The art of Siona Benjamin closes out one of the most significant anthologies on Indian Jewish life published in recent years, Growing Up Jewish in India: Synagogues, Customs, and Communities from the Bene Israel to the Art of Siona Benjamin, edited by scholar and curator Ori Z. Soltes and published by Niyogi Books in 2021. Where an overview of the book’s historical scope and a critical look at its reception both deserve their own treatment, Benjamin’s contribution deserves a closer look on its own terms, since it turns a scholarly anthology into something closer to a family memoir told in paint.
A Book Built in Six Chapters
Soltes structured the anthology around six chapters plus an epilogue, preceded by a foreword from Ralphy Jhirad and a lengthy introduction situating Indian Jews within the broader Jewish diaspora. Individual chapters cover the Kerala synagogues, contributed by Orna Eliyahu-Oron and Barbara C. Johnson, and the Calcutta Baghdadi synagogues, written by Jael Silliman, who traces the community’s decline from roughly 4,500 members in the mid-20th century to a small handful today. Soltes himself contributes a chapter titled “Refocus and Return,” examining Benjamin’s layered visual work, and writes the book’s epilogue on the community’s past. The final major piece of the book, however, belongs to Benjamin herself: a memoir titled “How I Turned Blue and Other Stories I Remember Growing Up Jewish in India.”
From Bombay to a Blue Palette
Siona Benjamin was born in Bombay in 1960 into a Bene Israel Jewish family and now lives and works near New York City. She trained with two separate Master of Fine Arts degrees, one in painting and a second in theater set design, and has exhibited across the United States, Canada, Europe, India, and Asia. Her most recognized body of work, the ongoing “Finding Home” series begun in the late 1990s, paints many of its central figures, most of them women, with blue skin, a deliberate echo of the Hindu god Krishna transposed onto female biblical and mythological figures. The effect, as Soltes himself has written elsewhere about her work, is to unsettle a viewer’s assumptions about gender and to fuse Indian miniature painting traditions with Jewish and Christian visual language.
A subset of that series, subtitled “Fereshteh,” the Urdu word for angel, reimagines biblical women as its central cast: Miriam appears three times, once fleeing with a suitcase in Indian dress, once ill and surrounded by demons, and once as a Persian angel caught in a spider’s web. Lilith, traditionally cast as a destroyer, appears in pop-art style as what Benjamin has described as the Bible’s first feminist, wrapped in flame and wearing an amulet normally used to ward her off. Rachel, Leah, and Esther populate the same visual world, and a later 2014 series imagines Rachel, Sarah, Leah, and Rebecca, rather than the four legendary sages of Jewish tradition, entering paradise.
A Family Scattered Across Continents
Benjamin’s memoir chapter grounds all of this in a single family history. She writes about her grandmother Elizabeth, who was born in Quetta, in present-day Pakistan, before the family resettled on India’s west coast. Elizabeth’s own children went on to scatter still further, to Israel, North America, and Africa, leaving parents in India, most siblings in Israel, and smaller branches of the family in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere on the African continent. Benjamin recalls being mistaken in India for nearly every regional and religious identity except her own, and later, after settling in the United States, being asked the same rootless question in a different register. That double displacement, she has written, is precisely what pushed her toward painting as a way of asking what and where home really is.
Soltes, in his companion chapter, argues that this is exactly why the book closes with Benjamin rather than with straight historical narrative: her paintings and her memoir together carry the story of Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jewish life forward into the present and into the diaspora beyond India, rather than leaving it as a closed historical subject.
