The book on Krishen Khanna, designed in a large format, reflects the scale of promotional activities in support of Contemporary Indian artists, one is witnessing these days. Logistically it is jointly published by a leading Indian and a leading British publisher. The book is a sequel to an already comprehensive study on Krishen Khanna’s work by Gayatri Sinha, who is one of the contributors to the present publication. It therefore seems more as a supplement, because as one peruses through its contents, one presumes it to be an attempt to focus on some of Krishen Khanna’s significant themes and paintings. In that respect it establishes its own justification. Krishen Khanna, who has crossed 80, is one of the best-known painters of India since Independence, who has remained active during the last six decades. I mean in the literal sense, that is, his works have been well-publicized in newspapers and magazines, who won prizes in national- level exhibitions held in India and whose work was sent to international exhibitions as long as the 1960s.
He was seen as the well-educated and most articulate artist of his generation and thereby became the spokesperson of Indian modernity. But most of all his temperamental affinity with the Progressive Artists Group of Mumbai, who had already dispersed in the 1950s, but this Delhi-based artist kept on referring to their contribution in his talks and short newspaper write-ups. I have myself been a witness to many such occasions when he rose to speak in art seminars from 1960s onwards.
A persistent figurative painter, the language of his figuration is parallel with that of F.N. Souza, Hussain, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta, who hailed from Mumbai, and whom he met when Krishen Khanna was serving in Grindley’s Bank at Mumbai in 1949. A conspicuous line, with preference for staccato sharpness, straightness and angularity, often termed as expressionist, in contrast to lyrical decorative type, is characteristic of Krishen Khanna’s imagery.
In his creative process predilection for making drawing is inevitable. This makes his activity of making drawings fascinating, even though they are not epitome of facile draftsmanship. Such kind of drawings have their own finality as much as the completed paintings. Only occasionally when he tends to flatten his colors in planes, otherwise the paintings have a state of ‘unfinish’ like many of his drawings. The number of drawings included in this book are sufficient proof for this observation. As painter and art critic, I have often thought that modern Indian art could be explained by a series of masterpieces, complex paintings, which serve as landmarks in the oeuvre of the artist as well as in terms of chronological bench-marks in the ongoing art manifestations. Interestingly enough, there are nine critical essays in the book starting with Norbert Lynton’s essay (he has contributed as many as three essays). Gayatri Sinha has written on two topics, Ranjit Hoskote, Marilyn Rushton and Tanuj Berry have contributed one each. Probably Tanuj Berry is also the editor.
The last essay is by Krishen Khanna himself. Twelve paintings have been chosen for critical analysis that reveal the seriousness towards his chosen themes and a conscious approach to resolve the pictorial language on the part of the artist. Norbert Lynton is a senior British Critic, where as Marilyn Rushton is a lawyer turned into admirer of modern Indian Art. Gayatri Sinha and Ranjit Hoskote are well-grounded Indian art critics. Tanuj Berry is an art collector friend of the artist. Three of the essays are on Christian themes, which underline Krishen Khanna’s involvement both with biblical subjects as well as European artists’ representations of those subjects such as those of Pierro della Francesca. Not only Norbert Lynton and Ranjit Hoskote have chosen to write on such themes, but the artist himself has also spoken about his interests in Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’, which generated Krishen Khanna’s triptych, ‘Last Supper, Lamentation and Emmaus. ’Norbert Lynton’s essay covers ‘Betrayal’ and ‘Flagellation’, reproducing a few pencil studies along with finished works in oils. The ‘Betrayal’ shows two men in conspicuous conspiracy, evident from their facial expressions and hand-gestures. Their confabulation appears more peculiar when we observe the unsuspecting persons who are walking behind them. For the ‘Flagellation’, and finally preferred the imagery of a blind-folded person whose hands are tied up along with this torso, to make his helplessness more conspicuous. It is obvious that Krishen Khanna is moving away from the Christian connotation to the larger context of violence inflicted by man on man.
