Panesar : An Artist and A Teacher

In these days of art fairs and art auctions, the old style love for art is no longer cherished. Artists produce very little for themselves and more for the market and the one who sells the most are considered the most successful. But not so long back, we had many artists who would spend their entire lives without ever willing to talk about their art. Balraj Panesar is one such artist.

B.R. Panesar

Belonging to a generation of such doyens as Bikash Bhattacharya and Ganesh Paine, with whom Panesar had formed the first major contemporary artists' group since the Calcutta Group broke down in 1950s. The group was named simply the 'Society Of Contemporary Artists'. It soon attracted such talents as Ganesh Haloi, Paritosh Sen, Manu Parekh, some of who in later years went to earn international recognition. Panesar was one of the life-bloods of this society and continued to encourage many late entrants and younger artists.

But art was only a part of his life. He was deeply concerned about his  people, particularly about those who lived in the margins of society. He would visit every week the slums of the city and give away almost everything that he earned from the sell of his paintings and collages. His works reflected the slums, though in much abstract manifestations. It is at one of these slums that he had met Shakila, a young girl then who used to live by selling hand made paper packets. Panesar took her under his tutelage and taught her collage making.

Shakila had once drew the attention of the artworld with her own collages. The story of Shakila and Panesar gathered some attention though got lost in the labyrinth of our times.  Panesar continues to live in a small room in Kolkata, unmarried for life, occasionally to be visited by Shakila, who lives away with her husband and sometimes by another of his devoted disciples, Devajyoti Ray, whose association with Panesar is also not known to the art world he traverses. Ray has often said it on many occasions that whatever he learnt has all come from Panesar, for which never paid any fee.

Shakila Bibi  &  Devajyoti Ray : Two of Panesar's disciples

Nonetheless as we today celebrate the internationally acclaimed works of our new generation artists like Ray, lest we not forget that we all owe it to that generation to which Panesar belonged when art was not really for sale.

Manto : A Life In Words

Like that great Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, whose works Sadaat Hasan Manto greatly admired and would later translate into Urdu- the later started his life almost like a tramp, could not pass the matriculation examination, which could have been his ticket into educated, cultured bourgeois society, despite attempting it twice. Yet Manto rose to become one of the greatest Urdu writers of the 20th century amid much personal tribulation and anguish and decided to drink his life away in a hurry at the age of 42? 


Manto was born into a respectable middle-class Kashmiri family of Ludhiana in 1912 and was the only son from his father's second wife (his father's first wife bore him three sons and seven daughters). Being the underdog and odd one out in his own family probably had something to do with Manto's later affinity with the underdog in his literary work. Then came Bari Alig, a leftist writer and activist who quickly became Manto's mentor and encouraged him to read French and Russian classics and to translate them. Manto, by then already a small-time author, successfully translated into Urdu the work of such writers as Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Maxim Gorky. 


Manto's sympathy with the downtrodden and with the Bolshevik revolution can be traced to his encounter with these writings; in fact, some of his best writing consists of translations of Hugo and essays on the revolution and Gorky. Those who are unconvinced about or downplay his socialist sympathies should peruse Manto's earliest collection of short stories, Aatish Paray (Flakes of Fire, 1936), and Manto kay Afsanay (Stories of Manto, 1940). 

Soon after the success of these early collections of short stories, Manto got married, in a match arranged by his elder sister. The years leading up to the partition of India were spent in frequent oscillation between Bombay and Delhi in search of permanent work, and some of his best work, in the form of essays and radio plays, came in this period. This was also the time when he had his first three run-ins with British law over the publication of three stories, “Black Shalwar”, “Smoke” and “Odour”, that were deemed obscene, but he was never convicted.

The partition of India in 1947 shattered Manto personally and financially, but his best creative work was undoubtedly produced after his migration to Pakistan. It also transformed him from a consummate connoisseur of wine into an alcoholic. Had he remained in India, he may have become a great film scriptwriter, as his numerous Indian friends who stayed behind believed. But he could see no future for himself in a partitioned country beset by a murderous communal frenzy, and he had already sent his wife and children to Pakistan. He also thought that at least the new Muslim state would give him the sort of acceptance, respect and financial security that would be on a par with what he had got in undivided India. 

