Meher Rustom Contractor

Meher Rustom Contractor was born in Bombay in 1918 and studied at Kimmins High School in Panchgani before entering the Sir J. J. School of Art. In 1936, at eighteen, she traveled to London for advanced study in portrait and watercolor painting, but the Second World War interrupted her time abroad. She returned to India, married Rustom Contractor, and settled in Ahmedabad, where she continued practicing painting, illustration, textile work and design.

Contractor's path into puppetry emerged from teaching. At Ahmedabad's Shreyas Foundation experimental school, founder Leena Mangaldas invited her to teach art and later to develop a puppet show with children. The experience revealed how objects and figures could convey ideas with visual sophistication. She turned seriously toward puppetry in the early 1950s and undertook study and observation in Eastern Europe, seeking out practitioners including the Soviet puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov.

Contractor became associated with Mrinalini Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, where she directed its puppetry activity. There she developed productions using glove, rod, string and shadow-puppet techniques. Her work did not treat India's inherited puppet forms as raw material to be discarded; instead, she studied their construction and performance contexts while adapting puppetry for schools, touring stages and contemporary communication.

Her translucent leather shadow puppets carried narratives from the *Ramayana* and Persian epic tradition to audiences across India and internationally—in Japan, France, Sweden, Denmark and Iran. In shadow work, movement was inseparable from material and light: articulated leather figures had to be positioned, rotated and overlapped against the screen so that silhouette, color and gesture remained readable to viewers.

Contractor was also a mentor and organizer. Artists including Dadi Pudumjee and Ratnamala Nori trained with her at Darpana. Pudumjee has described her as the person who introduced him to both traditional Indian puppets and puppetry's creative and educational uses. She helped establish the Indian center of UNIMA, the international puppetry organization, and later served as a UNIMA vice-president. India's national performing-arts academy recognized her with its 1983 award for modern puppetry in Gujarat. She also documented the field: her 1984 book *The Shadow Puppets of India* is catalogued by the Smithsonian Libraries. Contractor died on 26 September 1992, but her pupils, writing, organizational work and the later Meher The Troupe preserved a lineage connecting traditional knowledge, art education and contemporary theatrical experiment.