Faded Earth

Subscribe 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 ...

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 t...