Book Review: Manaku of Guler – The Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State

Book: Manaku of Guler – The Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State
Author: BN Goswamy
Publisher: Niyogi
512 Pages
Price: Rs 4000

If you hear Dr BN Goswamy speak about Manaku, the subject of his most recent book, or his brother Nainsukh, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he'd met them in person. That he'd spoken with them. That he knew them intimately. That they were not two painters who'd lived back in the 18th century in the obscure Himalayan kingdoms of Guler and Jasrota.

Of Manaku, says the 84-year-old art historian, an authority on Indian miniature painting, "I am very fond. His handling of colours is absolutely masterful. Unlike Nainsukh, who is extremely refined but does not allow you to come closer to his work, Manaku is charged with emotions. He is very persistent with his subjects. I am also convinced that he could converse with the gods. He addressed them as equals — the inscriptions carry just the names, 'Brahma', 'Ramachandra', 'Krishna', without Sri or any honorific."

Infusing life

Such knowledge comes with long familiarity. Manaku, rather Nainsukh, has been the subject of Goswamy's interests since the early 1960s when he was pursuing a PhD in Kangra painting from Punjab University, having resigned from the IAS to turn to academics. In a real sense, it was Goswamy who redeemed Nainsukh and Manaku from the shadows of time and neglect, and breathed life into them.

"At the time, Indian painting, especially miniatures, were slotted according to style — Kangra, Basohli, Guler, etc. I felt this was wrong," says Goswamy, reminiscing about the genesis of his scholarly interests. "The artists were a mobile lot; they moved a lot between the kingdoms. They couldn't possibly give up one style and start painting in a different way when they moved locations. What I proposed instead as a way of understanding miniature painting was the gharana model — a family style, passed on from father to son, among brothers. But there was very little evidence to support my idea."

Nainsukh and Manaku, like most traditional painters in India, almost never signed their work. Among the hundreds of works that are now accepted as part of Nainsukh's oeuvre, there are only four signed ones. Similarly for Manaku, whose name appears as inscriptions on just four paintings. Of other kinds of documentary evidence — land or birth and death records — there was very little too.

At a loss, Goswamy turned to the bahikhatas, the genealogical registers maintained by pandas or priests in pilgrim spots like Kurukshetra, Gaya, Haridwar and Benaras. No scholar before him had thought of exploring these records for the purpose of social research into historical era. But it wasn't easy.

"Millions of people come to these places, and often the records are not maintained properly. The pandas also needed to be convinced; they don't show the records unless you belong to that family. Besides, the painters, or chiteres as they were called, were a class of carpenters and hence lower down the social order. So the records would be a little kachha," Goswamy says. It took three years of painstaking detective work, from 1963 to 1965, before Goswamy found a reference to Manaku in the register of Sardar Ram Rakha in Haridwar.

'Gharana of style'

That discovery formed the basis of the seminal essay, Pahari Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style (1968), and, nearly three decades later, Nainsukh of Guler (1997), for which Goswamy is best known. That book, which supported the documentary evidence that Goswamy uncovered, with a close reading of his paintings, understanding them in the light of the texts that they illustrated, overturned the belief that traditional Indian painters were a faceless, anonymous lot. Goswamy managed to establish that Nainsukh was an iconic painter, whose works commanded a premium in the auction market. "Nainsukhs have become a blue chip today," says Goswamy, somewhat wryly. You may be sure that Manaku will go the same way.