Badwelgar Prabha, better known as B Prabha, is one of India’s modern art maestros. Born in 1933 at a village in Nagpur, she came to Mumbai in the 1950s to study painting on a scholarship at the JJ School of Art.
Image source: DAGWorld.com
She named Indian-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil as her inspiration, and you can see the similarity in their choice of subjects: graceful, introspective, feminine. Rural Indian women—and the lands they inhabited—remained at the centre of B Prabha’s practice.
Bride's Toilet, 1937, oil on canvas, Amrita Sher-Gil, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Gossip, 1970, oil on canvas, B Prabha. Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
In her portraits of women, B Prabha draws our attention not just to how the subject appears to the world, ie how she drapes her sari or what kind of jewellery she wears, but also makes us consider what her inner life and private struggles might be. The artist once said, "It is my aim to paint the trauma and tragedy of women".
Image: Untitled, 2001, oil on canvas, B Prabha © Sarmaya Arts Foundation
Legend has it that in the 1950s, B Prabha was the first artist to sell paintings to the national carrier, Air India. This sale marked the birth of one of the most prolific corporate collections of Indian art. In 2023, the Air India art collection was opened to the public through the exhibition, Maharaja’s Treasure, housed at the NGMA.
B. Prabha, 1979, Sunrise, Oil on Canvas, 87 cm x 163 cm, Air India Collection – NGMA
Air India used B Prabha’s paintings of Indian women on their in-flight and branded stationery. They acquired six paintings for 84 rupees and 8 annas each.
Image source: AirIndiaCollector.com
B Prabha has spoken in interviews about her early days of struggle in Mumbai. She arrived in the city with 2 rupees to her name. But posterity has been kinder. In 2023, her 1986 oil-on-canvas sold for ₹1.24cr at an auction.
Image source: Astaguru.com
Among the earliest patrons of B Prabha’s art was Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the nuclear physicist who is regarded as a pioneer of India’s nuclear program.
Image: Homi Jehangir Bhabha, 1960s. Source: Unknown (Mondadori Publishers), Public domain, via Wikimedia Common
This landscape by B Prabha, part of the Sarmaya collection, was acquired from the personal collection of Homi J Bhabha.It is an oil on canvas from 1959, when the artist was on her way to making a name for herself.
It is rendered in an abstract style, suffused with warm earth tones and texturally rich.
The paintings of B Prabha, who passed away in 2001, capture the hopes and anguish of a woman making art in a newly independent India. Even as her career unfolded in the metropolitan corridors of modern art, her inner gaze remained on the common people and forgotten places far outside this rarefied world.
1. Melancholy beauty, pensive grace, Giridhar Khasnis, 1 Oct 2023, Deccan Herald 2. The Forgotten Women Artists of Indian Art History, Aliya Khan, 30 Apr 2023, TheTalentedIndian.com 3. AstaGuru’s ‘Modern Treasures’ auction breaks world records for six Indian artists, Shannon Tellis, 6 Sep 2023, EconomicTimes.IndiaTimes.com 4. The birth of India’s greatest art collection, 23 Jul 2017, AirIndiaCollector.com
Image: Untitled (Landscape), 1959, B. Prabha, Oil on Canvas, © Sarmaya Arts Foundation.