Excavation of a Forgotten Painter: The Moments of his Art

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In the earlier post I had tried to dig up the silken glow of Maniklal Banerjee, an eminent painter aligned to the Bengal School of Art, not so well remembered, who also happens to be my great grandfather. Like the familiar yet elusive beauty of his native village Sonaranga, he has remained less than fully tangible. He has remained somewhere amidst the luminous haze of family reminisces and the "ghost paintings"-as I call them- mere photographs retained of his best work on silk. I have received them archived on a CD disk, that came to me as a family heirloom. 

Sonaranga of his younger days, drawn from memory and impressions.

I have decided to call him, at times, by the name of Manik Babu, even though the man is both, a great painter and my great-grandfather instead of the more endearing “Boro-Dadu”. I have accused him at times in my mind, for remaining like a myth in our household. It was as if everybody knew half-truths about him, yet he did leave pieces of his soul here and there- definite, full-bodied clues of his being displaced in time that would possess my attention for hours. I was not grown up enough to talk about art with him beyond a sketch or two of cow or crow that he was kind enough to draw for me. In his life, he gave a large family his name and his legacy, but he remained cooped up in his studio, growing old and wrinkled quite alone, while the world around him busied itself in frivolity. Therefore, there are only two ways I can see him again: through his art, of course, and through accounts of a few understanding friends, written or spoken about the man. When they talked of his art they called him Manik Babu, as common a name as any, as homely and as quaint.

Fortunately though, I have Manik Babu’s son, my own grandfather, to unearth for me the stories of the artist’s earlier days. And apart from the "ghost paintings", there are also a couple of sketches here at home which I can allude to- tiny, casually drawn on postcards, fragments of years of struggle, impressions of his wife and his mother, of the common folk who came to work, of ‘models’ who would take away a paisa or two to feed their kids after posing for hours at a stretch. These sketches are the only tangible objects available to me, as all the bigger, coloured paintings and the grander, more approved sketches are sold or displayed at places far beyond my reach.

From my grandfather, his son (blessed with a good memory for all things worth remembering), I would receive the stories attached to the moment of their composition. With these, I would know how similar are the ways in which his mother sat down to chop vegetables and fish on the bothi, and the way he sat down himself, to practice his sketches sitting on the floor. There are detailed sceneries of Sonaranga, clearly the place closest to his heart.

Mother, in her most characteristic pose. His wife, with her much emphasized chin.

Women engaged in their daily chores was a common theme.

 

 
He commonly painted models from the lower classes, they posed more readily.

    I hear how he had moved here to study and rented a small flat in Calcutta before calling the rest of his family to join him as the intentions of the newly independent government became clear. Just before the partition, my grandfather, who was a child then, recalls coming to this city, to his father’s new residence, with only a few necessary things and some bundled up money hidden in the crevices between his foot and the sole of his shoe. Manik Babu was married and had children by then, yet he was a struggling artist with very little to sustain his growing family. His children, including my grandfather grew up closer to his grandparents rather than his parents. He was more Manik Babu, the artist than anything else. His wife was a simple woman who could not comprehend why scantily clad females would sit in his rooms posing awkwardly and kept mostly to herself seeking respite from heartache in her household chores or the gods. Little by little his fortune grew enough to comfortably educate and marry off his sons, but never enough to abandon oneself to luxury. He was well liked at the Govt. College of Art as a student and later, teacher of “Indian Art”, even though Manik Babu regretted the division of the department into separate departments of “Indian” and “Fine Arts”. He sadly remarks in a book of essays he authored, that it was extremely disturbing to see that Indian art was not considered of the same stature as Western Art.

Emphatically fond of the Bengal School of art, he reveres Abanindranath Tagore, "Aban Babu", and reflects repeatedly about the immense impact of his school on modern Indian art. Manik Babu was one of the earliest to recognize, in his college days, that modernity and Indian-ness in art do not necessarily bear conflict with each other. His style however, distances itself more and more from the well-rounded empirical realism of European art, he leans more passionately towards Vedic and Tantric themes, themes that cannot be perceived directly by the 5 senses but must include the manas (intellect) and chetana (consciousness). He emphasizes bhava (overall emotion, affect or mood) over everything else including form and verisimilitude. The three-dimensional art in oil, he wished to incorporate freely from the European masters but only so far as it remains true to the overall impact it creates in the mind of the perceiver.

 

  

In his book of essays and reminiscences called Aakaar Niraakaar Bikaar (The Form, the Formless and the Transformation) he expresses his views on Indian and Western aesthetics deeply. Some of his discussions on the nature of beauty, of the technique and ethics of art have given an entirely new direction to the way I perceive form and material. The book is long out of print and the few close friends and relatives who had read it in his lifetime, are long gone- what remains however, is the relevance they bear to the understanding of Indian art. I would not indulge into a discussion of his opinions expressed in the book at present, as that must be kept for later, but I must repeat from the last section of the book, a short discussion on the author Maniklal Banerjee, a delightful appreciation from a musician friend, “At places we may feel, it is the work of an adept writer who speculates about becoming an artist.” For one such as him, who received the highest honorary award in art (the Abanindra Puraskar for contribution to art in 1999), this appraisal is not a belittlement of his painting but an appraisal of his literary skill.

A short essay by Manik Babu about Janaka Raja and his enthusiasm to know the true nature of art happens to be my favorite:

One day, Janaka Raja decided to ask, to the one who knows the supreme truth of art, the most fundamental questions regarding the same. The questions would be framed by the greatest artists and exponents in the field, to whom, the one who professes his knowledge must answer. Acharya Neelkantha came forward as the sole willing professor and at once was subject to a dozen questions from numerous sceptics. Of them, an expert of nature study asked him, “What is the difference between essential (swarasa) aesthetic study and its converse, false art?” To this, the Acharya replied, “realistic imprints or mere copies of the visible present, that which can be named by man, interpreted in the human mind or experienced through the senses, the substance of which can be analyzed, whose rasa can be relished only grossly- that is the converse of true art. And that, which is omni-present yet ever-existing, natural yet metaphysical, form-less and unchanging, yet filled with eternal knowledge and sweetness ‘amritatatva’- that is true art”.  

Manik Babu’s works, whether texts or paintings, are suffused with this quest for an elusive instant of art that would bathe the most familiar and mundane moments into the luminosity of beauty and knowledge. Perhaps its not possible to garner radiance out of the day to day without immersing into it. One can try and dig the lost time, but can one also immerse in it? If my amateur attempts at excavation is even partially successful to conjure up those bygone days, the readers may expect more posts on this.

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