An untitled painting by Hemen Mazumdar (oil on canvas, 1940), auctioned in 2021, exemplifies his mature style. In this work, a solitary woman bends over a raised platform to dry or tend to her foot, her eyes gently closed in a private moment of introspection . She is draped in a thin, shimmering gold saree which, though not overtly wet in appearance, clings to the contours of her form in “gentle wrinkles” against her skin . The backdrop is a deep, palatial darkness that sets off the subtly highlighted figure – a hallmark of Mazumdar’s chiaroscuro. Even without an explicit water setting, the translucency of the sari and the intimate, unguarded pose create a wet-saree effect: the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the grace of the female body under the fabric, while the scene retains an atmosphere of modest domesticity. This painting, along with similar works like Kaner Dul and Roop (Image), was likely inspired by Mazumdar’s experiences working in royal courts (Patiala, Bikaner, etc.) during the 1930s . Today, Mazumdar’s works are housed in collections such as the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), the Academy of Fine Arts (Kolkata), and various former princely palaces, though many remain in private hands or are traded at auction .

During his lifetime, Mazumdar enjoyed considerable acclaim and patronage. He won three consecutive Bombay Art Society prizes (1919–21), a feat that caused envy among Bombay’s art circles . Maharajas across India – from Kashmir to Patiala – coveted his paintings of beautifully draped women, which they found both erotic and aesthetically refined . The Maharaja of Patiala even retained him as Court Artist for five years in the 1930s, paying a handsome salary for a steady output of portraits and semi-nude studies . Yet, Mazumdar also faced criticism from some quarters. Certain conservative British critics and “middle-class Hindu elite” viewers took offense at his depictions of women “in wet sarees and states of undress,” finding them neither truly classical (by academic European standards of the nude) nor appropriately modest by Indian standards . To his detractors, these paintings verged on the indecent; a 1930s journalist opined that if not for the thin veil of the sari, Mazumdar’s images “would have verged on the pornographic” . Mazumdar was unapologetic – he actively defended naturalism in art and derided the Bengal School’s idealism as “cobwebs”, arguing that art must portray what the eye sees . In his view, the sensual truth of the human form was a legitimate subject, and by using the culturally symbolic saree as a prop, he gave his nudes an Indian identity that pure European nudes lacked.

Light, Texture, and Composition: Stylistic Approaches Compared

The wet saree theme allowed artists to explore light effects, surface textures, and compositional poses in distinctive ways. Lighting is a crucial element: in many wet sari paintings, a single source of light (natural or artificial) plays across moist fabric and skin to create a shimmering effect. Mazumdar often favored a dim, indoor lighting or cloudy daylight, which gave his scenes a moody intimacy and made the few highlights (on the woman’s wet shoulder or the glistening folds of cloth) stand out dramatically. This can be seen by comparing Varma’s and Mazumdar’s handling of light. Raja Ravi Varma tended toward brighter, even lighting – for example, Mohini on a Swing is set in daylight, which softly illuminates the figure and makes the white sari glow gently. In contrast, Mazumdar’s untitled 1940 work (see above) is almost tenebristic: the background is nearly black, and the woman’s golden sari catches a mellow light from above, revealing its texture against shadow. Such use of chiaroscuro was influenced by Western academic art (one might think of Rembrandt or Gérôme for the rich dark backgrounds) and served to heighten the sensual atmosphere by literally spotlighting the feminine form emerging from darkness .

The texture of wet fabric is another area where artists displayed virtuosity. Painting the sheen and cling of damp sarees requires careful observation of how wet cloth adheres to skin and reflects light. Varma’s draperies, while exquisite, were usually dry or only mildly clinging; he depicted fine silks with detailed gold borders and folds, but they maintain a certain sculptural weight. Mazumdar, on the other hand, specialized in the silhouette-revealing cling – his sarees often appear as translucent films molded to the body’s curves, with heavy folds gathered around the waist or lower body. In Palli Pran, the fabric is described as “translucent folds… delicately concealing [the figure’s] bare flesh” ; the woman’s wet sari is almost skin-like in places, except for strategic heavier drapery at the hips. This required blending techniques (glazing and wet-in-wet paint handling) to achieve the illusion of transparency. Mazumdar also paid attention to the tactile contrast between wet cloth and dry cloth or skin – for instance, a frequently used motif is the woman squeezing water out of her saree end or wringing her hair, which allowed the artist to show dripping water and clingy cloth adjacent to smoother dry areas. Other artists of the period, such as M.V. Dhurandhar (who painted women bathing on occasion) and S.L. Haldankar, were likewise interested in sari textures, albeit in different contexts. Haldankar’s famous watercolor Glow of Hope (Woman with the Lamp, 1945) showcases a dampened translucency: the saree isn’t wet from water, but the light of a lamp shining through it makes one hand of the woman glow red beneath the fabric, revealing the fine gauze of the material . This demonstrates how transparency and lighting effects became a broader fascination in academic realist circles beyond just literal wetness.

