Krishen Khanna @100

He is old and slightly infirm, but active. Still paints large canvases, draws, can recite from memory ‘Four Quartets’ of TS Eliot, Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and even a whole poem of Conrad Aiken, a barely remembered American poet. He is full of laughter and fun. He remembers his artist friends, the warm friendships he enjoyed with them over the decades. They grew in togetherness to which he contributed in no small measure. Krishen Khanna — who would be 100 years of age on July 5 — has been a very visible part of the modern art scene of India in the past 75 years. He has mattered to the art world as much as the art world has mattered to him.

Today, he feels unhappy and agitated over the steep decline in bonhomie between communities. He shifted from West Punjab after the Partition but carries no bitterness, just deep regret. He has intervened, off and on, stood up, spoken for plurality, mutual understanding, accommodation, reciprocity, and social responsibility.

Krishen has mentored many young artists, and never allowed his wit and humour to leave him. He has been a friend to many acknowledged masters of our time, such as MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, VS Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, with whom he remained in constant dialogue and correspondence. He stood by them, their art, their unique visions. He was part of the famous Progressive Artists Group, which singly produced a galaxy of masters, he being one of them. He is the last serving member, ‘the last man standing’, as he calls himself.

Krishen’s oeuvre is vast and varied, and it consists of such a rich repertoire of themes and styles that it is impossible to even describe it in a few words and in brevity. However, it can be noted that in its variety and richness, intensity and concern, passion and vision, Krishen’s is an epic imagination. It explores the human condition, the human predicament, the human suffering, the human empathy and human relationships and struggles: the human in dialogue with nature, seeking dignity and survival in its ordinariness, the human glowing in its everydayness as it were.

The aesthetic imagination creates images of pain and Partition, of war and failure, of the invisible in the visible, of the visible in the invisible, of Krishen’s iconic truck-wallahs and the band-wallahs. The repertoire includes classical episodes of Bhishma, Christ on the Cross, The Last Supper. While addressing and celebrating the heroic, Krishen does discover significance and value in the utterly unheroic. This is an epical chronicle of our time. More troubled than tranquil, more painful than joyous, more raw and real than ignored or concealed. Krishen’s narrative is that of togetherness, sharing, solidarity, concern, and eventual confrontation.

Many a time it would appear he is a witness to things falling apart. But he is invariably also quietly mapping the architecture of hope. The liveliness of his personality gets embodied in his art as warmth, as playfulness of colours and lines and in open invitation to companionship and dialogue. His command over visual language was noticed early in his career, both by critics and friends. Over the decades, his works have grown in complexity and subtlety. Though a thinking artist, Krishen’s works have not been a simple or loaded manifestation of his thoughts; the thoughts led to visual and aesthetic exploration in speaking colours exceeding the limits of thoughts, pushing some of them, at least, to discover and assert colours as ideas.

The colours, while expressing, also emerge as ideas. The world becomes accessible, as it were, in the epical imagination, discoverable, and its changes are taken into aesthetic account. And yet, an anxiety persists that the world ultimately is too large and complex to be apprehended fully in art. So, art takes you back to the primeval wonder, the original mystery.

Like all epics, Krishen Khanna’s art also takes you back to the world. Having encountered in the art its beauty, enchanting, tranquil, and turmoil-ridden, terrible, fearful beauty, you are back to the stark, unadorned beauty of the world and, metaphorically, of art as well.

Living life in and by art alone has been a risky matter. Yet, Krishen Khanna very early in his career gave up a top banking job in 1961 to devote himself exclusively to art. There, his artist friends were waiting for him as he walked out of Grindlays Bank, and one other friend, SH Raza, in Paris was celebrating Krishen’s liberation by throwing a party! Krishen has had, through his long career, some of the major artists of our time as his personal friends. He spoke to them, met them, critically examined their works, offered advice and support. Even the inevitable feuds between them were often negotiated to peace by him or his friendly intervention. His huge correspondence with many of them is an illuminating record of his considered responses to the artworks, the personal problems and dilemmas of these artists as well as a repository of many valuable ideas about and insights into art in our time. Just as they mattered to them, he mattered to them.

