L. T. P. Manjusri

High on a scaffold in a village temple, a young monk copies a fading fresco brushstroke by brushstroke, racing a slower kind of vandalism: the whitewash and the cheap repainting that were erasing the old wall paintings of Ceylon. The monk was L. T. P. Manjusri, and the copying he began in the mid-1930s grew into a life’s work, a one-man salvage of an art the country was letting die.

He was born Lokukankanamge Thomas Peiris in the coastal village of Alutgama on 28 October 1902, and was ordained a novice monk at the age of thirteen, taking the name by which he came to be known. In 1932 he travelled to Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan in Bengal, and there, under the influence of Nandalal Bose, the school’s master of painting, his eye for art woke; in later years he studied Tibetan art as well. He came back to the island in 1937 seeing its temple walls afresh, and seeing at the same time how fast they were vanishing.

That double recognition set his course. In 1950 he gave up his robes to work as a painter and journalist. He gave himself to travelling the length of the country, copying what survived on crumbling temple walls before it could be lost, and to writing: more than a hundred and fifty articles in Sinhala and some fifty-five in English, pressing the public to value the frescoes of Sigiriya and the temple line he had come to love. His own painting carried that line into modern work, economical and calligraphic, the figure set down in a few sure strokes. In 1943 he joined the founders of the ’43 Group in Colombo, the movement that measured European modernism against the island’s own ancient forms.

His work outlived the fragile walls that taught it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds several of his watercolours, among them ‘Nun and Noble Female Devotee’, where a jewelled laywoman is posed after the celestial dancers he had copied from the old Sigiriya paintings, a muted grey wash behind her suggesting the inside of a shrine room. His paintings reached other collections abroad as well. The copies themselves became a national record, in some temples the only surviving witness to frescoes that no longer exist. His documentation of the old temple murals, the copying and tracing of the Kandyan and southern paintings, has been ranked second only to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s contribution to the study of the island’s art.

In 1979 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the recognition reaching him near the close of a long working life. He died on 10 July 1982, having given some sixty years to the service of paintings he did not make. The monk on the scaffold had set out to keep an old art from disappearing, and in the keeping of it he made an art of his own.