In terms of gesture and composition, different painters approached the motif to balance sensual display with narrative or emotion. A common compositional strategy in wet sari paintings is the solitary female figure in a moment of stillness—this avoids complex storytelling and focuses attention on form and mood. Raja Ravi Varma’s compositions, being often narrative (from epic stories or dramas), placed women in more dynamic interaction with surroundings or other characters. For example, his Shakuntala pretends to remove a thorn from her foot while actually looking for her lover – a coy pose, but set in a larger tale. Mazumdar stripped away explicit narrative to concentrate on a single figure, typically avoiding eye contact with the viewer. As noted, he favored the back-facing or profile pose: the woman in Palli Pran turns away, absorbed in adjusting her dress; in the 1940 untitled painting, she bends fully over, face in profile and eyes shut. This averted gaze and introspective body language serve two purposes. First, it adheres to decorum – the women are not presenting themselves knowingly to an audience (which could be seen as immodest); instead, the viewer is an unseen spectator of a private scene, reinforcing the voyeuristic gaze . Second, these poses allowed the artists to show the curves of the back, hips, and bust in a graceful continuum, often highlighted by the wet sari clinging to those contours. Mazumdar explicitly celebrated the back view as his “particular rendering” that “excel[led] in the sensuous quality of the back” .

Comparatively, some other academic realist artists explored different gestures. In Pestonji Bomanji’s and M.V. Dhurandhar’s works of the early 1900s (for instance, scenes of women at bathing ghats or on the beach), one finds groups of women in wet clothes, but treated in a more genre painting fashion – the emphasis is on cultural documentation and the charm of the scene rather than a single eroticized figure. Those works often lack the intense focus on one body that we see in Mazumdar’s art. Thus, Mazumdar and a few peers isolated and refined the wet sari motif into a genre of its own, akin to how academic painters in Europe had genres of the odalisque or the bather. By the 1930s, the “woman in wet sari” had become a trope recognizable enough that it even began to appear in early photography and films as a shorthand for erotic allure with innocence. (Indeed, Indian cinema of later decades famously adopted the wet sari trope in song sequences, directly drawing on this artistic heritage .)

Sensuality, Gender, and the Gaze in Academic Realism

The wet saree paintings are deeply intertwined with questions of gender, sensuality, and the gaze. They are products of a male gaze in colonial India – typically male artists painting female subjects for a predominantly male audience (whether aristocratic patrons, art critics, or public exhibition viewers). This is evident in the way the female body is objectified for visual enjoyment, yet carefully packaged within acceptable norms. On one hand, the artworks celebrate Indian womanhood, turning the rural or domestic woman into an aesthetic muse; on the other hand, they reinforce the woman as an object of desire, often passive and unaware. The gaze in these paintings is unilateral: the woman almost never looks back at the viewer. By averting the model’s eyes or showing her from behind, artists like Mazumdar allow the viewer to gaze freely at her body without confrontation. This technique contributes to what has been called a “sense of vulnerability and voyeurism” in the painting – the woman appears vulnerable (being observed unbeknownst to her), and the viewer is placed in the role of a voyeur, indulging in a forbidden glimpse. The voyeuristic aspect was part of the erotic appeal noted by contemporaries; princely patrons, for instance, were drawn to “the intimacy and voyeuristic eroticism” of Mazumdar’s depictions .

At the same time, these works navigated the constraints of modesty and morality in a colonised, tradition-bound society. They did so by constructing a scenario of sanctioned transgression: the woman is depicted in a state of undress (sari wet and revealing) but within a context that connotes purity or normalcy – she is bathing (a daily ritual), or caught in rain (a natural occurrence), or simply at her toilette. Often, she is portrayed as a dutiful figure, “a wife or mother involved in general household chores” like fetching water . By embedding erotic imagery in scenes of domestic duty, artists gave their work a veneer of “respectability that allowed [these] works to occupy a ‘legitimate’ area of middle class taste.” In other words, a nude by itself might be scandalous, but a woman bathing her child or a devoted wife waiting for her husband (even if semi-nude under a wet sari) could be seen as culturally acceptable. This delicate balance was very much a product of its time – a society where Victorian morality (imported by the British) intersected with Indian notions of female modesty. It resulted in a uniquely coded erotic art: titillation under the guise of tradition.

