The modernist centenarian: A hundred years of Krishen Khanna

New Delhi: Krishen Khanna, the painter whose brushstrokes helped draw the contours of Indian modern art, is 100. Still painting, still drawing, still sketching.

The last of the surviving modernists and one of India's most influential artists celebrates his 100th birthday on Saturday, his empathetic brush spanning the history of contemporary India through all its highs and lows.

There has been little romanticism of the subaltern in the brush of Khanna as he drew truckwallas, labourers, fruit and vegetable sellers, fisherfolk, fakirs, and bandwallas - an artistic sensibility that chiselled out for him a niche in the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) he inhabited with M F Husain, S H Raza and F N Souza.

If his Christ is a man battered by old age, his bandwallas are uncomfortably stuffed inside tight-collared jackets of gaudy colours, and his truckwallas are faceless migrant labourers, their identities obscured as if on an endless journey through time. All of them figure within Khanna's universe that sees and unflinchingly depicts the harshness of life often in colours that are a celebration of it.

Khanna has spent eight of his 10 decades in front of the canvas, reflecting on and putting into paint those who live on the margins. He continues to draw and paint at his Gurgaon home.

"Of course I still paint," Khanna told PTI in 2021 a few days after he celebrated his 96th birthday, a little surprised he was asked the question at all. In fact, said the artist, he is always working on something, still finding out things, still thrilled by the very act of painting.

"Art is not just about making faces or drawing this or that. It’s the churning of the spirit inside, which is far more important. Everything else then falls into place," Khanna told PTI in a phone interview.

Four years later, the indefatigable spirit continues undiminished.

"He can't stand for too long, but he doesn't stop working," his son Karan Khanna told the Times of India as his father celebrates his landmark birthday.

Born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan), Khanna grew up in Lahore, and studied at the Imperial Service College, England, from 1938-42 as a Rudyard Kipling scholar where he studied art for the first time.

Back from England, Khanna's pre-Partition years were spent in Lahore, where he briefly worked as a printer. His family moved to Shimla on August 12, 1947, just three days before India became independent.

He worked at Grindlays Bank in then Bombay and Madras from 1948-1961, all the while honing his art. He became a reputable name in art circles, especially as a member of the PAG.

"He shared a strong camaraderie with the group members, often known to sketch with M F Husain on the platforms of Delhi's railway station, but Khanna's work got steeped into empathetic concerns with the subaltern communities of local neighborhoods in Delhi," Roobina Karode, director and chief rurator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), told PTI.

His figurative works became "an embodiment of artistic liberation", emerging from the aftermath of the turbulent 1947 Partition to focus on the lives of those on the margins.

It was "a subject not touched upon by his contemporaries in a profound manner", she added.

One of his first exhibitions with the PAG in 1949 featured the News of Gandhiji's Death, depicting a gathering of Indians reading newspapers - divided across gender, religion, and class but united in their collective shock of the tragedy.

He had his first solo show at USIS in Chennai in 1955.

Through the years, Khanna was assuredly shaping the Indian modern art in a way that was distinct from his fellow artists.

"Where Husain’s figures were bold and assertive, Souza's were despicable and dehumanised, Khanna's figures were endowed with tenderness and subtlety.

"His narrative pieces are rendered with free-flowing brushwork and emotional intensity, mirroring the chaos of the human condition and his vivid cultural memories," Karode said.

From his understanding of the emotional undercurrents of the socio-political changes in the country came out his many series - the bandwallahs, the Biblical stories, the Christ series, the Rumi series, and the series depicting stories of Mahabharata - each in their own right a reflection of contemporary India.

"His works have always had a delicate human touch, composed of myriad stories - the memories of his childhood, his lived experiences of the Partition and much more. The lens with which Krishen ji looks at displacement, memory and human values is very unique to him," said Sunaina Anand, director Art Alive Gallery.

In his Truckwallahs series from the early 1970s, Khanna engaged with the migrant labourers arriving in the rapidly expanding city of Delhi in more or less monochrome.

In the Bandwallahs series, beginning in the 80s, he painted the ubiquitous performers in exaggerated uniforms who would remain invisible in society if it were not for the tired music of celebration wedding processions.

"The iconic Bandwallah series pays homage to the wedding musicians - figures who are central to celebrations yet remain invisible in cultural imagination,” Karode said.

At the same time, his large-scale mural commissions, such as The Great Procession at ITC Maurya in Delhi (1980s) and Chola Migrations at Chola Sheraton Hotel in Chennai, exemplified his role in embedding modern Indian art into the architectural and public consciousness of the nation.

In his mythological and biblical works, Emmaus (2004) and The Last Supper (1979), Christ does not appear as the son of God but a labourer, "emblematic of resistance and dissent for those whose contributions are integral to the functioning of the city but are often overlooked".

The KNMA has a substantial collection of Khanna's works, including "Ramu Ka Dhaba" (1979), which was part of a series of paintings he did that explored the roadside eateries as a place of communion, rest and conversations.

Ashok Vajpeyi, poet and managing trustee of The Raza Foundation, said that Khanna shared the broad concern of a modernism, "deeply Indian but open to the world".

"...his own aesthetic vision was epical: from the grand and heroic classical to the ordinary and unheroic, his art explored them with intensity and passion," Vajpeyi said. "...if modern Indian art is about 150 years old, Krishen has lived and painted in nearly eight decades, more than half of that period. Also, though old and slightly infirm he is still painting. All these surely call for a huge celebration," he added.

On July 9, the Raza Foundation along with many galleries is organising a seminar on his art and life at the India International Centre with a two-hour colloquium by eminent art critics.

The Human Condition, a film by the French Director Laurent Bregea, will also be screened at the event.

Khanna has received the Lalit Kala Ratna from the President of India in 2004, the Padma Shri in 1990 and the Padma Bhushan in 2011.