Revisiting Manjit Bawa through ‘The Storyteller’

Born in 1941 in Dhuri, Punjab, Bawa trained at the School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, receiving a national diploma in fine arts in 1963, and later a diploma in silk screen painting at the Warden Institute of Essex in England in 1967. He worked as a serigrapher in London in the late 1960s and briefly taught painting at the Institute of Adult Education, England, before returning to India. Over his career, Bawa participated in several major art camps in India and abroad and co-founded Sama’a with Ina Puri in 1998 to promote artists. He was the recipient of the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1980. He died in 2008.

“The Storyteller” traces how Bawa saw myth as a living narrative instead of a fixed scripture. Tharoor shared on the aptness of the exhibition’s title: storytelling, he noted, is how human beings first make sense of the world around them. His figures – gods, humans, animals, are immediately recognisable. Limbs curve and merge, uninterrupted by sharp edges. Forms soften into one another. Tharoor described this as visual gentleness without fragility: a steadiness that holds intensity in check.

Shashi Tharoor (Photo: Vadehra Art Gallery)

What is equally striking is what Bawa refuses to do. Tharoor pointed to an ‘Untitled’ work depicting a man holding a knife with his daughter seated on his knees – an image heavy with potential violence but it is not dramatised. Just like how it is in one’s life, joy and sorrow, devotion and anxiety coexist within the same frame of the painting. In Bawa’s world, harmony is the ability to remain present within it, not the absence of it.

This idea is also closely tied to how Bawa often engages with mythologies in his works. In her exhibition note, art conservator and writer Rupika Chawla recalls Bawa as someone who watched theatre, listened to oral traditions and noticed how myths subtly shifted from region to region. While the core story remained intact, details changed. For Bawa, Chawla writes, this justified an artist’s freedom to “play around with the imagery” while allowing the myth itself to endure.

From the collection of Bhavna Bawa and Ravi Bawa (Photo: Vadehra Art Gallery)

That freedom is evident in works such as Bawa’s depiction of Narasimha killing Hiranyakashipu, where violence is suggested not through blood or gore but through a charged red background.

Running beneath all these is a deeply personal history, articulated in Bhavna Bawa’s note for the exhibition. Writing as a daughter, she remembers a father who was playful, gentle and instinctively compassionate. She remembers how caring for her brother Ravi, who has special needs, reshaped Bawa’s visual world and found their way into paintings where forms merge without harsh division. She writes, “Though many people touched his life, none shaped it as deeply as Ravi.”

Bawa’s paintings do not explain; they trust the viewer. Many remain untitled by design. As Tharoor reminded the audience, a good story does not disclose everything at once, it waits for its audience to uncover and take part.