4 January 1912 – 3 January 2009)

In 1931, Ambika Dhurandhar became the first Indian woman to graduate with a Government Diploma in Painting from the prestigious J.J. School of Art in Bombay where her father, the renowned painter M.V. Dhurandhar, was a teacher. By the time she graduated, the young Dhurandhar was already winning accolades at different art society exhibitions in Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, and Shimla. In 1939, she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London, in what was an unprecedented achievement for an Indian woman artist in the 20th century.

Learn more about her life and legacy here:

Amrita Sher-Gil (30 January 1913 – 5 December 1941)

Amrita Sher-Gil was the first Indian woman artist to find acclaim internationally. Born to an Indian father and a Hungarian mother in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913, she grew up in Europe and trained as a painter in Paris, initially at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon, and later at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Sher-Gil travelled extensively in her tragically short life — drawing inspiration from both precolonial Indian art forms as well as contemporary European art styles of the time. A pioneer of modern Indian art, she is considered "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th-century".

Sher-Gil became known as a formidable painter in 1932 — when she was only 19 years old — for Young Girls, an oil painting made the same year in Paris. Young Girls was awarded a gold medal at the 1933 Paris Salon and earned Sher-Gil an associate membership of the Grand Salon in Paris. She was the youngest ever member and the only Grand Salon member of Asian descent at the time.

Sadly, Sher-Gil passed away just days before her first major solo show in Lahore in 1941. She was only 28 years old at the time.

Learn more about a lesser-known side of her life and work here:

Meera Mukherjee (11 May 1923 – 1998)

Meera Mukherjee was the first polymathic woman artist to emerge out of India. Her multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, sculpting, as well as writing. Today, she is known for her innovative use of the traditional dokra lost-wax casting technique in her sculptural practice. Mukherjee's sculptures, often cast in bronze, were thoroughly modern, yet rooted in the ancient motifs and idioms of Bengal's tribal sculpting traditions.

Learn more about her creative life and legacy here:

Zarina Hashmi (16 July 1937 – 25 April 2020)

A master minimalist, Zarina Hashmi was a path-breaking print-maker. Her print-making practice was defined by her erudite upbringing as the daughter of a distinguished professor of history at the Aligarh Muslim University, and her impeccable craftsmanship. Her prints — made using various techniques on both wood and metal — explored the intersections of textuality, mother tongue, memory, childhood, diaspora, the concept of home and her identity as a Muslim-Indian woman artist.

Learn more about her print-making practice here:

Of Spaces of Their Own: Women Artists in 20th Century India, an exhibition of early to mid-20th-century women artists across India curated by Aparna Roy Baliga and Debdutta Gupta, is on view at Akar Prakar, Kolkata, until January 11, 2025.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

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