Band, bajaa, record: Artist Krishen Khanna marks a century on canvas

Time of India

07-07-2025

Krishen Khanna
For a glimpse of the work of one of India's most eminent painters, you don't have to visit a gallery or museum - a hotel will do. At Delhi's ITC Maurya, which has an art collection that would be the envy of any aficionado, the showstopper is a glowing mural by Krishen Khanna in the lobby.
Titled 'The Great Procession', the mural is in the elite environs of one of the city's plushest hotels, but it captures the pulse of India's street life: women doing gupshup, a pickpocket at work, a man dozing under a tree, and a roadside dhaba where you can spot writer Khushwant Singh. It's only fitting that this very hotel will host Khanna's 100th birthday celebration on July 5. Later in Nov, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai is holding a retrospective of his work.
Krishen Khanna's 'The Great Procession'
The last surviving member of the iconic Progressive artists group, which included artists such as M F Husain, F N Souza, S H Raza and Tyeb Mehta, is still sketching and drawing at 100. 'He can't stand for too long, but he doesn't stop working,' says his son, photographer Karan Khanna.
With his pucca English baritone and even more pucca Punjabi sensibility, the handsome Krishen Khanna has always stood apart. His arresting tableaux of ordinary Indians and New Testament scenes may not have seduced the auctioneer's hammer in quite the same way as the other Progressives, but their prices have been on a steady march like the bandwallas he so loves to paint.
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His personal auction record was set last year at an AstaGuru sale, where one of his bandwalla paintings fetched over Rs 9 crore.
'Except Husain, most of the other Progressives didn't see much financial success in their lifetimes, so it's good to see Khanna getting his due,' says Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder of auction house Saffronart.
Not that Khanna, who quit a plum banking job to become a painter, ever begrudged the success of his fellow Progressives who were also his closest friends.
'Auction prices are not really the measure of the artistic worth of a work. In fact, some of my pieces have gone for more than they deserve,' a candid Khanna told me some years ago during an interview at his Gurugram bungalow, whose walls were lined with works by his contemporaries.
His first sale - bought by the eminent nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research more than six decades ago - went for the then eye-watering sum of Rs 200.
'Husain sold it for me and the long telegram he sent telling me about it probably cost more than what the painting fetched,' he laughed. Khanna, too, owns a Husain canvas that he bought for a mere Rs 60. 'He gifted it to me because he borrowed a book from me and lost it.
''
It was Husain who brought Khanna into the Bombay Progressive Art Group, the influential artists' collective that pioneered Independent India's modernist movement in the forties, taking visual art in a new direction and helping local artists discover their own painterly idiom.
Khanna's tryst with the limelight occurred in 1949 when painter and professor S B Palsikar took a small canvas of his which depicted crowds poring over the newspaper after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, and put it up in a Bombay Art Society show alongside works by V S Gaitonde, Souza and Raza.
'I thought my canvas might be rejected,' recalled Khanna, 'but there it hung, right in the middle.' From friends like Tyeb came much-needed words of encouragement.
'Chaar linein lag jaayen par hon aisi (Let it be just four lines, but let the lines be like these),'' said Mehta, perceptively commenting on the bold lines that are a hallmark of Khanna's style.
A raconteur who peppers his conversation with anecdotes, Khanna is just as skilled at storytelling with his brush. He ploughs a few thematic furrows but uncovers fresh ground each time. And whether it is powerful depictions of biblical scenes, urchins devouring slices of watermelon or the portraits of truck drivers, the essence of India vibrates in every hue and stroke.
'The mundane fascinates him, and he always draws from his surroundings,' says Karan.
'For instance, his paintings of migrant workers were inspired by what he saw when we lived in Jangpura - trucks packed with labourers, their bodies slathered with red brick and white cement dust. Even his Christ was based on the fakirs he spotted around Hazrat Nizamuddin.' His aim was never just to depict the common man, but to do so with empathy.
In one painting from 2002 titled 'Problems of Bandwallas', he captures the quiet fatigue of musicians playing the same tune at one wedding after another. And his Draupadi, as Kishore Singh of DAG observed in a curatorial note, is painted from a female perspective for, it focuses not on her disrobing but her public humiliation.
His Pieta - very different from Michelangelo's classic marble statue of Mary cradling the broken body of her son - has a Punjabi woman so devastated by loss that she is yelling her head off and slapping her head with her hand.
'Christ carrying the Cross' is a work full of tension, starkly reminiscent of a skeletal rickshaw-puller straining up a slope. 'Last Bite' is his cheeky version of The Last Supper (of which he has painted many versions since age seven when his father first brought home a print of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous work).
It portrays Husain as the figure of Christ with the Progressive artists grouped around him in a dhaba. So where does the fascination with Christian themes spring from? 'Some things just insist on being painted, like the Pieta,' Khanna told me.
'I have painted Arjun on the battlefield and Draupadi too. I don't consciously decide I am going to do a series, but certain subjects haunt me.''
If the Bible and Mahabharata are central to his work, so are memories of Partition. His family moved from Lahore to Shimla when he was in his twenties - a relocation that left a lasting imprint. In a painting titled 'Refugee', he returns to the trauma of those years. 'I draw my impression of those days in the same way that others write about them,' he said. 'An artist can't change things, much as he might want to but his work can stand as a witness.
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Set to mark his centenary, the self-taught artist has no regrets about quitting a 13-year career in banking to pursue what he calls a 'compulsive itch', an itch that has given Indian art some of its most evocative images of everyday life.