First published on 4th July 2025
A 1954 Portrait of MF Husain by Krishen Khanna, a mid-sized painting in oil on canvas is a prescient point of entry into the artist’s practice. Husain is depicted in a contemplative mood, holding his head with one hand, preparing to sketch on paper with the other. These are early days in the friendship between the two men, when Krishen was still an occasional painter, and Husain still wore identifiably Muslim clothing in the small, if profoundly cosmopolitan and egalitarian, art scene of Bombay. Krishen’s skill in portraiture is quite emphatic. Here the cavernous backdrop arraigned on either side with loose architectural details lends the foreshortened figure a monumental grandeur, not constrained or constricted by the still, static act of drawing.
In the nearly eight decades since, Krishen Khanna has continued to reveal his profound emotional investment in the human figure. The scale of the investment dazzles with its confidence, even as he draws the singular, heroic body, and unidentified figures, within the same frame. The appearance of the epic hero and the ordinary worker become critical in our understanding of the kind of oscillation he effects between India’s class and caste-riven society. One may read Krishen from the ground that was also seized by Husain and Tyeb Mehta, both of whom draw on the human figure with an entirely different intent. While Husain’s view is celebratory, intended to beguile with its beauty, and to soften the blows of circumstance, Tyeb’s figures are beyond redemption. Suspended in a slow descent into an abyss, they petrify the fall into a state of annihilation, or forgetfulness. However, the evocation of the fall, like Lucifer’s descent into darkness, or the body consigned into pataal, need not involve a heroic act. Tyeb renders the singular anonymous body’s fall, but seeks no other means to confer heroism on the flailing, falling subject.
Krishen Khanna appears to complete the third part of this triangulation of forms with an all too human view, one that brings the gods into the basti, and the divine into the dhaba. From the mid 1970s, when the Emergency was declared and intellectuals, writers and thinkers arrested and jailed, Krishen turned to the greatest story of protest, the Bible. His schoolboy study in England, particularly of the New Testament, of Eliot, Yeats and the war poets was vindicated by his transposition of the Christ narratives into the working-class areas of Delhi. The city in the 1970s was in the throes of manic building activity. Large colonies like Greater Kailash were being carved out of the rich kharif yielding agricultural land of Yakutpur, Devli gaon and Zamrudpur. Resigning from his job in Grindlays bank, pinning up his canvas on the back of the door in the rented family home in Bhogal, Krishen drew an epic imaginary onto the scenes of the street. Often sketching in a Bhogal dhaba himself, he drew on the intimate connection between the dhaba and the truck hurtling across darkened highways. Bhogal, even today, is a vast chaotic mandi, its streets congested with push carts and daily wage earners. Even as the wave of refugees from West Punjab moved further east, dhabas came up all the way from Peshawar to Calcutta, on the grand trunk road, offering rustic food for the trucker’s palette. Krishen drew and painted both of these symbols of transition and change. Ramu’s dhaba as the scene of passing, rest and sustenance for the weary subaltern body, also becomes the site of the miraculous, a place for the apostles to meet and confer. As rough hewn labourers, their attitude is sombre and contemplative. At stake is their very survival in the charged political atmosphere of that time.
What we see here then is a complete inversion of what artists like Krishen himself had been attempting earlier. The expressionist works of the 1950s that sought to internationalise the painterly language of an entire generation of painters in dense, even blotchy impasto abstraction is here put to rest, as the artist seeks to depict in his words “all emotions that flesh is heir to”. With a canny reading of the Indian street, Delhi’s layered architectural history and the seething political ferment of the time, he inverts history and cartographic distances with ease. Herein, the Christ narrative is reconciled to an Indian reality, with themes of betrayal and loss transposed into the colonial police stations of the capital city.
Krishen Khanna’s career throws up so many points of entry and analysis that one can lift different skeins of thought. Perhaps, at the apex of his achievements lies his vast mural at the Maurya Sheraton, with its piquant humour, the easy flow of characters from an ancient past to the present. Invoking the 7th century Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang (Xuan Zang), artist friends in Garhi studios, pandits and polluting dogs, refugees and Delhi’s intellectuals, loiterers and lovers, an unmatched opus of human engagement unfolds. In a letter of 1984, describing his “greatest shortcoming” Krishen spoke of “A refusal to be tied down to an image either in the minds of others or in my own.” There is a reconciliation of personal histories at work, as we trace his love for Urdu poetry and acquaintance with the pirs from the dust bowl of Multan, where his father was posted in early years, to the traumatic journey back from England when his roommate died and had to be buried at sea. Working as a young printer in a press in Lahore during the intense summer heat of 1947, he witnessed Partition, and was to draw it over the years as a biblical exodus, a quest for survival. The turbulent 1960s and 70s, with war and political upheaval coincided with his leaving Grindlays bank to become a full-time painter. Much of his work took place in the congenial exchange of close friendships of the time, forged both in Delhi and in Bombay. Writing in an exhibition catalogue at Dhoomimal’s in 1979, Krishen spoke of his friends’ affection, of how the show had been presented by J. Swaminathan, and the catalogue cover designed by Manjit Bawa.
Krishen’s painterly moods oscillate between easy humour to the deeply contemplative. In later years, he has turned to the theme of the Mahabharata, the great war that addresses the ethics and justification of violence. He paints the dying Bhishma Pitamah, the patriarch who in the throes of death for 58 days gave valuable lessons on truth and kingship.
In the face of the loss of his friends, and in a bewildering new world order, Krishen even in his centenary year has continued to sketch; the figures from his past are palpable and real, and reappear, with neighbourly chatter in his drawings. Together, astheymaketheirway through the melee of the march, to the sounds of music, they constitute his peaceable kingdom.