Sutapa Biswas' father was a famous character in her family, a Marxist agronomist who fought the West Bengal government over environmental violations and smoked joints in a moonlight Taj Mahal (he broke in). The artist's latest docufiction film Lumen, about a lady who traveled alone with her five children to England to start a new life, is inspired on her mother's story.

"She was in a lot of pain," Biswas adds. "The United Kingdom in the 1960s was racist. She had a strong desire to climb trees or swim in her sari."

Lumen alternates between nostalgic sensory recollections of her long-gone home – its distinctive greens, the smell of frangipani – and an indictment of imperialism's horrors, from India's hidden history of slavery to the carnage that followed division. She explains, "I wanted viewers to work hard and feel uncomfortable."

Biswas has never been afraid to make her audience uncomfortable, as shown by the traveling exhibition of the same name, which documents a four-decade career devoted to women's "unheard, untold narratives." Housewives With Steak Knives, a massive representation of a tooled-up Kali, the Hindu goddess, clutching a dictator's severed head and throwing preconceptions of demure Asian homebodies out the window, dates from 1985.

"The room that would have been occupied by a servant," Biswas remembers from her time as a student in Leeds, when she was given a small attic in a Victorian home to display her work: "The room that would have been occupied by a servant."

I was planning to construct something that would not fit."

At university, she was taught by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who encouraged her to question western-centric views. "When I arrived, I told him, 'You have to alter the path.'

"I was lucky because she listened," Biswas recalls, but that didn't stop her from suffocating Pollock with a bag and tying her to a chair for her video Kali, in which Biswas portrays both the eponymous avenging goddess and a capitalist monster, Raban.

Lubaina Himid, the 2017 Turner Prize winner, chose Housewives With Steak Knives for her landmark 1985 exhibition of Black women artists, The Thin Black Line, at the ICA in London, just after graduating. Biswas, on the other hand, discovered that attention to her work was accompanied with an unsettling emphasis on her looks.

“I felt it was really important to deal with questions of the body, sexuality, and desire,” she says of Synapse II, a large picture in which sensual Indian art is projected on to her own naked body.

Taking the leap into her mother's mind has been "nerve-racking," she admits. Her travels, from partition to leaving India, instilled in her a dread of the unknown. Allowing us to be wild as youngsters was difficult.”

Biswas and her siblings, on the other hand, seemed to be unfamiliar terrain when it came to such fears. "They left with nothing," she recalls, "but we had no idea we were poor."

“We just had so much attitude – I don't think I've ever been so riled up!”

Sutapa Biswas’s work – in her own words

Housewives With Steak Knives, 1985

“The background is a homage to Rauschenberg’s white paintings, my metaphor for the white institutional spaces of the university and the gallery system. I allowed a slightly tempered surface, paper painted with house paint to crinkle. Out of the shadows grew Kali.”

Lumen, 2021 (pictured, top)

“In telling my mother’s story, I was trying to understand the taste of what is left in the lives of people who are disenfranchised because of imperial histories. For my mum, to leave the landscape that was home, where everything feels and is experienced differently, was a trauma.”

Mata Ne, 2015

“Drawing on children’s fables designed to control the behaviour of those born female, some of Mata Ne’s visual imagery becomes a metaphor for the simmering desires of women whose own dreams are curtailed by the repressive patriarchal, sexist culture that exists in Japan, as elsewhere across the globe.”

Synapse II, 1987-91

“In these large photographic pieces, the bodies look back at you in a funny sort of way. They have a way of stripping you somehow, of making you very uncomfortable. It makes the viewer confront, to an extent, their own fantasy.”

Thanks to Skye Sherwin at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.