The Artiste's Artist

"...the figure that, so to speak, 'gave me permission' to imagine her personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of modern art in India - to believe in the possibility of such a woman - was an artist I never met, who died tragically young, and whom I first encountered in a luminous painting by Vivan Sundaram, her nephew. That artist was Amrita Sher-Gil."

- Salman Rushdie on the artist who provided inspiration for the heroine of The Moor's Last Sigh.