Manaku of Guler

ABOUT THE STORY Writers of both fiction and non-fiction have long been interested in descriptions of the rigours, epiphanies and mysteries of the life of the visual artist. It is as if, having always to turn the sights of the world into words, writers long to enter—even if vicariously, without leaving their own native medium—an artistic universe that is not as closely tied to literal and linear meanings as words are. In this story based on the life of the 18th-century painter Manaku of Guler, Sharmistha Mohanty brilliantly realises not only the religious-cultural world of a painting tradition, but also the development of an artistic sensibility even within a scheme where the individuality of the painter is not paramount.

Particularly revelatory is the contrast set up by Mohanty between Manaku’s art and that of “the Mughal courts below”; the sense of sexual love as something ordained, natural to any two human beings who begin to live together (“He is married, he falls in love”); and the discussions of the representation of light in the tradition practiced by Manaku. When we learn that the light in Manaku’s paintings is unchanging so that “what he paints is outside time”, that revelation is so powerful precisely because we learn it inside the world of story—which, being a narrative art, is almost never outside time and acquires its own power precisely by never being so.

This excerpt is from Mohanty’s forthcoming book Five Movements in Praise, a work of connected fictions.

ALREADY, BY THE TIME HE IS TEN, they have taught him, and he has learnt, to draw the simplest things. Eyebrows, folded hands, the outlines of distant hills. He is shaken awake one night and asked to draw, by the trembling light of the lantern, in the cold and darkness, a hand. He does it without thought, in a state between dream and sleep. “Not bad,” says his father, Pandit Seu, and carries him back to the bed. By the time he is nineteen Manaku is drawing trees, the mango, the amaltas, he is drawing curving lianas on the trunks. He is lowering or raising the horizon. He is married, he falls in love. He wonders why there are no shadows in these paintings his family makes, no rendering of times of day, a changing light. He asks his father. “The answer will come to you,” says his father, “if you wait.” In the evening the men in the family talk, about a change in kingdoms, a gifted painter from another region, the swabhava of a colour. By day the women grind pigments—the finely ground lapis is for Krishna’s body—men paint, and others in the family are building things from wood and iron. Manaku likes the sound of hammer on iron, or of wood being cut and sawn. He meditates at dawn, as his father does and his uncles. When he opens his eyes the landscape falls perfectly into place, hill by hill.

