India’s first woman abstract artist, a modernist, remained in the shadows

Lines, subtle, winding tremors/Orange shapes/ Crystal sparks/An illuminated dark expanse/Notes on water/Charcoals/Limitless greys into purples/Weedlike patterns/Changing/Dark sounds
Long before the age of Insta-poetry, in 1967, this verse formed the diary entry of a reclusive, cotton-sari-clad modernist painter who liked to fill her canvases with stark lines, measured circles and other geometric shapes that her father would laugh about but the world would celebrate as minimalist masterstrokes over a decade after her demise.
Nasreen Mohamedi--India's first woman abstract artist--has been seeing a posthumous resurgence as a significant modernist in various global retrospectives since the early 2000s but, during her ascetic lifetime that was cut short by a degenerative disease in 1990, her understated, charcoal-grey canvases, photographs and graphics remained largely eclipsed by flamboyant, rainbow-coloured brushstrokes.
At a time when the vibrant canvases of MF Husain and VS Gaitonde filled auction houses, the reticent Mohamedi would sit, surrounded by architectural instruments, on the floor of her apartmentcum-studio in Baroda and sketch to the classical soundtrack of legendary singer BhimSen Joshi. The results were soulful yet stringent monochromes that would make art critics compare Mohamedi to American expressionist painter, Agnes Martin. Born in Karachi in the undivided India of 1937, Mohamedi spent her childhood in Bombay from 1944 when tensions preceding Partition had led her well-heeled family to move to the island city. As a student of the extinguished Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute--whose one-storey bungalow at Breach Candy was a melting pot of progressive artists ranging from thespian Ebrahim Alkazi to sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar-- Mohamedi encountered artists such as Jeram Patel, known for using blow torches on woodwork as his medium.
As she flitted in the 1950s between Bombay and Bahrain where her father owned a photographic equipment shop, her artworks straddled monsoon clouds and deserts. Mohamedi--who travelled extensively to Iran, Turkey and the Persian Gulf before settling on Paul Klee--ditched her paintbrush for pencil and graphite and set off to train at London's prestigious St Martin's School of Art.
"I sent you to St Martin's in England and all you are doing is this?" her father would often chide her for preoccupation with lines till one day, she drew and handed him a silent rejoinder: a line sketch of him and her brother-in-law playing chess at their bungalow in Kihim, near Alibaug, that put an end to the mock taunts with its minimalist brilliance.
Sea, trees, weeds, twigs, sails, an island lost in sea-green splendour--her first show in Bombay in 1961, assembled by noted art sponsor Bal Chhabda, contained a dozen canvases that introduced the London-honed promise of the artist who tended to flee human figures in her art, photographs and saris. Her second exhibition in Bombay, following her return from Paris where she studied lithography, displayed graphics and the third, collages and abstracts that had a photograph-like quality thanks to the sparing use of colour.
Four years after she left for Delhi in 1968, Mohamedi was appointed the faculty of MS University in Baroda where she held exhibitions in her living room for students who remember her not only for her meticulous preference for simple wood and steel frames but also her performance of mundane household chores with monastic devotion. When the lines in her artworks grew even more scarce in the 1970s, art critic Geeta Kapur wrote in TOI: "Nasreen, the lyricist, has rigorously whittled down expression the way a hermit whittles down his visible self to a mere sign."
Drafting equipment became Mohamedi's means of expression during the last decade of her life when a degenerative disease began to affect her movements and speech. She died at age 53 at Kihim. Ten years after her demise, one of her artworks was sold off for a song at an auction without the consent of her family. This pen-and-ink sketch was displayed in an ornate gold frame that would have mortified her.