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Academy of the Punjab in North America |
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Manjit Bawa [Born 1941 Dhuri East Punjab – Died 29 December 2008 New Delhi] By: Madan Gopal Singh
We – Manjit Bawa and I – had an association which went back by about 31 years. I first approached him to do a poster for Mani Kaul's Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (Arising from the Surface) towards the fag end of 1979. The film had been selected for the Un Certain Regard of the Cannes festival and Mani wanted something truly avant-garde by way of a poster. I approached Ranbir Kaleka – another astounding painter from Punjab. He in turn took me to Manjit who happened to be amongst the three best silk-screen artists of the world. The poster – a collaborative effort between the two – turned out to be an absolute stunner and, not unexpectedly, most of its copies got stolen from the board where it had to be pasted a countless number of times. Mercifully, the last few copies were retrieved by the Posters Archives of Paris where it now rests in relatively safety.
Ranjha by Manjit Bawa. 82x68 in.The Ranbaxy Collection Our friendship grew eventually as Manjit started weaving tales of journeys through the strangest of landscapes. He was a great story teller and his stories never followed the same path of narration. Ranbir was a mesmerisingly slow raconteur, Manjit was nearly breathless and I was somewhere in between. And what a friendship we three had! And then the other two discovered my more than passable ability to sing. I would sing and Manjit, the innovator that he was, would accompany me on his match box giving ample rhythmic support. Before we realized we were being inundated with requests to perform here and there. Manjit soon graduated onto a dholak and gave me his harmonium and we started weaving spells of Sufi music. The anti-Sikh riots lent a degree of emotional depth to our music.
Bawa and Madan Gopal Singh. New Delhi. Lohrhi. 2002 The infamous Rath Yātra against the Babri mosque brought us together so many times on the Artists Against Communalism forum under the aegis of Sahmat and we became integrally woven into the pan-Indian campaign against the demolition of the mosque, Anhad Garje. Manjit had given up silk screen printing and become arguably the most important painter to have emerged from Punjab. Even as his stature grew as a painter he continued to wash his own clothes and cook his own food and sing Bulle naalon chulla changa jitthe ann pakaayida Rall faqiraan majlis keetee bhora bhora khaayida.
[The hearth is of better use than Bulleh Shah; on it you bake roti. The faqirs get together sharing the bread.]
Sohni. By Manjit Bawa
The lyricism of Manjit Bawa springs from his training in silk-screening.
Bawa’s boneless, amoebic humans and beasts float in fluorescent candy
coloured space: pink, violet, emerald green, sky blue, tangerine. Bawa,
who is inspired by the eighteenth century Hill State [Pahārhi] painters of
his home state of Punjab, seeks the iconic simplicity of Indian mythology.
Since the themes are universally familiar, ‘you can concentrate instead on
the form, the colour, the space’, he explained. |
