Diwan Mana is not just a photographer. He is a photoartist. Besides painting visuals on bromides, his lenseye probes through privation in search of….
BITS OF EXISTENCE
The day comes to an end and the fatigued rickshawpullers plod their weary way homeward. Home – which is at the foot of a huge, blackened brick wall beneath the far-flung skies and whose paved floor is strewn with pots and pans and the mindless litter of the passing thousands.
In dhabas it is pack-up time. Customers have gone home, having fed themselves to the brim with goodies made by the sweating dozens, working in the damp, poorly lit kitchens of these places.
It is a juxtaposition of shadows – life and the lifeless. And these shadows form lasting images. They are one man’s stamp upon the range of survival.
The man is Diwan Manna, a 34-years-old photo-artis based in Chandigarh. Having graduated in 1982 from the Government College of Art, Chandigarh, the once shy and hesitant lad from Bareta, Bhatinda has already held two one-man-shows in Chandigarh. He is now ready to fly off to U.K. to deliver lecture demonstrations and attend talks and seminars in February, in response to an invitation by the Shropshire Country Education Department.
At present he is working on a series on rickshawpullers and dhaba workers. He wants to capture them while they are involved in their daily chores and moments of fun, as well. And the choice of subjects as in the case of all artists, is a direct consequence of his life-long experiences, his immediate environment. He says. “For the last ten year, I have been closely associated with these people. I have no conveyance of my own, the rickshaw takes me everywhere and since I am living alone, with no cook, it is the dhaba which is normally my pantry.”
This is not the first time that he has been stirred by the hard and miserable lifestyles of these men of labour. The focal point of his college photo-feature was the psyche of the college peons. Through the lens he aspired to capture the sense of distance and alienation these men feel. One of his memorable shots is of a peon smoking a bidi, sitting all alone on a bare and cold wooden bench. The starkness of the figure stands out in the bold light thereby highlighting the aura of alienation.
Literature has a marked influence on perception and sharpens one’s sensibilities. Diwan claim that of all the poets whose works he has read, Surjit Patar, Amitoj and Batalvi have really influenced his work. While Patar can be felt in his latest series, one can see Batalvi’s women in the series of photo-paintings he made in the eighties. Reacting to the Punjab problem, he focused mainly on woman as the ultimate sufferer. Thus superimposed upon the blood-spattered paintings of Raj Jain and Viren Tanwar, one finds the images of the groping lover, the widowed bride or the fear striken, lonely and abandoned woman.
What is truly startling about this series is the riot of colours. The women are in blues and greens and even springtime yellows – colours which clash with the prevailing mood of broken dreams. And resounding around them are shiv Kumar Batalvi’s lines. Main kandialii thohr vey sajna ( I am the thorn infested bush, my lover) intelligently used in the effect of the whites surrogating the black retina – a device which not only compliments the darkness of the negative print of the faces but also aids in the movement and focusing of the viewer’s eyes.
Interspersed between such creative periods was the documentation work he was doing for the North Zone Cultural Centre (N.Z.C.C), Patiala. In fact he is still the chief photographer at all their functions. With a deep passion for music and other performing arts, he finds it an interesting enough job. This year he was commissioned by them to make a 20 minute film for the Delhi Dordharshan “Cosmic Rhythms” (the film) is not exactly a feather in his cap because it leaves the viewer rather cold. It makes one feel that he is beter at conceptualizing still photography. Nevertheless, he dreams of making a feature film some day.
Viewing Diwan’s work today, one feels he has come a long way. From the isolation of peons, to the song which fell dead on the lips of once smiling woman, followed by an indifferent period of documenting cultural events for the N.Z.C.C. and then capturing with his former youthful fervour, in black and white, the hills and cascades of Manali and with considerable pathos the lifestyles of the rickshawpullers and dhaba workers.
In fact his works have lately started showing a lot of inspiration from Raghu Rai, his ideal photographer. And somewhere along the journey he has lost that earthy ‘Panjabiyat’ which one sees in his earlier photo-painting series on women.
