As someone who emerged as an éminence grise in India’s contemporary art scene during the 1990s, Anju Dodiya’s geniality takes me by surprise. “It was all just happenstance,” she says of her successful career. Born into an orthodox Sindhi business family, Anju was expected to keep with tradition. So when she dropped out of her commerce degree to join Sir JJ School of Art, her mother presumed the arrangement was simply a stopgap between college and marriage. When she did get married (to her college senior, the noted contemporary painter Atul Dodiya), she did not swap her career for companionship as her mother had imagined. “My sister-in-law, Priti, would often tell me, ‘You love to paint and I love to cook, so you need to go to the studio and I’ll be here at home.’” A few years after Biraaj was born, Anju began tailoring her schedule around her daughter’s—dropping her off at school in the mornings, sometimes meeting her for lunch, accompanying her to sports practices—all the while working nights, weekends and whenever else she could squeeze in time.
