Sometime in August last year, Manisha and I
went through a series of one-line messages to each other to find a date when we
were both free to meet for lunch. Two days before we were to meet though, I had
to cancel. I had dislocated my elbow. My right arm, I wailed to her. What if it
never worked normally again? How would I make pots? “I am paranoid about my
hands & legs,” she wrote back “…jodi kichu hoye jaaye taholey kaaj ki kore
korbo!!! [How will I work if something happens to them?] That December, we were sitting in the
sun outside her barsaati studio, and I was gazing with distaste at my hands, which
were rough and knobbly with being constantly in cold water and clay. She
noticed and said, “We don’t have beautiful hands, but they make beautiful
things.”
She knew the place of beauty in art is a tricky
one. It is easy to be dismissive of works that are beautiful as being not sufficiently deep. In the world of high art, if a work did not come with an
incomprehensible paragraph describing what it was trying to do, it was not
serious. To be the maker of beautiful things was not enough. The equivalent in
the world of fiction, which I inhabited, was to be labelled a “good
storyteller”. So we exchanged a fair number of rueful, heartfelt notes on this
subject.
The first half of last year, Manisha was
thinking constantly and feverishly about what she wanted to do. She was getting
ready for a major exhibition with former students of the Golden Bridge Studio,
Pondicherry, where she too had learned much of her ceramics. Like any student
worth her salt (or clay), she had grown away from her training and created a
language of her own. She worried about how her work would sit beside those of
her peers and teachers.
Around this time, she was alone in her studio throwing
porcelain bowls, when a friend of hers called, attacking someone else’s ceramics
as “merely attractive”. It shattered the peace of her morning, but immediately
replaced her diffidence with certainty. “Deep in one's heart one is not
apologetic,” she wrote. “Alone in my studio, throwing those porcelain
bowls....trying to achieve the delicate lip......I was lost in a world of my
own…at this point of time I am joyous just making a beautiful thing.....damn
the meaning! I am sure it also has a validity, a reason for being.....even
without a meaning.”
Two of Manisha’s ceramic installations are on
the covers of books published by Permanent Black. Although artists are
extremely protective about their work, she did nothing to dominate the
designing of the covers. She knew how suffocating it is to have anyone
breathing down your neck when you’re trying to make something. “You have
complete freedom,” she wrote, reminding me only that “There is the plug and
wire showing on the left side of the image, can you Photoshop it out?” As we looked
at photographs of her works, she remembered how deeply she had been involved in
photography, like her oldest brother. It made her dream up a new kind of
installation, combining ceramics and photographs. That was what she would do
next, she said.
It was when I was working on those book covers
that I realised how complex and intriguing her ceramics were. They were, in
fact, full of meaning. They spoke without words of the themes in those books.
If Manisha was aware of this she did not say so. She was an outlier in many
ways and her lack of pretentiousness, so unusual in the world of art, is embodied
in these works. They remind me of Sheila Dhar quoting the Queen of Tonga’s profound
words: “I just Be-s.” Manisha’s exquisite seed-pod bowls and her folds of
porcelain that look like shells or waves: they just Be-s.
It was such happiness to Just Be with Munu. To
sit in her studio and watch her forcing her students to think -- harder! To
drink the dark, strong coffee her brother made, and eat her home-baked cakes.
To absorb all the learning she had picked up over years of work and yet was so
generous about sharing. To think up hair-brained schemes, mostly deep in the
night, to do things and go places. To one of my last messages to her with another impossible travel plan she wrote: “Been there, been there, seen it. Can go again!”
REMEMBERING MANISHA
BHATTACHARYA, Potter
(died 1 September 2015)