Signature and dated lower right 1935.

Provenance: Virginia Giacometti Collection, Italy.

Publication: Plamena Dimitrova Racheva, Boris Georgiev of Varna, Ed. Kibea, pp. 70-71 e 130.

When he planned and created this work in the 1930s, Boris Georgiev had reached an important moment in his career, marking the second stage of his artistic develompent. By that time his art had been appreciated by both the critics and the public in Europe. Before embarking upon his trip to India, strongly influenced by his master Nicholas Roerich and by Kipling, he learned Sanskrit and Hindi. For five years he traveled all over India, meeting with members of the lowest caste - the pariahs- as well as with the privileged untouchables- the Brahmans and the Maharajas.
With this allegorical work, Georgiev has expressed his compassion for the poorest caste in Indian society, relegated for millennia to a miserable life of extreme poverty and injustice. In "Meeting with Pariahs in India", also known as "The sorrow of India", the artist depicts himself among them, led by the spirit of his late sister Katya. In preparation for this composition, the artist had drawn a series of portraits of poor people, as well as self-portraits showing himself as a wanderer with a sack on his back, followed by Katya's spirit. In some sketches she is like a fairy-tale creature from an imaginary world, wearing a cloak and a wreath of daisies. In her image, idealization is brought to perfection: she is like an angel, her hands brought together in prayer, recalling Beatrice in Dante Alighieri's The Inferno.
The landscape is monumental. Light falls through the heavy clouds on dozens of pariahs who pray and support each other, and also direct the viewer's attention to the foreground.
In the distance, the imposing buildings of Kapurtala can be seen. The procession of suffering pariahs is filing towards us as if from infinity, ending in the foreground with the allegorical figure of "Mother India", kneeling and weeping. The light of the sunset behind the clouds pierces the darkness, creating a special mystical atmosphere of sorrow and resignation similar to a biblical scene.
The artist wrote in his note that the work was created during his visits to Maganwadi Ashram in Wardha, where thousands of miserable pariahs came to seek solace. There Georgiev showed this painting to Gandhi for the first time, and Gandhi gave it a name in Sanskrit: Daridra narajanako namaskar. Georgiev wrote that it was difficult to translate but that it did correspond to the content of the painting: "we bow to divine poverty and sorrow (which will raise us to God)".
Dozens of sketches for this work show the artist's complex process in taking his monumental plan from sketches of separate faces to a completed composition. It has been preserved in two versions. The first one, preserved in Boris Georgiev's archive and lacking the temple, is a drawing measuring 59x79 cm executed in his well-known colour pencils technique.
The second version is the better-known "Meeting with Pariahs in India", in the collection of the National Art Gallery in Sofia and measuring 67x85 cm. In both this painting and "The Wanderer and His Sister", an event is transformed into a poem of human compassion. As critics have observed, the artist placed the highest value on the work's moral message.