An uncommon art collector

BN Goswamy

Rummaging through my books and papers the other day — something that I do from time to time, even if reluctantly — I landed upon a thin little booklet that I had abandoned the search for quite some time back. It was — I reproduce the complete title here — A Catalogue of Indian and Persian Pictures, Miniatures, Sketches and Specimens of Calligraphy, from the 15th to the 20th Century, Comprising the Collection of P.C. Manuk, Esq. of Bankipore, Behar and Orissa, India. At the bottom of the title page was printed, in small letters: “The collection may be visited by appointment.1913”. With great difficulty I had secured a copy of this Catalogue years ago through a colleague in Oxford who had photocopied it for me from the Library of the Oriental Institute at that great seat of learning. Then, somehow, I lost it.

To find it again gave me the opportunity of refreshing my mind about the efforts of an uncommon art collector of India, a pioneer in many ways: P.C. Manuk of Patna. Naturally, there had earlier been great collections assembled by kings and princes, nobles and rich merchants, even foreign adventurers. Several names come easily to mind: the Great Mughals and the rulers of nearly every major state in Rajasthan, for instance; Maharaja Sansar Chand of Kangra; the Gaekwars of Baroda; the Wodeyar rulers of Mysore; Col. Antoine Polier; the Fraser brothers; among so many others. But somehow the collection that “P.C. Manuk, Esq.” started assembling in Bankipore, Patna, had a different air, for every single item in it was bought from a dealer, not produced by a retained artist. That apart, the man himself had a different air, for he was an Armenian by descent, was born in India, studied in England, and practised as a barrister at the Calcutta High Court. He also had an unusual name, the middle part of it with a vaguely Indian sound: Percival Chutter Manuk. No one knows where he picked up the taste for Indian painting, especially at a time when very little work on it had been done. Coomaraswamy’s great work on Rajput Painting had just about appeared in the second decade of the century; O.C. Gangoly from Calcutta was both collecting and writing; Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh had been amassing Islamic manuscripts for his library. But there is no evidence that Manuk was in close touch with any one of these, except to an extent with Gangoly. In his recent and valuable work on early collectors of Indian art — In Pursuit of the Past — Pratapaditya Pal traces the career of Manuk, but concludes that “Manuk himself appears not to have had any single mentor in the formative years of his own collection”. He also adds: “Whether Manuk got the bug (of collecting) in Calcutta or Patna remains unknown”. We have thus in P.C. Manuk a phenomenon: a person who seems entirely to have taught himself as far as taste is concerned, and who, oddly for an Armenian, developed a special fondness for Hindu mythological subjects and, as a corollary, for Rajput paintings, then barely known.

To go back, however, to Manuk’s collection, in particular to the 1913 Catalogue. As many as 11 albums are listed in it, followed by 102 ‘framed pictures’. The first entry, from album I, is about a piece of calligraphy. It reads: “Couplet in Persian written by Zamir, early 17th century, meaning: ‘All places are places of safety, within a mosque or a temple/ All men are in need of friends, whether clever or mad.’” Mughal paintings, then valued far above Rajput work, naturally attracted Manuk’s attention, and a number of them are listed: thus, “A Moghal Princess taking Persian lessons from an old Moulvie, with Duenna and maid-servants in attendance. Early 17th century”; again, “A Moghal General riding in a litter with his army proceeding to the attack of a castle (possibly Chitor). An unfinished picture of the 17th century”; portraits of Akbar in combat, of a Mughal Prince, possibly Salim, of Shah Jahan, of the Emperor Aurangzeb on horseback, and so on. But, mixed with these, in the same album were paintings with diverse Hindu themes: thus, “A Hindu Prince receiving an embassy headed by a Brahmin priest making his offering, gold and silver coins heaped up, probably an offer of marriage. 18th century. Rajput School”; “Churning of the Ocean. Gods on one side, Demons on the other, the hydra-headed snake employed as the rope, Vishnu seated on a mountain, which rests on a tortoise in the sea. The Moon, Luchmi, Goddess of Fortune and wife of Vishnu, the white elephant and other sacred things being thrown up by the ocean. Rajput School ... about 1750”; “Sri Krishna receiving a message sent by the milkmaid community complaining of Indra’s oppression”; and the like.

What is surprising about all this is the almost entirely accurate identification of so many themes or subject matters: information which Manuk seems to have picked up, with great alertness, from some pandit or well-informed dealer. Deities are always spoken of with respect: thus, “Sri Rama”, “Mahadeo with a Snake”, “the Goddess Durga”, “Mahapurusha”. Occasionally one can see that his information is imperfect, or that he misinterprets a scene. But these were early days — the year of this publication is 1913 — and very little literature on art, or art history, existed then. Gamely, however, he seems to have gone on amassing works in the years that followed, almost till his own death in 1946. Collecting for this barrister had become an addiction, something that a poet described in a different context: “Chhutati nahin hai moonh se yeh kafir lagi huyi”. Always eager to share his enthusiasm for art, he apparently gave free access to his collection to anyone who was interested. Among those he infected with his passion was W.G. Archer, who was then serving as an ICS officer in Patna, and slowly grew to be one of the foremost experts on Indian painting.

A stab of regret at the end. Barring possibly one painting, the entire collection of Manuk left India, for he bequeathed most of his works either to his alma mater, the Cambridge University, or to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. That ‘one painting’, an exception, — a stunning Pahari picture of Sohni crossing the river to meet up with her lover, Mahiwal — is now in the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Varanasi.