Born in a cowshed in Dhuri, Punjab, Manjit Bawa was the artist of luminous oils populated by purple bulls and cowherds, myths and modernism. He died Monday morning at home in Hauz Khas, Delhi, leaving behind son Ravi and daughter Bhavna. He was 67.

Sitting in the sparse bedroom where Bawa spent his last three years — and his last day — in a coma, 23-year-old Bhavna fought back tears. “I kept hoping he would come back. He would open his eyes, but he never registered our presence.” Two days ago, she accepted the Bhavesh Sanyal Award on her father’s behalf. It was a fitting tribute; Sanyal had been Bawa’s teacher.

Ina Puri, Bawa’s partner, biographer and curator of his last show at the Sakshi Art Gallery in 2006, said, “Manjit was full of life. He loved to sing and paint, and was a romantic at heart. Seeing him lie there, unable to do anything for three years, was not easy for any of us.”

As a young boy, Bawa was more interested in cockfights than in school. One day, his brother Manmohan, a commercial artist, made the boy pose for him. “Manjit, mesmerised by the magic of pencil and charcoal, tried his own hand at art,” writes Puri in her biography, In Black and White. He could never stop after that, and despite being discouraged by his mother, enrolled at the School of Art in Delhi in 1958. The family wasn’t affluent and art did not fetch six-figures sums then, but as Bawa wrote later, “I believed God would provide me with food and I would earn the rest.”

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