As the Bhupen Khakhar retrospective plays out at the Tate Modern, curator Nada Raza speaks to Gayatri Sinha, on what attracted her to the artist, and the challenges that his work presents to the contemporary viewer.
Gayatri Sinha: Can you give us an idea of the extent of the show, the number of works in different mediums?
Nada Raza: There are over 90 objects in the exhibition, spanning five decades, spread over five large rooms. These are broadly chronological but with thematic groupings within each room, tracing Bhupen Khakhar’s artistic development. The works include oils on canvas and board, works on paper, sculptural ceramics and glazed plates, a painting on cloth, and three paper accordion folded books that are exquisitely painted in watercolour. We have also included prints and etchings, printed books, sketchbooks and photographs.
GS: In the early 70s, Bhupen Khakhar seems to effortlessly switch into an ironic/humorous take on popular culture and its many aspects - rituals, ceremonies, past and present customs, his attempt, as your text quotes, was both to “celebrate and to satirize.” With the exception of Atul Dodiya, he is also quite unique, in assuming this position. How do you think this came about?
NR: Khakhar once mentioned (in response to Timothy Hyman) that his humour was a sort of foil, a way to cope with the discomfort of being different, specially while he was in the closet and perhaps more so afterwards. He was also heavily influenced by satire in writing - his stories were bawdy and dealt with the petty yet human preoccupations of working class families - imported soap, borrowed kitchen utensils, sexual fantasies. He used humour to disarm, to create a ripple or expose hypocrisy in polite society even as he moved effortlessly through different social milieus in Baroda and Bombay. His friends were wealthy collectors and poor shopkeepers. Atul Dodiya was of course quite close to Bhupen, but there was a wider literary circle too, Gujarati writers, with a shared critical sensibility. Khakhar employed satire in different ways, sometimes playful, at other times quite explicit. He was irreverent and witty, sometimes shocking, but without slipping into crude offence.
GS: This is the first major posthumous exhibition of Khakhar’s work. As curator of the exhibition, what drew you to his work?
NR: Chris Dercon met Bhupen Khakhar in the Netherlands in the 1990s. A few years ago he was able to view the works in the estate (via trustee Praful Shah), which form the core of this exhibition. In his words, “After Amrita Sher-Gil it felt quite natural to choose another radical Indian artist who 'shows and tell' or comments on the position of the modern Indian artist, in the country and beyond, combining a very personal or autobiographical stance with a strongly critical attitude - beyond art.”
GS: The caricature of the self, which also serves as a confessional, is an important aspect of Khakhar’s work. His enactments vary from Russian spy, to British man out on a date, to lover. The fact that he built a permanent theatre in his own home and painted for theatre is another aspect of his interest in performance. Do you see Khakhar as performing the role of the artist and if yes, what would be its leading contours?
NR: If you look back at the discussions happening around Khakhar - in Vrischik, and later in the Journal of Arts and Ideas and so on - the role of the artist as an Indian intellectual, as political, as committed to expressing local concerns, was constantly debated. At the same time a group of very male painters were based in Mumbai, moving to London or Paris, representing this very international notion of modernism, following international movements such as abstract painting. The overblown figures of Picasso or Warhol were hard to escape, as a sort of prototype for the successful male artist. Personalities like Husain or Souza were increasingly conscious of how they presented themselves; they were quite constructed and performative in a way.
Khakhar was interested in this idea of the artist very early on, you can see his playful yet critical approach to self-representation in the photographs in the 1972 catalogue Truth is Beauty, which parodies advertising but also western notions of economic success - toothpaste, cigarette advertising. They are very telling in their approach to aspiration, both artistic and economic. He was additionally very interested in theatre, and in film - he wrote a play, and painted the sets when it was performed. He also painted the sets of a film, Kali Shalwar, based on the Manto story. In the film Messages From Bhupen Khakhar, which we will play in the exhibition, he really performs for the camera, even staging these short opening scenes where he is at the centre of a mandap, playing with the iconography of Krishna, or perhaps also as a bridegroom. Khakhar’s use of everyday iconography ranged from the devotional to Bollywood - borrowing from the performative cultures in his midst. The house, Parmanand, was called an ‘open air theatre’ and he was great friends with Naushil Mehta, Adil Jussawala and others. Of course at Chemould in 1972, he staged a mock wedding procession; I hope we can unearth some more documentation of that evening which Richard Bartholomew wrote about. At Documenta IX he staged the paan beedi shop, painting the kiosk in situ even as he was struggling with his sight at the time. There are many tales of Khakhar playacting, being outrageous in public, a prankster. For a man who abandoned a potential corporate career to become an artist, his commitment to self-expression became a way of being.
