The Excavation of a Forgotten Painter

Subscribe

Now that we are talking about things old and (not quite) forgotten, I’d like to tell you a story about an Indian painter, and not an ordinary one at that, for he was aspiring to do something new and difficult. More extraordinary was the fact that he was trying to do something beautiful in troubled times.

Maniklal Banerjee was, to begin with, an ordinary village boy at Barisal. He was born in pre-independence India, in 1917, at a swampy but beautifully green place that now falls within Bangladesh. His father, a big man with a sweet humor and knowledge of worldly things almost as large as his moon-shaped belly, allowed his son to go after his heart’s desire: to study art.

 Father of Maniklal Banerjee, Jintendranath Bandyopadhyay, as painted by son.

 So, our young man quickly acquired his degrees from the Govt. Art College, Calcutta, and went on to win the first Indian Govt. Scholarship of art. This was a big deal for a new nation striving to build its own cultural identity in every possible medium, the fine arts being more and more defined by a strange and experimental mix of Indo-European form. What could our young man bring to this new terrain? Why, he had silk on his hands, of course!

 He specialized in water-coloring and took his art to great heights when he colored on silk. This was way before we had silk paints in the market. This apart, his paintings have a typical silky glow which made them resplendent in a mystic sheen even when they were not done on silk. The man became philosophically more and more intent on the mystic. There were numerous little occult signs and symbols that detail his works, Vedic and tantric images, difficult to understand, but unearthly and attractive to behold. His subjects were nothing transcendental though. They were real men and women, village scenes mostly.

 He often did the usual deities of Hindu mythology, Shiv and Parvati, Kali and the like, deities most often worshipped in Bengali households, but they were seen engaging in dance and revelry, like ordinary men and women, in settings very akin to his home and his place. He was a true excavator of history: dug out myth effortlessly from the mundane.

"Shiv-er Vivaha", marriage of Shiva.

Scene from the Mahabharata, advent of the Pandavas to Swarga

There were a large number of monkeys near his house, all of which got transformed into bits of art, now sold scatteredly for nominal amounts of money, or thrown away to fade into earth. The hundreds of birds he drew, likewise, flew away.

  

This man served as an art teacher in the Govt. College of Arts and Crafts from 1939 to 1977, when he retired. Thereafter, he changed his style quite a lot, having a lot of time on his hands and endless ideas in his head. The forms became very modern and colors brighter; the themes more mystic. When asked, what he thinks of M.F Hussain, the now old man smiled and refused to comment on Hussain’s themes and opinions, then softly mumbled, “it is remarkable how powerful that man’s strokes are!” Manik Banerjee went by almost unacknowledged, which makes it difficult for me to provide you peeks into his works as I intended. But I promise to do so, as and when I find copies and prints of his work. Like many Indian painters who gladly dissipate into the very earth which feeds their soul, he left very few traces of his life indeed. This is in spite of having had his works travel far in galleries in India and abroad; probably because he was too immersed in his art to bother about the afterlife of his works.

 This seemingly romantic man happened to be my great-grandfather, very old and barely there when I visited his place for the first and only time. He was known in his household to be a stern and rather uninterpretable old man, mostly cooped up in his own room, by this time. He would stick to his routines, keeping his medicines, his paintbrush and his spit-bowl close by. They said he used to make sketches in the air even in sleep. I was scared, for I did not know at this time, that most sensible old men keep to themselves best of all. When they took me to see him, in his room, they introduced me to him with a perfunctory “We have heard she takes after you, she draws well”, I cockily asked him in my squeaky, childish voice, “Can you draw a cow?” The man very genially drew for me the sketch of a cow, to which I approvingly remarked “Ah, I see you manage to draw pretty well!”