How to Cite

Cattoni, Nadia: Alice Boner (1889-1981) and Pramoda Charan Mittra (1901-1976): A Forgotten Significant Encounter, in Bornet, Philippe and Cattoni, Nadia (Eds.): Significant Others, Significant Encounters: Essays on South Asian History and Literature, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2023, p. 151–168. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1155.c16216

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https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1155
ISBN 978-3-948791-50-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-948791-51-3 (Hardcover)

Published

07/24/2023

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Authors

Nadia Cattoni

Alice Boner (1889-1981) and Pramoda Charan Mittra (1901-1976)

A Forgotten Significant Encounter

This chapter analyses a central encounter in the life of the Swiss artist and scholar Alice Boner (1889–1981) in the form of her forty-year relationship with Promoda Charan Mittra (1901–1976), a Bengali lawyer she met in 1935 in Varanasi. Studying Alice’s diaries, photographs, and drawings, as well as correspondence between the two, it aims to identify the roles Promoda Charan Mittra played in Alice Boner’s personal, intellectual, and artistical life, as well as her understanding and rendering of India through this specific encounter. Questioning Promoda Charan Mittra’s absence in the scholarship on Alice Boner, the chapter also shows Mittra’s agency in this encounter and in its reception.

Keywords Alice Boner, Promoda Charan Mittra, art history, orientalism, India-Switzerland