With Niyogi Books’ Manaku of Guler, Indian art critic and historian Padma Bhushan Brijinder Nath Goswamy continues with his undying effort of bringing alive the long-lost glory of a painter whose work has mostly remained unnoticed. This is surprising considering the fact that Manaku has left behind a collection of significant paintings.
Goswamy has dedicated a large part of his life studying and unearthing lost Pahari artists of the era gone by. His doctoral dissertation was on the Social Background of Kangra Valley Painting—done when he knew very little about the art—but the quality of work done by Pahari painters soon ‘snared’ him.
The 84-year-old has worked with the Mughal, Rajasthani, and Deccani styles too, but he keeps returning to the Pahari masters. Goswamy says, “Locating information on the painter, who belongs to the 18th century, was very difficult. What we know about Manaku’s life is little compared to his younger brother Nainsukh.”
In Manaku’s case, there are no dates (save a lone entry in a pilgrimage register which gives the date equivalent to CE 1736, and a colophon which gives the date 1730 CE). “So, everything had to be imaginatively, but logically re-constructed,” he says. “Besides, Manaku’s work is widely scattered, and it was an effort to access it across continents and people.”
People debate on Kangra and Guler art forms. But Goswamy insists that there is no such thing as Kangra style and Guler style. “Styles do not belong to states, but to the families of artists. I am happy to say that a work is in the hand of an artist belonging to the Seu-Manaku-Nainsukh family workshop based in Guler, but I am reluctant to say that it is in Guler style,” he says. He was working on a different paradigm to classify Indian paintings when he came across the Seu-Manaku-Nainsukh family.
“This required to dig up information on artists, reconstruct their genealogies, identify dates and places and patrons, and come upon names of master painters. For this, I had to go to an unexplored source, the bahis—large tomes in which priests at major centres of pilgrimage keep records of pilgrims’ visits—of pandas,” says the Chandigarh-based historian.
His books have helped the common readers in general and the specialists in particular. “I have reservations about writing that obfuscates, or is aimed at being ‘clever’,” he says.
The art chronicler
BN Goswamy, former vice-chairman of the Sarabhai Foundation of Ahmedabad, is considered one of the prominent scholars of Indian miniature paintings. His 1968 article, ‘Pahari Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style’, is a study of this genre, where he is reported to have been successful in unearthing the genealogy of renowned miniaturists such as Pandit Seu, Nainsukh and Manaku. He says, “Importance was laid on not where a particular painting was produced, instead which artist or family was holding the brush.”