Scholars have noted that these paintings also reflect the idealization of women as both erotic and virtuous within patriarchal norms. The women are often “mature and presumably married,” not adolescent girls – implying that their sexuality is legitimate (within marriage) even as it is put on display. They are usually depicted alone, not in a sexual act but in a moment of thought or routine, which again distances the sexual suggestion from any overt impropriety. This aligns with the broader construction of womanhood in late colonial India, where the figure of the woman bore the burden of tradition and modernity – she was to be the bearer of culture (pure, modest, spiritual) and yet the object of modern desire and aesthetic appreciation. The academic realists’ wet sari motif dramatized this duality: the saree itself is a symbol of Indian femininity and respectability, and by making it wet and transparent, the artists literalized the idea of seeing through that respectability to the sensuality underneath.

The reception of these works further illuminates the dynamics of gaze and gender. Indian princely and urban patrons celebrated them (as noted, many royal collections proudly hung Mazumdar’s semi-nudes), suggesting that the elite male audience was comfortable indulging the gaze in private or in exclusive art circles. However, in more public or critical fora, there was ambivalence. Some Indian critics, influenced by nationalist or Victorian moral views, found such paintings embarrassing or regressive. They worried that these did not align with the “pure ideals” of Indian womanhood being promoted in nationalist rhetoric, or even that they failed to measure up to European standards of high art nude (perhaps being too overtly erotic) . The British art establishment, while training these artists, could also look askance at the frankness of their subject matter. Thus, these paintings existed in a slightly fraught space – celebrated but also subtly policed. It is telling that after Independence and mid-century, the wet sari genre faded from “high art” as modern Indian art moved towards abstraction and new themes. Yet, it found new life in popular culture (films and calendar art), indicating that the motif had struck deep chords in the Indian imagination .

European Influence and the Academic Nude in India

The phenomenon of women in wet sarees in Indian painting cannot be separated from the broader influence of European academic art on Indian artists of the colonial era. European academic nudes – whether the Greco-Roman goddesses and nymphs of Academic Salon painters or the biblical and orientalized nudes in 19th-century art – provided a template for how the female form could be idealized and studied. Raja Ravi Varma’s early exposure to European art came via visiting artists and prints, and he adeptly adapted the “British traditions of naturalism and realism” in oil painting to Indian themes . Varma’s women, though fully draped, often echo poses from Western paintings (for example, his reclining goddesses mirror the posture of Venuses or odalisques in European art). The wet drapery technique itself is a direct heir to Western classical art – the term la drapé mouillé (French for “damp drapery”) was coined to describe how cloth in Greek sculpture (like the Venus Genetrix or figures on the Parthenon frieze) appears to stick to the body as if wet, revealing anatomical details. This concept was taught in academies as part of drawing from drapery casts. Indian artists, learning from such curricula, applied it to the saree, a garment with its own flowing and clinging qualities.

Hemen Mazumdar’s practice demonstrates conscious alignment with European methods. In a 1929 article “The Making of a Picture,” he outlined a process of sketches, detailed studies, and final oil painting, explicitly “aligning with the prevalent academic technique favoured by the British.” He often used photographs as aids to get poses and lighting right, a method also common in European studios . Moreover, Mazumdar was conversant with Western art history; the subtle eroticism in his works shows an understanding of how painters like Ingres, Bouguereau, or Alma-Tadema balanced nudity and narrative. One might compare Mazumdar’s bathing women to, say, the bather paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme or William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s nymphs, where water and translucent drapery play teasing roles. Indeed, a scholar notes that Mazumdar’s wet sari look fed the same kind of “fantasies of countless viewers” that European academic nudes did, representing a direct adaptation of the nude genre to Indian subject matter . The difference, of course, is the cultural costume – by keeping the saree, Indian artists localized the European nude, making it palatable to Indian eyes. In doing so, they also invoked classical Indian precedents: one could argue that the wet sari harked back to descriptions in Indian literature and poetry (the Gita Govinda or Kalidasa’s verses) where a woman’s drenched clothes are poetically described, or even to ancient Indian sculpture where sensuous drapery is sometimes depicted on yakshi figures. Thus the Indian academic painters stood at an intersection of two art traditions, merging them in their canvases.

