- Lived:
- 30 January 1913, Budapest → Simla (Shimla), Paris, the family estate at Saraya near Gorakhpur, and Lahore, where she died on 5 December 1941, aged twenty-eight
- Field:
- painting — the founding figure of modern Indian art, fusing Parisian post-Impressionist training with the Ajanta murals and the Pahari miniature palette
- The Big Idea:
- Europe taught her how to paint; India told her what to paint. She came home at twenty-one, against every career instinct, and painted ordinary Indian women — tired, watchful, unposed — in flat, glowing, sorrowful colour, and in doing so gave Indian painting its modern beginning.
- In their words:
- "India belongs only to me" — from a letter of 1938, claiming her subject the way an empire claims territory
- If you remember one thing:
- Modern Indian painting was invented in roughly eight working years by a half-Hungarian, half-Sikh woman who died at twenty-eight — and everything she needed, Paris had already given her except the one thing that mattered, which she found in a dark cave at Ajanta and in the faces of village women in Punjab.