Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Alka Joshi, the New York Times best-selling author of 'The Henna Artist', as well as a popular writer of three other novels, did not know anything about the iconic Indian Hungarian painter Amrit Sher-Gil. As a painter and illustrator as well as an art historian, it was a gnawing gap that she decided to fill with her latest work ‘Six Days in Bombay’. Her protagonist in the novel, Mira, is drawn from Amrita Sher-Gil’s extraordinary, albeit short, life as a painter of in the Europe and India of the 1930s.
Born to an Indian Sikh father and a Hungarian mother in 1913 Sher-Gil died at barely 28 in 1941. That short lifespan was enough for Alka to expand as a novel of, as a blurb describes it, “identity and self-discovery that takes readers from Bombay to Prague, Florence, Paris and London, to uncover the mystery behind a famous painter's death.”
Alka Joshi, the New York Times best-selling author of 'The Henna Artist', as well as a popular writer of three other novels, did not know anything about the iconic Indian Hungarian painter Amrit Sher-Gil. As a painter and illustrator as well as an art historian, it was a gnawing gap that she decided to fill with her latest work ‘Six Days in Bombay’. Her protagonist in the novel, Mira, is drawn from Amrita Sher-Gil’s extraordinary, albeit short, life as a painter of in the Europe and India of the 1930s.
Born to an Indian Sikh father and a Hungarian mother in 1913 Sher-Gil died at barely 28 in 1941. That short lifespan was enough for Alka to expand as a novel of, as a blurb describes it, “identity and self-discovery that takes readers from Bombay to Prague, Florence, Paris and London, to uncover the mystery behind a famous painter's death.”
