Born in 1928, Shanu Lahiri trained at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata, before continuing at the École du Louvre and the Académie Julian in Paris. These institutions gave her a grounding in formalism and art history, yet her art resisted elitism. She returned to Kolkata determined to extend art beyond the studio, to paint on walls, marketplaces, and even derelict road rollers, turning the city itself into collaborator and canvas. In her paintings too, this insistence is present: the rickshaw is no passive motif but a frame of transformation. The woman within it is at once carried and resisting, both subject to and author of her own trajectory.
As co-founder of The Group (1983), Lahiri had already challenged the hierarchies of gender and visibility, arguing for form and intellectual rigour rather than the decorative stereotypes imposed on women’s art. This painting extends that defiance into image: the figure is not an icon of arrival but of passage, marked by the crosswinds of history.
It is perhaps in such paradoxes that Lahiri locates freedom—not in the smoothness of movement, but in the refusal to flow entirely with the given direction. The rickshaw here is both transport and theatre, a stage on which the woman claims the city even as the city resists her. To see the hair move against the pull is to glimpse the enduring dialectic of her practice: art as the site where resistance and possibility are always intertwined. In returning to the rickshaw throughout her career, Lahiri made it one of the central tropes of her oeuvre; a vehicle that condensed her concerns with women, urban space, and transformation into a singular, enduring image.