Child Wife is an oil on canvas painting depicting a young Indian girl sitting alone dressed in her bridal outfit.

[3] She completed Child Wife in 1936, the year after painting Mother India.

[4] From her home in Simla, in a letter to her friend Denise Prouteaux dated July 1937, Sher-Gil told her that the painting is "too influenced by Gauguin.

[5] Art historian Sonal Khullar interprets the Child Wife and Mother India as neither depicting rosy images of women, but they have a connection with Indian nationalist aspirations for reform in India.

[4] She says that Sher-Gil's paintings of 1935 to 1936 "refuse to represent India as voluptuous, colorful, sunny and superficial"... "their dark, detached, and distant subjects critique nationalism's idealization of the masses".