Ranjit Hoskote in his essay on Krishen Khanna’s Raising of Lazarus, argues in terms of ‘the Secular Miracle’ about it. According to the Biblical episode the mother of Lazarus cried in extreme sorrow as her son lay dead. It was from his burial that Christ caused him to become alive once again while amazed bystanders were watching. As Hoskote observes, Khanna not only removes the peripheral personages and settings, but also introduces elements of indeterminacy of interpretation. One possible interpretation is that of Christ having turned into a tyrant issuing orders to an almost crippled person barely managing to get up. Hoskote links this to grouping to a whole range of characters that Khanna has depicted in several paintings through 1970s of military dictators and rapacious generals bullying over their emaciated victims.
In his own concluding essay on his involvement with Christian themes, Krishen Khanna explains the first part of the triptych to be an extension of the Biblical Last Supper, which represents not the feast but an anxious deliberation in progress among the concerned persons, as if expecting an impending tragedy. This is very effectively handled by mutually interacting facial expressions and gestures. The ‘Pieta’ turns into an archetypal mourning of a mother over the body of her dead son, as a sequence of violence unleashed by mindless rioting. The three characters are carefully chosen and delineated in the third painting called ‘Emmaus ‘. It is again a Biblical theme when Christ, after his Crucifixion, had joined two unsuspecting persons for a meal. Here the figure of Christ has an expression of unease, as if troubled by such helpless persons posed in front of him. Krishen Khanna, universalizes, as well as, unmistakably localizes the Christian episodes, for the onlooker. As explained by Krishen Khanna, the image of Christ in the third painting described above, is more like one of the fakirs around the Nizamudin mosque of Delhi.
In her essay on ‘Serenading Lajwanti’, Gayatri Sinha interprets Krishen Khanna’s paintings of the Bandwallahs, also his persistent subject since 1970s. Gayatri Sinha reads many connotations in it. The painter represents the sub-culture of the streets, the spectacle when the Bandwallahs lead the baratis, the bridegroom’s marriage procession at night, very common to north-Indian weddings. The painter is a sympathetic narrator of this comic entertaining ‘act’, by musicians in soldiers’ uniform, playing the colonial period band. The soldiers who otherwise cause destruction, themselves appear old and haggard, playing out popular tunes as if serenading a commonplace girl.
Gayatri Sinha expands her view point of Krishen Khanna’s concerns in the essay titled ‘O.K.Tata’. It is a slogan inevitably painted on the millions of trucks that criss-cross the county. Krishen Khanna brings out the monster-looking appearance of the speeding truck and the characters and other cargo, like cattle, briefly visible to the onlooker. The rear view, of the truck as a composition of the ‘human condition’ is really brilliant.
Two very expressive faces stand out in ‘A stranger in Gyaniji’s Dhaba’, analyzed by Norbert Lynton, who also has discussed the ‘Evening News’. While the ‘Dhaba’ leads to situations of fakirs or the poor engrossed in partaking their frugal meal. The reading of the large sheets of stretched newspaper is an occasion of ordinary crowd responding to the absorbing or horrifying news of the day. The artist has been an unobtrusive observer of these trivial though persistent actualities. Tanuj Berry’s essay covers the painting ‘The Blind King and Blind folded Queen’ which is an epic-derived subject, the kind of fateful situations amidst which Gandhari and Dhritrashtra were entangled with as described in the Mahabharata. The troubled man and woman in their expressiveness, including their sculptural versions, belong to the same kind of imagery as in his Bible-derived characters or the fakirs of Nizamudin.
I have always thought of Krishen Khanna as a serious and persistent artist restless to achieve lucidity of the language of his imagery. His forte of lucidly creating varieties of facial character, physiognomy and expressions (especially the male imagery) singles him out in comparison with the figurative painters of his generation.
Ratnam Parimoo, Painter and Art Historian is a retired Professor of Art History & Aesthetics, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda University.