It is 1719. On the plains below the Mughal Empire is losing its life, the East India Company has been formed more than a hundred years ago. The British, the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch have arrived on all sides of the subcontinent wherever land meets ocean. Manaku is aware of some of these changes. He has already traveled, on pilgrimage to Hardwar, down to the Mughal courts on the plains. But in these hills time and history are not one. Manaku climbs a steep slope and a valley opens. He climbs another, and in the distance are the Himalayas breaking up the sky, reducing the horizon almost to the narrow width that he uses in his paintings. He studies horizons, their height and depth, different each day wherever he studies them. If love has turned into its absence, here is where he brings it, along with other things that cannot be spoken—the weight of a father’s gift, the luminosity of a younger brother’s craft. As he walks among hill ranges and valleys, there is born in him on some days an elation so large and so strong that he sits for a whole day near a river without moving, or walks for hours over slope and valley. When he comes home, he hammers iron, to ground himself again. Or he sifts rice with the women, to bring his eyes back to what is minute. He paints the trees and Krishna almost the same height one day, by mistake, the trees only a little taller. His uncle comes by and stands there watching for a long time. This uncle is not a painter, his father’s elder brother. He makes carved wooden tables for the kings, low stools for them to rest their feet. Yet it is to him that they all go when they have finished a painting. They trust his sight most of all. “I made a mistake,” says Manaku. “No,” says his uncle, “you have corrected something.” Manaku watches the painting. He knows he cannot ask his uncle anything more. The elders do not like to use too many words. Over days he feels that once again, as with so many other things, his uncle is right. But he does not know why. Children are born to him, sons and daughters whom he loves. They will bring with them their own specific fates as he brought his. No one talks any more about Manaku being left handed. He paints King Prithu pulling an arrow with his left hand, once a gopi has a right palm on a left arm, and there is Krishna, painting Radha’s breasts with a brush in his left hand. His patrons, kings and princesses, do not correct him, nor does his family. Who knows whether Krishna was indeed left handed? As a composition of human desires Krishna could have used either hand, and anyhow, what aberration had the universe ever excluded? When the pandits come he listens closely to the texts, the Bhagvata Purana, the Ramayana, the Gita Govinda. At the same time he sees paintings that have traveled up from the Mughal courts below, where landscapes are rendered in minute detail and every face is individualised, the way it is in reality. They paint always the real, these painters, they paint kings and courtiers, hunts, animals. He knows that painting the divine is forbidden them. He sees that from forbidding a thing, something else arises. His father, Pandit Seu, has absorbed elements from the work of the plains. He is among the first painters of the hills to paint vegetation in its details, to individualise his faces, to do portraits of real people. He has painted, in the same painting, the teller and the tale, and his brother will take it further and render at the same time the painter and his painting. But Manaku cannot bring himself to paint only a physical reality or to bleach it of colour like his brother. He looks at these Mughal paintings for many years, he thinks about them while drawing water from the river, putting a child to sleep. He rises earlier and earlier, long before the sun. He studies the night, before he sleeps, then again after he wakes up. He never paints night, but he paints the dark blue of Krishna’s body. On one among his many nights of watching, it comes to him that Krishna is a fragment of night, a dark immensity condensed and thickened into a moving body, a god. He doesn’t tell anyone. Speech exists to express daily things, as dear to him, but different. Tomorrow he will make the lapis a shade darker. This he can talk about, with his father, his brother. Often colours appear to him as he is about to fall asleep. The next morning he spends hours achieving the remembered colour, its exact tone and hue. They are solid planes of colour, monochromatic, haldi yellows, flaming reds, dark oranges, all of them aspects of sky. One day walking on the riverbank he sees the light change, the sun suddenly covered by one dark cloud. The light is now like that in his paintings, the hues of each thing in the land become less emphatic. After so many years he understands. That what he paints is outside time, what he paints is not a moment that will pass. That the movement of sun and shadow and light will introduce time and so inevitably its consequence, suffering. In the end what he paints is a landscape of belief, not doubt. He does not want to erase suffering, but he wants his paintings to hold it like the hills hold their ore. He bows his head and touches the ground. Next to him the river flows on. Flowering shoots as in the work of the plains enters his work, they stand alongside his stylised trees, and later comes an open landscape of undulations with green shrubs. He is very cautious when he introduces these physical realities, as if they would disturb an elemental reticence. But he is amazed to see that it remains, untouched. This silence, like that of an oil lamp in a windless place, he does not know from where it comes. He knows it is there in the work of his father and his brother. It does not come from the way the brush is held, it does not come from the colours, nor from what they paint. After a painting is finished, he watches his own silence within the borders he has just painted, like an outsider. His father dies, the great painter Pandit Seu, a daughter is given in marriage, his two sons sit bent over their painting. If one is fortunate, Manaku thinks, then time unfolds and reveals more than it seals up. When he is painting the laconic light, or perfecting the singular blue of Krishna’s bare body, a power begins to manifest inside him. It is not a power over anything. It makes metaphors crumble in his hands. Finally it eats and digests him. He is left like a rind on the soil, not fit for human use. He lies motionless for hours. After this he chops wood. He grinds wheat. What is it that a painter paints? It is not beauty. He has taught his sons well, Fattu and Khushala. He has grandchildren. The absence of love in his own life becomes presence once again. He paints a Radha and Krishna, seeped in vermilion. The background vermilion, as if a flaming sunset sky. Radha’s clothes vermilion. She sits on Krishna’s knee. Before them is the white curve of the river. They look, not at each other, but to the right, both their faces held at exactly the same angle, they look into a distance of endless space. The trees have remained as he painted them in his youth, only a little higher than the seated Radha and Krishna. It was the mistake that made him see, slowly, that brought him to a belief he never had before. That each thing in his painting was equal, as it was in the landscape in which he moved, none diminished by the other, freed from a hierarchy imposed only by the eyes. When Manaku is cremated the light is like the light in his paintings, always forgiving.

They put his brushes next to him, and among the flowers his pigments, ground lapis, powdered vermilion, and strewn all over, the green beetle wings he would always use for Krishna’s crown. The fire burns for a long time. It is 1760. What Manaku does not know when he dies, what he cannot know, is that the generations after him will perfect that light, that it will remain shadowless, but will have an even more subtle refulgence, that hills and rivers and horizons will open continuously, trees, plants and birds will get more and more detailed, and yet none of these things will impinge upon the elemental reticence, and his sons and grandsons will do something he had never done, they will have the courage to paint night and render it dense yet transparent, night of love never night of fear, and the dark sky will be filled with such a quiet nightglow that no one will need a lantern. After a few generations the paintings will, like any living thing, begin to decline, grow overripe. But that original light, and that original darkness, will reach across hundreds of years to another time, to solitary people sitting close to them in crowded cities, that seeds gathered by a Dutch merchant at the Cape of Good Hope in 1803 have germinated in the year 2006, and among the plants which have blossomed is Leucospermum, a rare, stunning, pin-cushion like flower.

The accompanying image of Radha and Krishna is a folio attributed to Manaku from a Gita Govinda Series, dated AD 1730. Courtesy Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh.