His background rebelled against his becoming an artist. But he persevered, joined an art college, soaked in all the plastic and performing arts. Today, Diwan Manna is a creative photographer and juxtaposes his pictures with paintings
DIWAN MANNA
Out of the hundreds of graduates churned out by our art colleges, only a few become artists in the true sense of the term, or do creative work and evolve new genres. What is that little extra they have? Thirty-one-year-old Diwan Manna’s artistic evolution offers some hints. His story is all the more laudatory because he comes from a mofussil town in Punjab and had little exposure to any creative endeavour early in his life. Now he is a creative photographer in his own right and also does montages by fusing photography and painting. Manna did have a flair for drawing but it was only after joining the Chandigarh Art College in 1977 that he threw himself into a whirl of activity. He would work from dawn to dusk, and soak in the ambience of the college. On weekends he would go to Delhi to see the exhibitions of painters like J. Swaminathan, Krishen Khanna, Manjit Bawa, Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh and Jogen Choudhary. There were three of his teachers also who inspired him: principal Jagmohan Chopra, Viren Tanwar and Raj Jain.
Athough he had opted for the 5-year graphics course, he felt that it was through photography he could express himself better. “An insight I had on coming in touch with painter Raj Jain’s work,” he says. “I wanted to use photography as an independent art and not merely as documentation.” Something not many lensmen have done in India. “It was also easier than painting; it gave immediate results.” Manna sought out and appreciated the work of Cartier Bresson, Raghu Rai, S. Paul and Pablo Bartholomew. Raghu Rai, he says, “has that unerring eye: his pictures speak volumes. He doesn’t mount a mere moment but encapsulates societal mores and attitudes.” Manna’s own photo subjects have been social issues and problems as well as dancers and musicians.
Manna knows that technical virtuosity in a form can come from practice, but depth and meaning only come from a keen empathy with life around you and training of the aesthetic sense by constant touch with the plastic as well as performing arts. Giving an example, Manna says, “Abstraction is very basic to art, and the kind of abstraction witnessed in music exists nowhere else.” And what better form can there be for learning the communication of “rasa” than Indian classicial dance?
Dark, bearded, brooding and beedi-smoking, Manna has the “lean and hungry looks’ and a voracious appetite for music and dance, theatre, film and literature.
Reading he had started in school itself-from pulp novels he grew to appreciate the work of Punjabi authors like Dilip Kaur Tiwana, Amrita Pritam and Jaswant Singh Kanwal and Russian master like Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Into theatre he was initiated by G.S. Channi Chandigarh’s Safdar Hashmi. This interest soon led to art cinema. He joined the local film club and the films by Goddard, Bergman, Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and Mani Kaul imploded into his consciousness.
Talking about his early influences, Manna, born in town Bareta in Bhatinda district, says that he grew up in an environ which had a preponderance of, but not preeminence of women. The numerous aunts and grandaunts were either widowed or separated. Their inferior social position touched him deeply and today his major concerns and themes relate to repression of any kind.
Manna, who has had a solo exhibition of his work in 1986, refused to take up a job as commercial artist or photographer. “As a freelancer,” he asserts, “I am free, free to innovate and devise forms which have never existed before but which could better represent and reflect the times.” In all his works he adds symbols and motifs peculiar to him: a train, railway tracks, animals, birds, vehicles. In his photo-painting montages, he has used Raj Jain’s canvases as background but will soon start painting himself.
Even though for an Indian artist, it is obligatory to go abroad, at least to see firsthand the art treasures in European galleries, Manna isn’t too enthusiastic; about migrating, not at all. “Although India is only a part of the globe, and one must observe life in its variety, I cannot go and start anew at my age. Only now have I acquired some sort of understanding of the Indian tradition, of the artistic and cultural milieu.” As afreelancer he has done a lot of creative documentation work for the North Zone Cultural Centre. Armed with his camera, he has captured life in its numerous shades: from the saffron fields of Kashmir to the Spiti masks to the chilli fields in Rajasthan.
