A GLISTENING GOLDEN EGG—the Hiranyagarbha, or primeval womb—leaps off the surface of the painting, its edges giving the impression of the egg’s shadow falling on the surface below it. It is levitating; it is flat. The egg is floating on black waters drawn like concentric amoebae, white spaces between black lines slithering this way and that, like a snake consuming its tail. An eighteenth-century folio from the Bhagavata Purana series by Manaku of Guler, a Pahari painter, this image flashed on screen during a 2022 lecture at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya by the art historian, public intellectual and curator BN Goswamy.
Brushing past bare facts, Goswamy posed a question, a rhetorical one, but one whose very asking opens up avenues of thinking. The waters could be visualised differently. Goswamy flipped through various ways that Manaku had expressed water: as a gray wash of paint here, as the foaming Yamuna there. Why, then, did Manaku’s brush trace this concentricity for this painting?
There was a humility in Goswamy’s lecture, which was titled “The Things We Do Not See”—the sheer number of times he says “My guess is,” “I have nothing to go on,” “We have nothing to prove or disprove it,” “I don’t know.” This was a way to make the audience comfortable and wired, to not intimidate them with pedantic scholarship and stiff certainty, but to draw them in, instead. Vrinda Agarwal, a doctoral student of art history who worked with Goswamy, told me about his strategy for public speaking. “‘Start with a joke,’ he would say, ‘make people laugh so they are at ease.’ He would always undermine his own knowledge, saying ‘this is what I think, but you may disagree.’”
There is also a reckless imagination at work. To not know the intention behind Manaku’s choices, and, yet, to not let that stop you from whisking theories into possibilities, that is where Goswamy’s sight is lodged. Looking at these shapes, for example, he thinks of “the measure of time,” of tree trunks being sliced in cross sections, leaving bare their concentric rings, which remind us of their age. Manaku was, in Goswamy’s reading, visualising “endless time.” To render a cosmic painting with cosmic pathos, producing within it a poignancy through meaning, entering the visceral through the cerebral, he makes us look at how the clock leaks from one shapeless torrent, plump with time, to another. This he does by forcing us to do the very thing we have taken for granted: seeing.