Two Fulbright Journeys
Benjamin’s engagement with Indian Jewish identity has been formalized twice over through Fulbright fellowships. The first, awarded for 2010 to 2011, funded a project titled “Faces: Weaving Indian Jewish Narratives,” which involved research conducted in India and culminated in an October 2013 exhibition at the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai. A second Fulbright, awarded in 2016, sent her to Israel for a project called “Motherland to Fatherland: Indian Transcultural Jews,” extending the same inquiry into the country where so much of her extended family had resettled. Her work and process have also been the subject of a documentary film, Blue Like Me, directed by Hal Rifken, and her paintings have been discussed in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, ARTnews, and Moment magazine, among other outlets. In 2024, her art was featured again in a children’s book, The Blue Butterfly of Cochin, produced in partnership with the Indian Jewish Heritage Center.
Tikkun Olam as an Artistic Practice
Benjamin has described her work as an expression of tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, treating each painting less as a finished statement than as an ongoing act of mending, whether the subject is her own scattered family or the wider, largely unrecorded history of Jewish communities across India. That framing helps explain why Soltes chose to end a book about synagogues, migration routes, and community customs with a living artist’s account of her own blue-skinned angels Benjamin has pointed to the idea, associated with the twentieth-century rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, that Jewish identity is measured less by ritual observance than by an inability to remain unmoved by wrong done to other people. She has treated that principle as a working method rather than a slogan, using her own family’s dispersal across India, Israel, North America, and Africa as raw material for paintings that ask viewers to sit with displacement rather than resolve it neatly.
A Visual Language Built from Three Traditions
Stylistically, Benjamin’s paintings draw on Indian and Persian miniature traditions, the gold-ground compositions of Christian and Jewish illuminated manuscripts, and the flat color and speech-bubble conventions of pop art and comics. She has extended some of these characters beyond the canvas entirely, collaborating with animators and dance performers to bring individual figures from the “Finding Home” series to life in motion, a choice that underlines how much her work resists sitting still inside a single medium or a single cultural tradition. The effect on the page is intentionally layered rather than resolved: a viewer is meant to notice the collision of traditions rather than a smooth blend of them.
Recognition Beyond the Book
Benjamin’s original paintings are represented commercially by ACA Galleries in New York, and her work has been reviewed and discussed well beyond the anthology itself. In a 2010 interview with the Financial Times, she summed up her own sense of dual belonging with the phrase “I belong everywhere and nowhere,” a line that could stand as a one-sentence description of the entire anthology’s subject. That same restlessness, the sense of holding two or three homes at once without fully resting in any of them, is what Soltes points to when he describes her work as the natural closing note for a book that otherwise moves chapter by chapter through fixed geographic communities: Kerala, Calcutta, and the Bene Israel heartland around Bombay. Benjamin’s chapter, by contrast, moves through continents in the span of a single family history.
Why This Angle Matters
Reviewers of the anthology, including Indrani Dutta writing in The Hindu, have singled out Benjamin’s memoir and Soltes’ companion chapter as the point where the book’s scholarship becomes personal, carrying the historical material on the Bene Israel, Cochin Jews, and Baghdadi communities forward into a living, ongoing diaspora story rather than treating it as settled history. For readers of this site who want the book’s broader historical sweep or a critical assessment of its reception, those angles are covered elsewhere; this piece exists because Benjamin’s own chapter, and the art it describes, is substantial enough to deserve its own space.
That layering also connects Benjamin’s chapter back to the anthology’s more conventional historical material. The chapters on Kerala’s synagogues and on the three Baghdadi synagogues of Calcutta are largely chapters about buildings, liturgical objects, and demographic decline, cataloguing communities that have shrunk to a fraction of their historical size. Benjamin’s memoir and Soltes’ companion essay on her art function almost as a counterweight, insisting that the story of Indian Jewish life is not only a record of vanishing synagogues but also something still being actively created, reinterpreted, and carried forward by artists, and that a scholarly book on the subject is incomplete without giving that living continuation its own chapter rather than a footnote.
Further Reading
- Indrani Dutta, “‘Growing Up Jewish in India’ review: Here, there, and everywhere,” The Hindu, January 22, 2022
- Siona Benjamin, Wikipedia
- The Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai and Kolkata