3 ideas
In her letters Sher-Gil wrote that Europe belonged to Picasso and the other European modernists, while India was the field where her own work could become original rather than derivative. She presented this as her personal artistic direction, and she credited her European modernist training with teaching her to see and value Indian art.
She painted Indian village women as silent, gaunt and resigned figures, and she held that their melancholy and patience were more truthful than the picturesque exoticism of colonial or revivalist painting. Treating endurance and stillness as the real content of a scene shifts the picture from ethnographic display to psychological presence.
In her journalism she attacked the Bengal School revivalists for copying the surface mannerisms of old Indian art while missing its structural vitality. Her position was that tradition should be absorbed as principles of form, meaning design, colour and simplification, and not reproduced as nostalgic style. This made her a critic of both academic Westernism and nationalist pastiche.