European academic art also influenced the portrayal of drapery and the play of light and color. Oil paint itself was a European medium that allowed rich rendition of textures like wet cloth, something not achievable in traditional Indian tempera. The depth of color and the varnished finish of academic oils gave these paintings a life-like presence. Varma received praise for making mythological figures appear “real”; similarly, Mazumdar’s viewers admired how tangible the wet saris appeared – a direct result of oil technique. It is noteworthy that these works often succeeded in cosmopolitan settings: Varma’s paintings were shown at world fairs, and Mazumdar sent works to exhibitions outside Bengal due to prejudice at home . They thus participated in the global academic art movement of their time. However, by the 1930s and 40s, Modernist trends were questioning academic art both in Europe and India. The wet sari paintings, being unabashedly academic and representational, were seen by the next generation as dated or kitsch, and many languished out of the limelight until recent rediscoveries at auctions and exhibitions. Today, scholars reassess them as important cultural documents – they reveal how Indian artists negotiated colonial influence to articulate their own vision of beauty and desire.

Between 1880’s and 1940’s, Indian academic realist painters created a compelling visual discourse around the sensuous yet respectable Indian woman, epitomized by the motif of the wet saree. Through the canvases of Raja Ravi Varma, Hemen Mazumdar, and their contemporaries, we witness an evolving interplay of art and society: European artistic techniques employed to capture Indian subjects; the female body rendered with anatomical realism yet veiled in indigenous decorum; and the male gaze manifesting in a colonized culture grappling with modernity and tradition. The wet saree served as an aesthetic device – showcasing the painter’s skill in rendering light, water, and texture – and as a cultural device, encoding eroticism in a form acceptable to Indian sensibilities and colonial morality. In these paintings, light and shadow caress damp silk, revealing the contours of a “graceful curve” or the glow of a lamplight through fabric , inviting the viewer into an intimate moment frozen in time. Yet the women remain enveloped in their own world, symbols of an ideal femininity that is both sensual and demure.

Scholarly interpretations of this genre underscore its nuanced position: some view it as an expression of the male fantasy and patriarchal gaze, while others note how it indigenised the nude and perhaps subtly empowered the image of the Indian woman by making her the central subject of art. The influence of European academic art is undeniable – from the la drape mouillée technique to the academic studio process – but the end result was something uniquely Indian, as evidenced by the lasting iconic status of these images. Indeed, the wet sari motif transcended painting to become a trope in Indian popular culture (notoriously in Bollywood rain songs of later decades), attesting to its deep resonance.

The artworks discussed – Varma’s swinging Mohini in her ethereal white sari, Mazumdar’s bathing beauties like Palli Pran and Smriti, and others – now reside in museums (such as the Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery in Mysore for Haldankar’s Glow of Hope , or the NGMA Delhi for several Mazumdar works) and private collections worldwide. They continue to be studied and exhibited as important artifacts of India’s colonial art history, where realism met romance. Through critical examination of their content and context, we gain insight into how art negotiated the portrayal of gender and sensuality under colonial rule – crafting an image of the Indian woman that was at once modern (painted in oil with Western realism) and deeply rooted in India’s cultural fabric (the sari, the modest pose, the ethos of “nari bhava” or womanly grace). The theme of women in wet sarees thus stands as a testament to the creativity and complexity of academic artists in India, who turned a simple motif of daily life – a drenched sari – into a lasting artistic legacy blending artistic virtuosity, cultural symbolism, and sensual allure.

Sources:

1. Partha Mitter, “The Bengali artist who popularised the ‘wet sari effect’ and invented a new genre of figure painting,” Scroll.in (Feb 2019) .
2. Christie’s Auction Catalogue, Lot Essay for Hemendranath Mazumdar, “Untitled” (circa 1930s) .
3. Christie’s Auction Catalogue, Lot Essay for Hemen Mazumdar, “Woman with Pitcher” (1930s) .
4. Paintphotographs Art Magazine, “Hemendranath Majumdar and his Wet Sari Paintings” .
5. Ganesh Shivaswamy, Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) talk on “The Unique Feminine Aesthetic of Popular Art” .
6. Sneha Bhura, The Week, “Rare work by master painter of the ‘wet sari’ up for auction” (Mar 2021) .
7. MAP Academy Encyclopedia, “Hemendranath Mazumdar” .
8. Wikipedia, “Glow of Hope (Woman with the Lamp)” .
9. Wikimedia Commons (public domain image of Mohini on a Swing, Raja Ravi Varma, 1894) .