Manjit Bawa
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A profile
[ From the archives of The Times of India]
Nona Walia
Ina Puri, writer-curator, was biographer, impresario, muse and companion to the late artist Manjit Bawa for 10 years
Ina Puri would say, yes. On a frosty Wednesday afternoon in Delhi, she wraps herself closer in an ink blue silk sari as she stands beside a Bengal art work inside Hauz Khas’s Delhi Art Gallery. She opens her bag to dig out photographs, some of them gone hazy in patches over time. There’s one of her clutching actress Kirron Kher’s hand in a friendly grip, a smiling Manjit Bawa to her right, his arm snug around her son Arjun’s shoulder. It’s a glimpse into what she calls a spiritual union with a Sufi, a man who loved Rumi and Bulleh Shah. She met the legendary artist in 1998 when accompanying a group of artists to Singapore, and insisted Bawa come along as chief guest. “He was 19 years older, but something clicked and we became friends. Age had nothing to do with it.” For years, Puri and Bawa were seen in each other’s company, sometimes spoken about in whispers. But for her, Bawa remains her best friend, soulmate and mentor. “Our relationship was nuanced. He shared a bond not just with me, but my son and husband too. They’d watch cricket together. My home was always open for him. One of the kitchen shelves still stocks spices he used when he’d decide to rustle up a special meal.” Bawa, the son of an aristocratic but poor Sikh family from Dhuri in Punjab, had a string of relationships. He had little in common with his wife Sharda, and their marriage was far from happy. “And then I found Ina and Ina found me,” Bawa wrote in the foreword to In Black & White: The Authorised Biography of Manjit Bawa that Puri authored. “A void was suddenly filled. He ended up teaching me how to live,” she shares. Puri would accompany him to a Bengali play while visiting Kolkata, and back in Delhi, he’d invite her for a Punjabi drama. “He would translate every word in the dialogue,” she smiles. “Sharda and he weren’t a couple in the true sense. I never met her, but we spoke a couple of times. And my husband met her once. We were more like family friends,” says Puri, who Bawa called his muse. “He painted me often. I witnessed his creative process; the making of magnificent paintings from a simple doodle. Those were happy times.”
Puri and Bawa were last together in 2005 when she was driving him and he complained of a headache. He lay in coma for three years, suffering cerebral haemorrhage, till he passed away in 2008. “I’d be at the hospital for days, and my husband would pace up and down the corridor. After he left, life came to a standstill. It was like someone had hit me hard, and I was out of breath,” she remembers. Fresh from having put together Readings, a retrospective on Bawa for the Lalit Kala Akademi, Puri says she has spent days searching articles written on him in the pre-Internet era. “It’s my labour of love.” Bawa hasn’t quite left her, she believes, recalling finding a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart that he had gifted her, with a note tucked inside. “He would leave little notes everywhere — in books, diaries, bags. I’m still discovering them. It’s like he is around.”
