“You are my Sanjay, the chariot driver and what he was to Dhritarashtra,” wrote Arpita Singh to me in a reference to figures from the Mahabharata. This was after I had WhatsApped her a couple of pictures of an event she could not attend. Ill health in recent years saw her make frequent trips to the hospital and she finally breathed her last at Fortis Hospital the day after Diwali. My last memory of her is at an intimate dinner nearly a month ago. She was seated in a wheelchair, leaning over conspiratorially and chatting with artist Manu Parekh, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.My first interactions with Arpita were as a young correspondent with the art magazine Art India, when I visited her home in Chittaranjan Park in the early nineties. I was writing a story on censorship of the arts and wanted to quiz her about her 1990 painting Devi Pistol Wali. The work had created a furore after it was published on the cover of Desh, a prominent Bengali magazine, depicting Durga in widow’s whites branding a revolver. Arpita was unfazed by the criticism. Artistic freedom was far more important to her.Arpita in her studio. Photo: Author provided.Over the years I kept up contact with her, meeting her at openings, visiting her shows and having discussions with her about her artistic practice. Later when she was not so mobile, we would communicate over WhatsApp. Her chats were2 witty and fun and she would send me pictures of the artworks she was creating, including the ones currently on display at her solo show Unfolding at Talwar Gallery in New York.Arpita’s early workArpita was born in Baranagar in West Bengal. After her father passed away, her mother moved to Kolkata. She was a witness to the struggle for Independence and recalled the large demonstrations led by students against British rule in India. “They were singing nationalist songs and marching, and I learnt at an early age that in India life is constantly spilling over with sound and movement.” Later she went on to study at the Delhi Polytech’s department of Fine Arts and married fellow artist Paramjit Singh.Arpita had a singular, painterly style and what I described as a flower fetish. This was evident in her earliest works. Flowers and Figures was the title of most of Singh’s paintings in her very first solo at Kunika Chemould Art Centre, Delhi, in 1972. I remember seeing two of them in her mini-retrospective, Other Narratives/Other Structures curated by one of her closest friends, Ella Datta, and mounted by the Lalit Kala Akademi in collaboration with the Vadehra Art Gallery at Rabindra Bhawan, Delhi in 2014.Her early works offered a dreamscape with empty chairs, fluid figures and unmoored, suited men with echoes of Rousseau and allusions to Alice in Wonderland. Her figurative style then gave way to her experiments with spare abstraction using pen and black ink. But her romance with minimalist abstraction was, however, short-lived as she launched into what would become her trademark narrative style. This was characterised by densely wrought surfaces with their amalgam of fantasy and reality. Flowers gave way to flags in the ’80s followed by domestic interiors, which were peopled with friends and other familiar faces as evident in Party at Ram Sharma’s House from the early ’90s.Arpita at the opening of her show at Lalit Kala Akademy. Photo: Author provided.But even then, exterior events always managed to insert their way into her scenes of domesticity. Cable TV flooding Indian homes with images of the Gulf War brought gun-toting soldiers marching into Arpita’s canvases. While death and frailties of the flesh were abiding preoccupations, she often countered them with an impish sense of humour, bordering on girlish glee.Text and textiles played an important role in the way Arpita composed her works, which probably explains why her oils can often come across as sensorily overloaded. There is a wealth of detail, as every square inch of space is occupied and filled. Planes and toy cars, flowers, custard apples and creepers occupy niches and crevices around her protagonists. The detailing is probably a throwback to her stint at the Weavers Service Centre, which offered her the opportunity to study the rich textile tradition in the country, not to forget the Kantha embroidery from her native Bengal.The role of womenWhile her use of textiles and ornamentation could be viewed as part of a feminist/feminine practice, Singh has never overtly subscribed to the feminist ideology. She was, however, deeply conscious of the role women played as transmitters of genetic material from one generation to the next and her works do revolve around the recuperation of these memories hardwired in the DNA. She enjoyed a close bond with her daughter Anjum, who passed away tragically in 2020. A school in memory of her is now coming up near Chandigarh.Arpita with Sheila Makhijani at her solo at Vadehra in 2015. Photo: Author provided.Arpita’s female protagonists have an autobiographical ring to them – the woman-child in early works had over the decades slowly given way to the nurturing mother and later to the middle-aged female with sagging flesh. She also drew many of her female protagonists from her own life as was evident in Submergence: In the midst of here and there, her retrospective curated by Roobina Karode at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. They were her friends and neighbours in Munna Apa’s Garden, 1989, and Amina Kidwai with her Dead Husband, 1992, and her own mother in My Mother, 1993. Her men on the other hand were increasingly clad in black jackets, teamed with white trousers or dhotis, and often stencilled clones of each other.Numbers, words and phrases also formed part of her pictorial vocabulary. Describing herself as a voracious reader, she had always been fascinated by the typeset and images in newspapers. In her early years when she could ill afford to buy sketchbooks, glossy catalogues from the foreign stalls at the India International Trade Fair provided the space to exercise her imagination. Print later became an intrinsic part of the warp and weft of her drawings. Explaining her thought processes in the use of text, she told me, “I made a car and after making it black I thought it was a taxi. I had to write something on it to break the monotony, so I wrote, taxi. But I thought that this is not enough. I knew the phrase woman-friendly because it has come up lately, so I wrote, woman-friendly!”At her cremation, artist Madhvi Parekh forlornly remarked to me. “Hamaari jodi tut gayi” (our group has broken up) in reference to the foursome made up of her, Singh, Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani, who had shown together between 1987 and 1989 in an assertion of female solidarity. With Arpita’s passing India has lost a unique and remarkable artistic voice.Meera Menezes is an art writer and critic. Her book, Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde — Sonata of Solitude, was published by Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation in 2016.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.