Violence and massacre aren’t themes you associate with artist Manjit Bawa’s bright, colourful and often unquestioningly flat surfaces. But 20 years after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the massacre of Sikhs in the capital, the artist is ready with five frames. They capture, for the first time, what he says is his ‘‘immeasurable pain’’ over the anti-Sikh riots, the agony of ‘‘witnessing the murder of his own people,’’ the killings in Gujarat, 9/11 and even the Beslan school killings. They will go on display at an exhibition titled ‘‘Mapping the Conscience: 1984-2004’’ starting Friday at Delhi’s Palette Art Gallery. ‘‘The time was right,’’ says the 62-year-old Bawa when asked if the show is being held to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. ‘‘I don’t believe in cashing in on recent tragedies. When wounds are fresh to ek tinka bhi aag mein phekna galat hai (then it’s wrong to throw even one straw into the fire).’’ With the safety net of time to fall back on, he says: ‘‘There’s so much violence in this world. I have to say something. After all, I’m not just an artist, I’m a human being too.’’ Bawa’s pain has come pouring out of his palette. His images are stark, though not bloody. In one, a man symbolising the artist himself is attacking a boy on his lap. The child represents Bawa’s now-30-year-old son Ravi. In another painting, the same bearded man is about to kill a little girl who, curator Ina Puri explains, ‘‘stands for Manjit’s daughter who was not even born in 1984’’. The daughter, Bhavna, is now 18. ‘‘When we kill anyone, it’s like killing our own children,’’ says Bawa. ‘‘Every act of violence has repercussions elsewhere. You kill Muslims in Gujarat, they will kill Hindus elsewhere, and it goes on and on and on.’’ On one canvas, primitive figures attack a lion (‘‘symbolic,’’ says Puri, ‘‘of the Sikhs’’) while a shepherd-like man on the sidelines plays his flute. Much of the pain is personal. Bawa is a Sikh who stopped wearing a turban in 1963 for practical reasons. But he remembers with anger ‘‘the vulgar jokes bordering on semi-porn about barah baj gaya and other things’’ that he had to deal with during his growing up years. In 1984, he worked in refugee camps during the riots. A chapter of his forthcoming biography by Puri is devoted to the Sikh identity. Bawa recalls an incident earlier this year when, while addressing a gathering in Gujarat, a member of the audience began asking seemingly innocuous questions about Hindu goddesses being painted in the nude. ‘‘I realised that he was trying to provoke me into making a comment about Husain’s works. I told him, ‘Jis kisi ne bhi devi ko paint kiya ho, Mussalman ho ya Hindu, yeh unki shraddha hai.’’ Bawa was initially hesitant to hold the current exhibition because he was unsure of the reactions he would encounter. The works are still strictly not for sale. They will ultimately go to a museum Puri is planning to open in Delhi. So what does the future hold for one of India’s best loved painters? Bawa has begun work on his version of The Last Supper, ‘‘where Jesus will be shown as the Asian that he was, and he will be sitting on the floor eating roti with his apostles, not the way the European painters chose to depict him’’.
