After The Turmoil
07/22/2003 , By Narendra Kumar Oberoi
Life has never changed so quickly as it is doing today. Times, you would say, have changed. But you would have no awareness of the time that goes into our making and unmaking.
Going through the images of life in Diwan Manna’s pictures one is disturbingly struck by the bewildering life around us. In configurations of the unknown and the known we begin to see what is so familiar to us and we are not aware of. The strange feeling that he creates in us is that we do not care to see what is so overwhelming and formidable and does not leave us any option and alibis for not seeing it.
In picture after picture this sense of lack of awareness of our surroundings increases, as we grow familiar with his kind of imagination at work. We are witnessing a breakdown and fusion of life and art forms. Traditionally we divided art forms as time arts and spacearts. These pictures create a space that helps us understand our world and ourselves through his camera eye. One is not sure what one is witnessing is a photography, a painting, theatre, cinema or all of them at the same time.
These pictures reveal to us the areas of our insensitivity, carelessness and cruelty in various forms. Diwan syas – I am not merely interested in presenting images of the destruction of human goodness, courage and beauty, but I try to tap the unsuspected and as yet unrealized sources of tenderness, fortitude and humanity.
Tapping the unsuspected and as yet unrealized sources of tenderness, fortitude and humanity is what he is doing in each picture differently. There is a future, which these pictures open before us.
One experiences a strange sense of community with those in his pictures who have been driven on the margins of social existence. He is not content with merely sympathizing with t hen. He makes you feel one with them in ways, which reveal the deeper source of his creativity.
He comes to terms with the insidious and unrecognized forms of our degradation of the sense of life and honour within ourselves as well as in others. Each picture is a call attention notice to get in touch with what is basic in us. We cannot remain bystanders anymore. We are struck with unsavoury nuances of our relationship with ourselves.
The circumstantial in these pictures unfolds the possibilities of our higher human nature, the possibilities we are all the time busy sabotaging. We hear the resonances of our deeper quest for harmony and peace in the turmoil of the day.
An encounter with these pictures is a disquieting and an empowering experience. It bring out our hidden humanness, which in fact becomes an experience of self-realization for each one of us. It opens a reservoir of fellow feeling across cultures, languages and political milieus.
In a way the experience of the exhibition recovers for us our lost humanity. We can hear the pangs within us of the humanity being reborn.
Narendra Kumar Oberoi
Media critic
July 22, 2003
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