The Magic of Puppets and Paints
Adored by children for his enchanting puppeteer performances and loved by people of all ages for his charming personality and undeniable talent, artist Mustafa Manwar's journey into the magical world of art and artistic endeavours was inevitable.
With a father being the celebrated poet Golam Mustafa, it was natural for Mustafa Manwar to grow up amongst music and painting. Now this charming, amicable, gray haired man with bifocals, says that many artists and aesthetes came to his father's house. His older brother Mustafa Aziz, moreover, was a painter. He was eight years older than Mustafa Manwar. When his father was in Hoogli, on the banks of the river, he saw many colours and the reflection of the sun on the hilsa -catching boats. This gave in him the love of the colours of Nature. In Kolkata, as a child he was taken to a painting exhibition , where for the first time he saw crowds. This led him to exhibit his own work around the verandah in his home. He went to the Kolkatta Government Art College. He was interested in science and during World War 11 he made many models of anti-aircraft guns and planes. He was told by his older brother to study science for a year or two before going in for fine arts.
Mustafa Manwar, surrounded by the paintings he had done in Kolkatta and Nainital, says his principal was the famous painter, Ramendranath Chakraborty, while his teachers were Gopal Ghosh, Shotngoshal,Makkhan Dutt Gupto, Horen Babu, and Chintamoni Kar, who was his principal later on, had their training from overseas. Some of the teachers were from Santinketan. His college of arts and crafts, Kolkata, was next to the Kolkata Museum. He had his sculpture department , where many portraits were done. Folk tradition from various places were shown. When the folk puppets came from Rajasthan, it pleased the students immensely. For pleasure the students made their faces from clay. He says that he had seen puppets before in Bakura, West Bengal and also in Jessore. He was, in the meantime, keen on cartoon animation.
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Under Zainul Abedin , he managed to teach some students the art of animation films. He had obtained a scholarship in France but Zainul Abedin told him that he could do better if he stayed on at the Dhaka Art College. He obtained a first class first position, with a gold medal.
This was in 1960. Five years later television came. Jamil Chowdhury was the then general manager. Meanwhile Mustafa Manwar had done a lot of work for set designs and set costumes for the small screen. He often dealt with plays by Rabindranath Tagore. The first one of these was 'Dak Ghar', 'Tasher Desh' and 'Mukto Dhara' etc. Here too he went in for stage settings and costume designing and he loved them. He was involved not only in drama but singing and dancing and so got to meet Indrani Rahman, a dancer and Hemanto Mukhopddya the famous singer from West Bengal. He got to know Nirmolundo Chowdhury's group of singers. He has bagged many prizes for singing. He won a gold medal by singing in an inter-university competition. In the all-India art competition in his third year at college he had similarly won a gold medal.
He describes how the Dhaka station of PTV defied the government regulation of flying the Pakistani flag on March 23, 1971 by extending the airtime to 12 midnight. At Agartala, he, along with others, formed a cultural team, the music section of which was headed by Waheedul Haque. "Shug Dev did a documentary of the time," he says, "and included the works of different artists." In the documentary, Manwar's painting of a mother holding a wounded and dying freedom fighter on her lap was shown.
While visiting the refugee camps, Manwar found all the inmates depressed. So he introduced some puppets, among which there was one of Yahya Khan and a farmer. He was one of the first group of civilians to return to Bangladesh from India by plane.
Despite his obvious talent for singing it was painting that he had a passion for and water colour was one of his most favourite mediums. So why water colour? The maestro says that he enjoys getting the transparent effect such as in the three moving paintings in his drawing–room. The musical instrument in the living room, meanwhile, speaks of his love of music. “It is like music, in a few words it expresses the depth of feelings,” says the artist about water colour.
Talking about the subject of a 'true artist', he agrees that a painter cannot lead his life in garret, and that he has to have enough finances to buy paint materials, canvases, art paper etc. According to Mustafa Manwar a “true artist” will never be a slave to the dictates of the galleries. Whether starving or not paint he will, at any cost.
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