A journey back in time

Krishen Khanna, one of India’s most celebrated modernists, captures his experiences
during Partition in his paintings, writes Madhusree Chatterjee

IN his new series of works, leading Indian contemporary artist Krishen Khanna has travelled back in time to his days in pre-Partition Lahore.

"They are mostly a recollection of events that I have seen in my early childhood — when tension between the British rulers and Indian freedom fighters was escalating," says Delhi-based Khanna.

The 84-year-old artist’s ongoing retrospective exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, is being organised by the Mumbai-based online gallery Saffronart. Khanna has completed five large format oil compositions in monochrome, which, he says, are an extension of his memories of Maclagan Road in Lahore, where he lived in a cosmopolitan neighbourhood "with Parsis, Sikhs, Christians and Muslims".

"The series begins with an oil drawing of Gurbaksh Rai, an old homeopathic doctor, saying goodbye to his family after being arrested by the police. He was an ardent Congressman. I have used monochrome because if there is something I want to say, it is best to avoid the dynamics of colour. Because, then you are not dealing with the man — the subject matter — any more," says the artist.

The painter then moves on to terrorists "trying to find a target in the way Bhagat Singh scouted for one" and also "reminisces about an English lady, who taught his mother how to read and speak the language".

"Another composition is about the ethnic cleansing that took place soon after Partition where a woman finds herself at the bottom of a horse-cart during the ethnic cleansing and a former Parsi army man-turned-dentist in Lahore," the artist explains, describing his new body of works.

The retrospective spans Khanna’s works from 1943 onwards.

"One had to be choosy about the art works, but several of my compositions — especially the black and white series — are abroad in the US and Europe. There are a lot of holes in the chronology," Khanna adds.

Walking down memory lane, the artist says he enjoyed working on his black and white series of ink sketches, which he started on when he was in Honolulu.

"I worked in a bathtub because I feared messing up the room. Most of them were shapes I saw at the bottom of the tub. I used to pour water through the sides of the papers to smudge the colours on the surface for a blurred look. It was a convenient method. I took most of my black-and-white works for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Charles Egan Gallery," Khanna recalls.

"You can see five of them at the National Gallery of Modern Art in the Capital, which is also planning another retrospective," the artist adds.

Khanna lamented that his friend Tyeb Mehta, who grew up with him in Lahore, could not manage a retrospective. "I am lucky that I did," he says.

Born in 1925 at Faislabad in Pakistan, Khanna grew up in Lahore. He studied art after graduating from the Mayo School of Fine Arts. In 1947, his family moved to Shimla after Partition. The whole experience found a way into his early works.

Most of Khanna’s works are figurative. "I used to do abstractions earlier, but now I have moved to human forms," he says. Khanna has always loved connecting to the masses through his art.

"In the 1970s and the 80s, I painted a series of trucks, ferrying workers — and coloured them with the shades of people and goods the vehicles were carrying. They were mostly monochromatic pictures," he says.

Around the same time, the artist started working on Christ as a subject. "I was looking at Jesus Christ as a holy and otherworldly person, striving and going through existence. He was a carpenter’s son and the State rose against him," says Khanna.

"If you look at my series on the Bandwallahs — whom I remember from my days in Lahore where the sahibs and the memsahibs used to listen to them — there is something sad about those people, despite the colourful compositions. I have always tried to capture human emotions in my compositions — not make life studies," adds Khanna.

The artist, who has exhibited all over the world in his career spanning more than six decades, has been bestowed with several honours, including the Lsalit Kala Ratna from the President of India in 2004 and the Padma Shri in 1990. — IANS

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