Having met the Indian artist Nalini Malani in 1985, I have been following her work for nearly 25 years with increasing admiration. When I first knew her, Malani was primarily engaged with acrylic paintings on canvas or watercolors on paper that presented an essentially realistic, socially-based picture of life in contemporary India, focusing especially on gender and family issues. Grieved Child (1985), for example, represents a group of family and friends with great psychological and social subtlety1. Both engaging and socially engagé, the paintings became widely appreciated, first in India and, more recently, abroad.
After the 1980s, Malani’s work became less oriented toward everyday life and more involved with the long and capacious Indian tradition. It was as if she were looking back over that history and seeing things hiding behind other things. She became increasingly concerned with the repressed, especially women’s issues. At the same time, she began to introduce the multicultural dimension that her own life reflects. Born in Karachi in 1946 when it was still in India, but shortly before it became part of a newly created Pakistan, she and her family soon relocated to Calcutta, in post-Partition India. Later, Malani traveled widely, spending a few years early on in Paris. Working within an increasingly international framework, she was especially drawn to earlier representations of female archetypes, from Hindu figures like Radha and Sita, to such Western icons as Medea and Alice.
