Manaku of Guler (The Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State)

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About the Book This work centres upon Manaku of Guler-older brother of the greatly celebrated Nainsukh-reconstructing whatever little is known of his life. but following closely his artistic journey. Manaku came from an obscure little town in the hills of northern India-home to his singularly talented family and yet his vision knew almost no limits. Endowed with soaring imagination and great painterly skills, this man with a name that literally means a ruby, that 'stone of fame and mystique', whose glow keeps hinting at an inner fire-was capable of painting giant rings of time upon time-less waters, envisioning the world of gods and demons, littered with cosmic battles and earthly triumphs, but also gazing, with tender eyes, upon the world of two lovers in which there is tortured loneliness at one moment but, in the next, 'her garlands fall on his chest and glisten like white cranes on a dark cloud. At least three great series were painted by Manaku: the Siege of Lanka which took forward the narrative of the Ramayana from the point where his father, the gifted Pandit Seu, had left it; the Gita Govinda - Jayadeva's immortal 12th century Sanskrit lyric - which he completed in 1730; and the Bhagavata Purana, that remarkably extensive text, revered and recited by millions to this day, which he set about to negotiate with his brush in ca. 1740-45. Every single folio that has survived and is at present accessible - the number comes close to five hundred - from these series finds a place in this uncommonly rich volume. For the second time - Nainsukh of Guler was the first Professor Goswamy looks here at the entire body of work of a great Indian artist from the past through eyes filled with curiosity and warmth.

About the Author B.N. Goswamy, distinguished art historian, is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Panjab University, Chandigarh. His work covers a wide range and is regarded, especially in the area of Indian painting, as having influenced much think ing. He has been the recipient of many honours, including the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, the Rietberg Award for Outstanding Research in Art History, the JDR I Fellowship, the Mellon Senior Fellowship, and, from the President of India, the Padma Shri (1998) and the Padma Bhushan (2008). Apart from the Panjab University, Professor Goswamy has taught, as Visiting Professor, at major universities across the world, and has been responsible for significant exhibitions of Indian art at international venues, including Paris, San Francisco, Zurich, New Delhi, San Diego, and New York. He is the author of over 25 books on Indian art and culture, including: Pahari Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style (Mumbai, 1968); Painters at the Sikh Court (Wiesbaden, 1975); A Place Apart: Paintings from Kutch (with A.L Dallapiccola: New Delhi, 1983); The Essence of Indian Art (San Francisco, 1986); Wonders of a Golden Age: Painting at the Courts of the Great Mughals (with E. Fischer; Zurich, 1987); Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India (with E. Fischer; Zurich, 1992); Indian Costumes in the Calico Museum of Textiles (Ahmedabad, 1993); Nainsukh of Guler: A great Indian Painter from a small Hill State (Zurich and New Delhi, 1997); Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting (with C. Smith; San Diego, 2005); and, more recently, The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works (New Delhi and London, 2014, 2016) and Pahari Paintings - The Horst Metzger Collection in the Museum Rietberg (with E. Fischer, Zurich and New Delhi).

Preface Among the many speculations about the Origins of Creation, the Beginnings of it All-something that earty Indian thought is remarkably rich in there are soaring, maddeningly beautiful, references to the mysterious Hiranyagarbha, literally the 'golden womb' or 'golden egg. In that ancient text, the Rigveda, there is a whole composition named Hiranyagarbha Sukta, in praise of a single. supreme creator deity. It speaks of Hiranyagarbha being "present at the begin ning", "upholding this earth and heaven", "whose commands all beings, even the gods obey", "whose shadow is immortality, whose (shadow) is death". By him "the sky was made profound and the earth solid", "by whom heaven and the solar sphere were fixed", "who was the measure of water in the firmament". "When the vast waters overspread the universe containing the germ and giving birth to agni, then was produced this one breath of the gods." There are descriptions of the Golden Egg in other ancient texts as well. An Upanishad says that the egg floated around in emptiness and the darkness of non-existence for a long time, and then broke into two halves. One of the oldest Puranas, the Matsya Purana, has this account of the beginnings of creation: after mahapralaya, the great dissolution of the Universe, there was darkness everywhere and everything was in a state of sleep. The Svayambhu, the Self-Manifested Being, arose a form beyond senses. It created the primordial waters first and placed the seed of creation into it. The seed turned into a golden womb, the Hiranyagarbha. Then Svayambhu entered the egg. The Bhagavata Purana -the text most revered by the devotees of Vistinu Narayana, passages from which are still recited each day by countless Indians also speaks of the Beginnings. In the beginning, it is stated, there was Narayana alone: multi-headed, multi-eyed, multi-footed, multi-armed, multi-limbed. This was the Supreme Seed of all