GS: How do you read Khakhar’s very persistent interest in ‘the insignificant man’? Can we think of him as a flaneur of the streets of Baroda, and ordinary men are his subjects? How do his readings of class, his desire to shock with the “vulgar” appear today?
NR: Khakhar’s use of colour, of petty bourgeoisie aesthetics as they were called at the time by Geeta Kapur, was both radical and very personal. He abandoned his early iconoclasm and collage and developed the series of trade paintings as they are called. Amit Chaudhuri has just written on them for The Guardian, and how they triggered memories for him of men from Kethwadi in Mumbai, where Khakhar grew up. When Khakhar speaks of them being ‘vulgar’ he does not refer to the work but to the response of the art world, as they were not commercially successful. The work is sensitive, painted with great attention to detail - when he paints a front room China cabinet, or the interior of a barber shop, the inventory of everyday objects is painted in incredibly affectionate detail. There is a deep awareness of class, but also a commitment to belonging within a community, and describing these characters from bazaar life with the compassion and expression that was missing in the formal inventoryoftheCompany School which he had studied.
GS: Considering that he believed that the artist must work close to his environment-and the environment that he worked in was specificallyinspiredbyGujaratiwriting,andvernacularpainting traditions, how do you think he integrated the influence that England wrought on Khakhar? Outside India, it was the country with which he had the most persistent dialogue.
NR: Khakhar’s engagement with England began even before his first visit in 1976. Vivan Sundaram, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Geeta Kapur had been to study in London, and the influence of Peter de Francia or Kitaj was already present. Khakhar had shared quarters with a visiting artist, Jim Donovan. When he encountered Howard Hodgkin, it enabled a more sustained dialogue with the British art world. Hodgkin told others about the Indian artist he admired, having seen early trade paintings at the triennale in Delhi. That led to Khakhar exhibiting with Anthony Stokes in London in 1976, then living in England for a few months in 1979, as artist in residence at Corsham. His account of the time is quite wonderful, the deadpan humour evident in his estimation of the gloom and meanness of British life. Yet it is still, to my mind, a postcolonial encounter. London is still the centre, and while Khakhar builds relationships here and makes some quite astute works, like Man in Pub or the Weatherman, it is not commercially a huge success for him.
GS: The deflating of the exotic or the grand, and the injection of the “day to day” in a condition of unawareness runs through all his work. He said (interview with Tariq Ali, 1986) that he preferred early Renaissance painting because it concerned itself with everyday life. How does his approach sit among painters today?
NR: That collapse of high and low you speak of was a very contemporary concern at the time - Khakhar was conscious of popular culture and revelled in it. He loved Bollywood, for instance, and he read pulp fiction, and that exuberance comes through. There is such enjoyment in his rendering of certain details. The towel in the barber shop, the plastic flowers, the front room cabinet. (I am not sure what you mean by unawareness). I saw some wonderful picchwais while researching this exhibition and it really was both forms, that and the Sienese works that find a congress in Bhupen Khakhar’s oeuvre. They are treated as equivalent, as are Hockney and Kalighat, Breughel and Nathdwara. I think that is really what distinguished Khakhar. He could so easily have been dismissed as postmodern, as someone who appropriated, as pastiche. His borrowing is so sincere; however, so appropriate to both the content and the narrative contexts he develops. Son is the Father of Man, for instance, is a classical Madonna but the expressions are so moving that you accept the image on its own merits, a man gently cradling an older man in a strange and powerful embrace. The engagement with the quotidian is now quite familiar in contemporary art, but in Khakhar the ‘vadki’ or the tacky shop interior even when being exposed as tawdry was still regarded with great affection, not simply as a statement. I love his line on great painting being like a good plot in a novel, complex, not just a one-liner.
GS: Do you see Khakhar’s influence in India, South Asia or beyond in present day practices?
NR: I have in my research met so many artists and travellers who visited his house in Baroda -Tariq Ali, for instance, its extraordinary how embedded he was in an international, progressive world. We don’t think much about it now when Indian art and artists circulate in international markets with such ease, but at that point India was changing, and Khakhar was an important ambassador.
The many tribute shows since Khakhar’s death in 2003 prove the strength of his legacy. He was of course part of the shift, away from abstraction, that coalesced with the group around the exhibition Place for People (1981), so the move towards figuration and narrative that Baroda is associated with, is linked to Khakhar and to his friends. He was also at Documenta, in London, one of the first of his group to find recognition abroad. Atul Dodiya’s tribute Sri Khakhar Prasanna is well known. Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat - many contemporary artists spoke to me about Khakhar during my research. We felt it was important to reappraise him for a new generation, to get beyond the myth and allow the work to circulate.
Image: Bhupen Khakhar, American Survey Officer, 1969, courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.