After visiting Borobudur, Krishen wrote a long letter to Raza, which carried this valuable insight about art: “By the very nature of our times and our emphasis on individual values, it is not possible for us to create such monuments. I am not bemocking the fact, simply recognising it, and it is this recognition which makes me realise that accent on personal style must, in fact, lend to many kinds of art, not just one. It is, therefore, not rational to try and equate everything that is being done as per a single norm. In fact, under modern circumstances, it is ridiculous to try and look for principles which apply with equal validity to all things. Painting now fulfills. You see what I am drawing at? There are no principles of universal applicability. When you say that you like A, B, or C and do not like D, E, and F, you are merely voicing a personal (it may be professional also) opinion. So, we can understand and accept the existence of many styles and ways of saying things and doing things which are really esoteric.”

Krishen as an artist and a promoter of and commentator on art did practice this insight. A narrative-figurative painter himself, he was never found wanting in appreciating significant non-figurative or abstract art or community-based folk and tribal art. In 1964, Krishen wrote to Raza about the then fashionable Pop art. Referring to a late evening spent at Octavio Paz’s house with Robert Rauschenberg, Krishen continued, “…Though a good talker, I found his values are those of a complete extrovert for whom anything that involves contemplation or an inward life is to be treated as suspect or phony. He kept harping on about his awareness of other people, but why should they (the big anonymous mass) invade our souls via our studios? These Pop painters are terribly self-conscious and their battery of words is as essential to their myth-making as the objects they choose to incorporate or paint. This causes a great deal of confusion, and because it is easy to talk about these things — much easier than looking at a painting which has certain values, people will be inclined to take the easier and more sensational way out. The strange thing is that some of Rauschenberg is interesting, and the man can paint. This lends force to his playing around with objects. Absurdity is only so if it is in the context of rational or logical; a pure state of absurdity cannot exist by itself. I expect you are feeling the pressure of Pop in Paris already.”

It is evident that Krishen follows his aesthetic vision while looking at others’ art and is able to offer sharply critical insights. In him, creativity and criticality have been organically linked and are simultaneous. Accordingly, his art is not merely a creative expression but also a critical statement.

While it is generally true that modern Indian art has not received commensurate critical attention, luckily Krishen Khanna’s art has elicited wide critical analysis and insights. They have helped towards understanding not only his art but also, more generally, several aspects of contemporary creative expression and exploration.

Ranjit Hoskote noted, “Khanna is a connoisseur of extreme conditions: he invokes not only the desperate and the damned but also the oddball, the quixotic and the sublimely mad. His portraits of dervish-like figures, and of saints with matted hair and rough garments exploring the wilderness, have a dual origin: if they owe much to the artist’s measured engagements with art history, they also spring from the quirkiness of his personal experience.”

Pointing to one of Krishen’s constant motif, ‘when darkness reigns’, Gayatri Sinha notes that “Krishen recasts the scene entirely in familiar terms, of the subaltern of the street, the disciples approximating the calloused, bare-footed workers in and around his own home in New Delhi’s Bhogal. At different moments, they have approximated a shifting panoply of characters: workers with whom he shared a history of migration, builders of the citadel of modernity, with little or no claim on the benefits of the state. Set in a roadside dhaba, ‘The Last Supper’ elicits a complex cast of characters in recognisable gestures of affirmation and betrayal… yet the artist continually offers a restorative vision, of a resurrection of humanity, through the agony of doubt, to a reconciliation with the human condition”.

Norbert Lynton concludes a long critical essay of Krishen with the following: “We have to assume that he uses his neat, flat, almost neo-classical style on a variety of occasions, grave or cheerful, when he wants to deploy clear colour forms with unambiguous outlines and surprising colour juxtapositions.”

Variously called epical, monumental, neo-classical, Krishen Khanna’s art and life have been a monument of memory and imagination, aesthetics and politics, creativity, and criticality, of despair and hope, of modernity and its fragility.

At 100, everything stands tall: a long life, a major art, a liberal vision, a complex aesthetics, an architecture of hope which only such a life and such an art could have put together.

— The writer is a Hindi poet-critic and art lover

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