and both eschewed ritualism and religious excesses. Iconographically, too, despite the fact that Manjit was a trained artist and serigrapher, with years spent learning the technique in Delhi and London, there was a connectedness in the trajectories that is hard to dismiss. Like Tagore, Manjit’s painterly domain encompassed the abstract and stylised figurative oeuvre that took little from Western practises, choosing to espouse all that was Indian, in terms of colour palette, imagery, and thoughtprocesses. The celebration of pan-Indic mythology, ethos,
music, poetry, spiritual thinking is common to both and we find in their paintings, some similar compositions that are similar only in their spiritual kinship. Some lives are lived and enriched by internalising pain and here again was another sphere where the two journeys coalesced. In both lives were moments of immense pain and emotional turmoil, yet, both dealt with their dark despair creatively, there was seldom recrimination, on the contrary, there was a looking forward that was a statement of their intensely positive attitude towards life, no matter how hard the blow life had
dealt them, be it the death of a beloved child or separation from a loved one. Calm and fortitude marked their approach towards life, showing a restraint that was remarkable given the tragedies they had to encounter on more occasions than one. Deliberately opting to live in isolated places, Santiniketan in the case of Tagore and Dalhousie in the instance of Manjit, their art reflected their inner mindscapes that seldom used imagery from the world around, no matter how beautiful that outer world was. While their techniques differed in so many senses, stylistically and technically as did their colour
palettes, both were bonded spiritually, no matter how asymmetrical one was and symmetrical the other. About Bawa’s art, J Swaminathan (1928-1994) wrote, “There is a certain bonelessness, a pneumatic
quality to Manjit’s figure which echoes the tantric frescoes of Himalayan Buddhism. Only the shadow of time intervenes: we are transported into a seemingly pastoral landscape, where the sublime and the risque, the lyrical and the grotesque set
Works of Manjit Bawa (below & right)
up a strange tableau... What is representational in Picasso becomes enigmatic, what is demonstrative in Souza becomes epileptic and what is petrified in Tyeb becomes liquid and sparkling in Manjit.” In the words of the Poet, ‘What is rhythm? It is the movement generated and regulated by harmonious restriction. This is the creative force in the hand of the artist. So long as words remain in uncadenced prose form, they do not give any lasting feeling of reality. The moment they are taken and put into rhythm they vibrate with radiance. It is the same with the rose. In the pulp of its petals you may find everything that went to make the rose, but the rose which is maya (or illusion), an image, is lost; its finality which has the touch of the infinite is gone. The rose appears to me to be still, but because of its metre of composition it has a lyric of movement within that stillness, which is the same as the dynamic quality of a picture that has a perfect harmony. It produces a music in our consciousness by giving it a swing of motion synchronous with its own.’ (From Rabindranath Tagore, What is Art?). ◆ The author is a well-known art critic and curator of many major international and national exhibitions.
INDIA PERSPECTIVES
VOL 24 NO. 2/2010
120
INDIA PERSPECTIVES
VOL 24 NO. 2/2010
121