How a young lensman brought to Delhi off-beat visuals of ancient Hampi

How a young lensman brought to Delhi off-beat visuals of ancient Hampi
New Delhi / September 18, 2022

New Delhi, Sep 18: The setting sun cast “magical” hues of orange across the historical ruins of Hampi, and the touring photographer impulsively felt like sharing the visuals with a wider audience. Soon on his return home, Delhiite Manoj Arora shared the massive stock of the images with art scholar Uma Nair. The result: an ongoing exhibition in the national capital.

If ‘Rediscover Hampi’ took two-and-a-half years to make it to a public gallery, it was because of prolonged Covid-19 spells. But then the pandemic has lent the show a unique contemporariness, going by the tasteful assortment of the medieval-era Vijayanagara vignettes on display at the Bikaner House here till September 22.

“I had for quite a while been planning a trip to Hampi. When it eventually happened in the spring of 2020, the world was in the early pangs of the spread of coronavirus,” says 30-year-old Arora, a trained lensman in the profession for a decade now. “The 16 square miles of relics looked all the more desolate, invoking in me a spiritual mood. I ended up staying there almost a fortnight,” he reveals about the visit to the 14th-century stone sculptures in east-central Karnataka.

The results were “equally impressive”, according to veteran Nair, who would go on to curate the exhibition that began this September 13 with fashion connoisseur Sunil Sethi’s formal inauguration amid a gathering of art-lovers. “Actually, I had met Arora in March 2020 at a group art show I conceived and organized in Delhi. His six images there, to me, stood out for their eminence.”

Not long after that association, Arora showed Nair a set of 600 pictures the cameraman had shot from his recent tour of Hampi. “It took only a look to sense their extraordinariness. Soon we decided to go for an exhibition of the works,” she recalls.

The selection was laborious. “Beautifully challenging, too. I spent almost six months, zeroing in on the best and apt images. I fixed their total at 60,” Nair says, also pointing out the segmentation of the images: starting with the famed elephant ‘Laxmi’ at the entrance of the site, followed by ‘Gods and Goddesses’, ‘Murals’, ‘Architecture’ and the evening-lit ‘Sandhya on Sandstone’ before concluding with ‘Man and Nature’.

The process tuned well to Arora’s sense of beauty. The synergy evolved from an ideal mix of the “logic of a historian and aesthetics of an artist”, as Nair puts it. “I’d say, long long ago, dreams were made out of stone. It’s called Hampi.” Adds Arora: “I was especially enraptured towards evenings. The colour and texture of the place would by change dramatically in the sundown hours.”

Not surprisingly, the current exhibition throws light on the big picture of Hampi even while zooming into the finer aspects of its pictorial and architectural brilliance. Arora’s eyes wouldn’t miss the odd trees that add to the charm of the location as a whole. “For instance, the Vitthala temple has several halls and pavilions. But it also houses a wonderfully shriveled tree, standing tall, just around the corner from the famous stone chariot. If the shrine is built around the 15th century, the tree dates back by 150 years — and matches its grandeur… against a twilight sun kissing its wizened branches.”

Everything about Hampi mirrors the richness of the country’s grand heritage, according to Arora. “The realization became stronger over my days there, the experience began growing on me,” he refers to the Unesco-recognised site along the river Tungabhadra.

Masha Art CEO Samarth Mathur, noting that the country’s legacies are as rich as they are diverse, said ‘Discover Hampi’ is capable of instilling a fresh shade of admiration for India's heritage among the youngsters.

As for its half-a-millennium-old murals, Nair says they are inspired by folklore, ancient Indian texts and epics and Kannada literature. Chips in Arora: “With the passage of time, the paintings have faded. I wanted my camera to capture this piece of history.”

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