creation, subtler than the subtlest, greater than the greatest, larger than the largest, and more magnificent than even the best of all things, more powerful than even the wind and all the gods, more resplendent than the Sun and the Moon, and more internal than even the mind and the intellect. There is majesty in these descriptions. The immanence they speak of, the sheer vastness of it all, mystifies and uplifts at the same time. When, therefore, a painter, asked by his patron to 'paint' the Bhagavata Purana, might have come to passages which address themselves to the Hiranyagarbha, he must have found the task daunting, challenging in the extreme. One can imagine him sitting down to visualize the Hiranyagarbha, struggling to come to terms with the range of thoughts behind the concept, reading about it from whatever might have been available to him, asking seniors in the family, a learned pandit perhaps. Was the Egg so resplendent, he might have wondered, because the Sun had en-tered it, as the text says at one point? Whatever the case, after all this cogitation, the image that he turned out, brought into being as it were, is nothing short of dazzling. Those 'primordial waters' that the text speaks of, he spread over the entire surface of the page, from edge to fine edge. But there are no waves here, no great commotion, only concentric whirlpools and eddies, like giant rings of time on timeless waters. And in their midst, unmoving, completely still, floats the great golden egg, a perfect oval, seed of all that there was going to be.The painter who brought this image ben C45, pg. xx) into being-produced might not the the right word-was Manaku, the man upon whom and whose work this book is centred. This retatively ittle known man, coming from a tiny principality called Guler in present day Himachal Pradesh, did more than paint: he thought about things, and seems never to have ceased thinking. He also knew his materials well and knew perhaps that what he was painting in the great Bhagavata Purava set from which this folic comes, and in the other wonderful senes he turned cut-was not for his royal patron or himself alone, but for the times that were yet to come. Consider this fascinating detail in this painting alone. When one sees the page laid flat, the egg appears a bit brownish, almost turbid. But when you hold the page in your hand, as it was meant to be, and move it ever so slightly, it reveals itself. The great egg begins to glisten and shine, an ovoid form of pure gald: true hiranya, to use the Sanskrit term for the precious metal. This volume on Manaku consists of an Essay in two parts, the first on "The Painter and his Work", and the second on "The Scholars and their Arguments". Between these two parts is placed a Catalogue of Selected Works by Manaku. This organization of materials follows the patton established in my book on the painter, Nainsukh, younger brother of Manaku, titled: Nainsukh of Guler, a great Indian painter from a small Hill State, published by Artibus Asiae, Zurich, in 1997. I have gone back to that pattern for, in my view, it works well. It is important for the reader to access a reasoned and uncluttered account of the painter's life and work without getting involved in the arguments between scholars on contentious points. At the same time, for those interested in the arguments and differing points of view, the second part of the essay serves a distinct purpose, for there is rich debate there and sharp expression. The Catalogue part does not contain all that I believe can be attributed to Manaku, for a little short of four hundred works of his have survived out of the several times that number which he must have painted or drawn in his life. The Catalogue therefore is essentially only a grouping of a large number of significant works of his, but it is at least representative of the manner in which his style evolved. But in this work I have not. I believe, neglected to include any work of Manaku's that I was able to access, and trusted to be his. They are all here: works that have not entered the Catalogue section, have all gone into a Supplement, and are identified and reproduced even if on a relatively small scale, with basic information but no detailed notes. I have many institutions and individuals to thank, and that is a real task, for my debts are deep and numerous. Some time back I chanced upon a very personal, "certified' list in which featured, according to that writer, the one hundred most beautiful words in the English language. Among them at the same time among the most difficult-ought to have figured 'acknowledgement', because of all the pleasures and the burdens which that word embraces. But to proceed... My interest in Manaku goes back many, many years but, in a real sense, the present work began when the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India, offered me the Tagore National Fellowship for Cultural Research to work on the project that this volume reflects, and the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, agreed to accept the role of being the nodal institution to which I was eventually affiliated and where, for the most part, I worked for three years and more. To these institutions I am naturally indebted, as I am to those whose collections was able gratefully to draw upon: in India, the National Museum, New Delhi: the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, formerly at Udaipur and now at Jodhpur: the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai; the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi: the Salarjang Museum, Hyderabad; the Jagdish and