Sher-Gil painted Three Girls immediately after arriving back in India in 1934, having spent five years training in Paris. It marks a deliberate change of direction: rather than continuing with the self-portraits, society nudes and still lifes of her student years, she turned her whole practice toward Indian subjects, and toward the poor and marginal in particular ^[1]. The painting compresses three seated women into a tight, cropped composition, with a plain background and strong shadow, so that nothing distracts from the women themselves ^[1]. It was a statement of intent as much as a picture.

Sher-Gil wrote about the change in direction this painting represents in unusually direct terms: 'I realized my real artistic mission, to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians pictorially; to paint those silent images of infinite submission and patience ... to reproduce on canvas the impression those sad eyes created on me' ^[1]. Three Girls is the first fully realised expression of that mission. The three women are shown not as individuals with named identities but as figures absorbing a shared fate, sad but resigned, on the edge of marriages they have no power to refuse ^[1].

The picture is a hinge between two styles. Sher-Gil paints with the bold, flattened colour and confident brushwork she developed in Paris, close to the example of Paul Gauguin, whose work she had studied closely there ^[1]. But she applies that technique to a subject Gauguin never painted: contemporary Indian women, observed at home rather than idealised. The blend of her earlier realism with a new emphasis on flat colour and line is what critics point to when they date the beginning of her mature style to this exact painting ^[1].