Born in 1936 in Srinagar, Kashmir, Ratan Parimoo is one of India’s leading art historians as well as an accomplished painter and teacher. Beyond his post at M.S. University, Baroda, as a professor of Art History and Aesthetics and the dean of the department for twenty five years, Parimoo has been shaping modern art discourse in the country since he was a young man. In 1956, he cofounded the Baroda Group of Artists with peers including G.R. Santosh, K.G. Subramanyan, Shanti Dave, N.S. Bendre, and Jyoti Bhatt, to expand on the postcolonial aesthetics piloted in Santiniketan the previous decade and evolve the meaning of contemporary art in India by integrating living traditions with modern techniques.

Painted in the Group’s founding year, the present lot captures the enthusiasm and ingenuity at the onset of their explorations. Kashmiri Women is a celebration of the region of the artist’s birth, showcasing three women in traditional dress and ornamentation pounding and sifting dry spices. The women’s almond-shaped eyes and rounded figures draw from the Kalighat style, as do the confident lines Parimoo has used to delineate them. Suffused with tenderness and a sense of nostalgia, this work perhaps reveals the artist’s memories of a homeland that has always been contested.