A remarkably printed forthcoming book of paintings with a long title Nepal Down the Ages: Glimpses of Nepali History, Culture and Lifestyle in Paintings priced at Rs24,000 drew my attention at Mandala Book Point the other day. A familiar Nepali painter named Hari Prasad Sharma executed these paintings in traditional style at different times. It has been published by Adarsh Books in New Delhi. I must confess I had not seen earlier an oeuvre of a Nepali painter printed in such shape, size and style. The little textured feel of the paper, the gloss and shade of colour in the background gives each painting an impression of original canvas. Each painting is meticulously printed by properly defining the field of action. Language editors explain the motif of each painting on the opposite full page in English, Nepali and Newar languages. The very heavy weight of the elongated clothbound hardcover book, one can easily see, is designed like, as the cliché goes, a coffee table book.

My familiarity with the paintings of Hari Prasad Sharma goes back to 2002 when the first exhibition of his paintings was held at the Arts Council, Babarmahal from July 4, 2002 for a couple of weeks. As these paintings cover a period from 1998 to 2021, I can roughly calculate that at least 27 of these 177 paintings must have been displayed at that exhibition. Himal Books also published them in book form under the title Kathmandu Valley Down the Ages (2002).

Traditional Newar life

I think it would be relevant here to recall what I had written in a review article in my column in Space Time Today. I wrote, "Hari Prasad Sharma's paintings executed in what Balkrishna Sama called Sahajshaili or naturalist style…have evoked several important levels of discourse about Nepali paintings of the traditional order. The dynamism of traditional Newar life depicted in these huge, beautiful oil works shows the opposite of what eminent Nepali architect Sudarshan Raj Tiwari calls "a cultural desert" that is the feature of the city today that "shuns community living" and "defeats movement". (July 21, 2002). Tiwari's observations sound more relevant today when the gap between the community and the performative culture of Nepal Valley is widening with the aesthetic order of life and culture being engulfed by the burgeoning metropolis in Nepal Mandala. This phenomenon has triggered debates in politics and architectonic matters.

It is very interesting to note here that these oil paintings, except 13 that have used the watercolour medium, are executed in traditional style by an artist who learned art mainly from the maestro Chandra Man Maskey. His other teachers were Kali Das Shrestha and Jeev Ratna Shakya. None of them were Chitrakars. Chandra Man Maskey was apprenticed to the orientalist school of EB Havell and Abanindranath Tagore in Calcutta. Maskey's compatriot and contemporary Tej Bahadur Chitrakar also learned art from the same Calcutta arts college. Hari Prasad Sharma's paintings show a strong impact of Maskey not least in his composition of the narratives of the festive order, and the depiction of female characters with their traditional attires and movements. Most of the paintings in this tome exhibit that schooling in a distinct order. Using oil medium for the traditional themes is a very challenging but productive subject. Treatment of the minute details in this medium requires great confidence, apprenticeship and skill as we have seen in Western art.

But executing oil paintings by using traditional motifs was a subject of thrill, ecstasy and experiment. It was so even for Indian painter Ravi Verma who used Western techniques and medium of painting at the turn of the 20th century. That was an influential form of art. Such art combined Western techniques with orientalist motifs. Hari Prasad Sharma worked without feeling the clash of the Western and Oriental styles of art. To Sharma, the technique came with his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Maskey and the practical teaching of Shrestha and Shakya. Sharma's very sharp intelligence and his deep aesthetic sense of history and rituals were the other factors that helped him. Sharma gives credit to his son Bishnu Prasad Sharma, who is not a painter, for being his companion in his old age in this quest.

The paintings are broadly grouped under such rubrics as history, culture, lifestyle and heritage, Buddha's life and portraits. The thrust of history is not modern; it stops with Prithvi Narayan Shah, the builder of modern Nepal. But the 19th century motifs like the Kot Massacre of 1846 architected by Jang Bahadur Rana, the founder of the Rana oligarchy (1846-1951), his meeting with a so-called Laura Bell, tradition of chakari or sycophancy at the Rana court and Bhanubhakta's Kantipur city are some exceptions. Sharma has executed powerful paintings that are grouped under culture. As a student of performance studies, I find Sharma's treatment of the performative culture very eloquent and expressive.

Architectural spaces

Creating panorama, landscape and humanscape through lines, figurality and colours is the speciality of these paintings. My favourite side of these paintings is the creation of the cityscape and the kinaesthetic human element filling such architectural spaces. "Arniko's departure for China" based on the exodus of this artist and 80 or so others to China in the 13th century, is one of the many examples in which the human drama characterised by emotional expressions, architecture, body movements and landscape come together to complete the composition of the oeuvre. These are more or less the common attributes of most of the paintings in this book. Sharma's human portraits of the Licchavi and Malla kings do not have much to show in terms of expressions, moods or aura of the characters of history.

These paintings are the results of Sharma's passionate quest in the realms of architectonic and human relationships. What is remarkable about Sharma's paintings is his sense of space, structure and performance, which he treats as the three essential factors of culture, bonding and faith. Sharma's strength as a painter lies in his delineation of oil colours in the architectonic and human forms. People's expressions of awe, love, woe and exasperation are captured in the fine shapes, lines and colour combinations. Mixing of colours and pigments is easily and effectively achieved in Sharma's paintings. He creates an aura of hope, love and confidence through such tonal variations of colours in nearly each of these paintings. Another feature of his paintings is that they are linguistically eloquent; they embody narratives. The greatest attribute of Sharma's paintings is his imaginative recreation of the events, lifestyles and rituals of the past, some of which interestingly still shape the lives of the people, especially in the areas of culture and rituals, and constitute the power of intangible cultural heritage.