Kamia Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad: the Himachal Pradesh State Museum, Shimla; the State Museum, Lucknow, the N.C. Mehta collection at the L.D. Museum of Art, Ahmedabad; the Sarabhal Foundation, Ahmedabad; the Sri Chitra Art Gallery at Thiruvanantapuram; and of course the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh. in Pakistan, most magnanimous help was given to me by the Lahore Museum, Lahore, and the National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. In Europe, my debts extend to the Museum Rietberg Zurich, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In the United States, I was given generous access to their collections by the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences, Florida; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia: the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. To the Directors and Curators of these institutions I remain grateful, for all their help and for their large-hearted permission to publish the works in their collections. But I need to speak also of so many personal debts that I owe, and great courtesies that I have received, for in them reside, other things apart, the pleasures of memory. Reversing the generally accepted order in which the family comes only towards the end, I would like to thank my family first. For without them-Karuna, my wife; Apurva and Malavika, our children; and Damini and Madhav, our grandchildren-this work would not have started, progressed, or ended, Equally am I indebted to Eberhard and Barbara Fischer for their sus-tained support: great friends, warm and generous spirits that they are. I hope I am forgiven for leaving out the honorifics and the titles and the official designations of persons whom I owe and am acknowledging here. Absolutely no disrespect is intended: it is simply a move away from stiff formality. So many private collectors have, unstintingly, shared their works with me, turning in the process friends, or drawing closer: Nona and Jyoti Datta, Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu, Jagdish Mittal, Shailendra and Abha Hemchand, Jai and Sugandha Hiremath, Willian and Olivia Dalrymple, two unnamed collectors in Europe and Amritsar, Eberhard Rist. Aldo Mignucci, Rakesh Sinha, Prahlad Bubbar, and Shilpa Mehta. At the institutional level, if things moved with smoothness, it was due to the interest, sometimes the intervention, of persons with spirit and warmth: at the Ministry of Culture, for example, Jawahar Sircar, Ravindra Singh, Vijay Madan and Deepak Kaul; at Chandigarh and in the Museum, K.K. Sharma, Anurag Agrawal, Karnail Singh, Jasvinder Kaur, Kriti Garg, Poonam Khanna, Seema Gera, Surinder Dhami, Sangeeta Sharma, Megha Kulkarni, Girish Naphade, Rajan Verma, Meenakshi, Radha Chandel, and Janak Raj:at the National Museum, Venu Visnutdevan, Vijay Mathur, and Joyoti Floy, at Jodhpur and Udaipur, Kiran Seni Gupta, Karni Singh, Sunayana Rathore, Vasumatı, Yasair and Christina: at Lahore and Karachi, Samad Sumaira, Uzma Usmani, Asma Ibrahim, and Mured Mumtaz, at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Mahara Museum in Mumbal, Sabyasachi Mukerji, Vandana Prapanna, Manisha Nene and Nilanjana Som, at the Dharat Kata Dhaven, Varanasi, Ajai Singh and Anjan Chakravarti; at the State Museum, Lucknow, through Rajesh Purohit of the Allahabad Museum; at the Satorjang Museum, Nagendra Fleddy and Rajeshwan Shah, at the Sri Chitra Art Gallery Thiruvananthapuram, Gangadharan; at the NC. Mehta Collection, Rattan Parimoo; at the H.P. State Museum, Shimla, Han Chauhan, at the Kangra Art Museum, Dharamsala, Ritu Mankotia and Anil Raina Of their giving selves were Albert Lutz, Jorrit Britschgi, Elizabeth Hefti and, of course, Eberhard Fischer at the Museum Rietberg Zurich, Eric Mauk at the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences; Laura Weinstoin at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Darielle Mason at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Joan Cummins at the Brooklyn Museum; John Guy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: and Anna Jackson at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. There are friends and colleagues on whose support and generosity I have been drawing upon throughout this period: especially Usha Bhatia, Ashok Aklujkar, Salima Hashmi, Chandramani Singh, Saryu Doshi, Debra Diamond. Saker and Mehli Mistry, Maithili Parekh, Anjan Chakravarty, Poonam Khanna, Seema Gera. Vrinda Agrawal. To them are due from me special thanks and much gratitude. It is also time for me to remember old friends who were 'with me', so to speak, when I began working on Manaku and others, years ago: Iqbal Nath Chaudhry: Harsharan Singh: the Pandits Madan Mohan, Harbilas, Ram Bahadur, Ram Kumar, Pyare Lal, and Chuni Lal, at Kurukshetra and Harid-war: P.R. Kapoor of Kangra Art Palace: Mohanlal Bharany of Amritsar, and the painter, Chandulal Raina. The writings of a number of senior scholars and some fellow art historians all of them brought into the second part of my Essay in this book, among them those of Ananda Coomaraswamy, W.G. Archer, M.S. Randhawa, Karl Khandalavala, Rai Krishnadas, Fakir Aijazuddin, Roy Craven, V.C. Ohri-have always been of great value to me even when I have not always been in agreement with them. Finally, as this book comes out, one can see how much effort and dedication went into its making on the part of Eberhard Fischer, Elizabeth Hefti, Claudia Rossi, Thomas Humm, the staff at Artibus Asiae, and Bikash Niyogi. It is easy to see that I have many obligations and much indebtedness. These debts I cannot repay in kind; only inadequately in the currency of poor words.