But the new ideological state closed its doors to him even before the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1956, when the minuscule Communist Party was deemed enough of an ideological threat to the custodians of the nascent undemocratic state for them to ban it on a trumped-up charge of sedition. 

Baul : A Continuing Tradition

Bauls are bards, composers, musicians, dancers and actors all rolled into one, and their mission is to entertain. Through their songs, pauses, gestures, and postures, these nomadic mendicants spread the message of love and ecstasy to lands far and wide. In a land devoid of mechanical entertainment, Baul singers were a major source of entertainment once in the British era. Tagore was fond of their songs and many of his best creations were evidently inspired by the Bauls. 

Tagore as Baul : painting by Abanindranath Tagore

Perhaps the best known Baul of yesteryear was Lalan Fakir. Lalan songs called lalongeeti in Bangladesh are still very popular and singers sings these with myriad improvisations. Along side these modern singers also exist the traditional Bauls. 


People still love to watch them sing and dance, their narration of folk tales, and even commentary on contemporary issues through highly melodious songs and an extraordinarily high-pitched rendition. Although their lyrics speak the language of the village folks, their songs are appealing to one and all. The songs are simple and direct, profusely emotional, enjoyable, and needs no special knowledge for appreciation.

Lee Lozowick

In the previous post, we had spoke about Parvathy Baul, perhaps the most known face of these wandering minstrels. This week we will speak about Lee Lozowick (aka Lee Khepa Baul or Lee Kṣepā Baul,  an American spiritual teacher and a Baul. Lee was largely responsible for popularizing  this tradition to the west. Lee had come to India in search of enlightenment and became a disciple of Yogi Ramsuratkumar. Then later he took to Baul and earned the name of Khepa Baul (Mad Baul). 

Although he resonated deeply with the Vedantic traditions of India, devoting himself and later his students to the wandering Baul minstrels,  he however did not stay with the school for long. In his last days, he had adopted so many ways of preachings and philosophies, that he had  carved a unique and unconventional path through the postmodern spiritual landscape of the west mocking sacred cows with his “crazy wisdom” approach, fronting a series of blues-rock bands, and adopting the role of a spiritual guru. 

A Study of Society Through Women's Songs

A Dalit Folk Song of Kerala in Translation

What kind of untouchability is this?
The untouchability of the lords!

Go away, go away
The stumbling block, go away…
Go away, go away
Even Pakkanar§ has to go away!

If the salt is sown,
Would it sprout?
And creep onto the fence?

Then, what is this untouchability?
The untouchability of the lords!

If the salt is sown…

If the salt is sown,
Would it sprout?
And creep on to the fence?

Go away, go away
The stumbling block, go away…
Go away, go away
Even Pakkanar has to go away!

A recent book, a very much needed one, Unearthing Gender by Smith Tewari Jassal brings out the women's universe of songs that deserve a complex, multilayered and nuanced map of the social, political and economic terrain of their lives and those of the communities in which they live. There is much that makes this book worth reading, not least its crossing and confounding of disciplinary boundaries and its offering of a different, a more poetic archive.

Women's songs are of course familiar terrain in much of India. Whether at weddings, or at moments of birth and death, or during the harvest and while sowing, women sing. Tewari Jassal here maps not only the songs, presenting a valuable archive of oral culture, but also looks at them differently, seeking out those sung by low caste or Dalit women, sung for themselves and at their high caste masters, offering both wisdom and irony, sometimes a bitter humour at the way relationships of power are played out, and sometimes an unrestrained expression of sexuality, and a realistic understanding of the forces that shape their lives-whether it is the loss of their claim to property via marriage, the prevalence of incest, the relationship with mothers-in-law, being duped in love and romance (of particular interest here are the songs of elopement).

Tewari Jassal divides this rich archive thematically, looking more closely at songs that describe the daily tasks women do, especially the grinding of grain (the jatsar or grinding song) and those that speak of family relationships, the power equations between natal and married families and their shifting equations in which it is the woman who often comes off the worst. Further chapters look at the songs women sing when performing a variety of agricultural tasks, songs of 'unfreedom', or those that describe departures and losses, marriage and migration, the cultural universe of village women, the pervasiveness of patriarchies and more, creating what the author calls a sparkling sense of women's community. She describes a rich repertoire of songs that offer an alternative telling of the Ramayana, focusing on Sita and her life.