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She portrayed rural men and women in the harsh realities of their everyday lives, but her subjects always maintained the dignity of their position in the world as people.One of India’s most respected pioneers in modern art, Sher-Gil’s story has the makings of a classic French film — filled with passion, fine art, sex, a pinch of over-intellectualisation, and a tragically young death.Witnessing the exploitation of her fellow Indians at the hands of the British Empire during colonial rule made Sher-Gil particularly empathetic towards her Indian subjects. At the age of 16, Sher-Gil travelled to Paris to study painting under artists Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon at Grande Chaumiere and later as a formal student of École des Beaux-Arts.’For Sher-Gil, who moved back to India at the end of the same year because she felt “haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter,” this was the beginning of a certain reclamation of what it meant for her to be Indian. Sher-Gil used the female form in her paintings to make significant statements about herself and the choices she was making not only as an artist, but also as a woman. In 1931 she was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, the son of Raja Nawab Ali, a prosperous landowner in Uttar Pradesh.