Krishen Khanna

In his 92nd year, Krishen Khanna has dramatically transformed his drawing, embracing a new scale and ambition. Using Conté on canvas, a medium that evokes the theatre of monochrome and the ease of scale, he has revisited his memory bank of images with an astonishing energy and grandeur.

Over nearly seven decades, drawing has been a medium reserved for intimate memory and reworking broad themes that underpin Khanna’s work. His closest parallels are stories retold and recounted in the tradition of the sub-continent, belonging to the fireside narrative of a village chaupal as much as the grand epic. However, within his practice, there is no closure, as these narratives are a people’s legacy, handed down through time and complex in their interpretation of opposition and resistance.

The present exhibition presents images that point to new and unexpected areas of enquiry, broadly categorised into two types: narratives of the battlefield and the journey. These unusually large drawings, varying in size and subjects, emerge from a nuanced imagination, presenting a play about small and big heroisms, small ironies, and monumental follies. At the pinnacle is the work “Benediction on the Battlefield,” the moment of the Pandavas wishing farewell to Bhishma Pitamah before his death, an image that Khanna has been working on over the decades.

Victorious in battle over the Kauravas, the Pandavas speak with the great preceptor, Bhishma, in his final hours. Propped up on his bed of arrows, Bhishma addresses Yudhishthira, exploring the nature of kingship and different forms of truth. He asserts, “Nothing sees like knowledge, nothing purifies like truth, nothing delights like giving, and nothing enslaves like desire.” At this pivotal moment, amidst the twilight of a battle with no clear victor, Krishna creates a profound connection between two great textual sources: the Mahabharata and the Bible. This connection lies in their shared narrative of adversarial conflict and persecution, as well as Krishna’s personal experience, the Partition of India.

This seemingly profound connection is a culmination of Krishna’s years of practice. From his paintings of the Christ cycle in the 1970s, set in the bastis of Nizamuddin and Bhogal, to his depictions of the moment of truth on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Krishna’s subject matter has consistently revolved around the Partition. Throughout his seven decades of intense dedication to draughtsmanship, Partition has remained a central theme in his work.

Drawing, a timeless medium, connects the artist to their earliest work. In 1947, as a young apprentice at Kapur Art Press in Lahore, Krishen meticulously worked on plates using the wet collodion process, a labour-intensive task that took hours. During the scorching summer months of June and July, he would carry the heavy metal plates to the press’s roof, sketching his fellow workers, predominantly Muslim labourers, while reading Dylan Thomas.

As the looming Partition approached, Krishen’s subject matter shifted to the urgent themes of mass migration, imagined homelands, displacement, and the small and grand acts of seeking refuge. At 22, Krishen was deeply affected by the shattered peace on Maclagan Road, the site of his family’s home in Lahore. The vivid memories of fleeing friends and neighbours in distress remain etched in his mind.

When the family relocated to Simla, a sombre and uncertain atmosphere pervaded the household. During this time, Krishen’s father sent him to Ambala railway station to receive some family members who would have arrived from Pakistan. Krishen witnessed the manifest dejection of the refugees, their faces filled with grief as they disembarked from the trains. The sight of their suffering profoundly impacted Krishen, leading to a lasting shift in his aesthetic sensibility.

Within months, Krishen was given his first posting as an officer at Grindlays Bank in Bombay. Among the Progressive Artists’ Group, whom he would befriend early in his shift to the city, the conversation around drawing continued. They met once a week at the Artists’ Centre on Rampart Row. Ara had arranged a professional model who also modelled for students at the J.J. School. They would then assemble there to sketch and paint.

During the 1940s, Bombay’s cosmopolitan identity was, if anything, enhanced by European expats, migrants fleeing Nazi Germany, and the influx of Indians from Karachi and other areas. Areas of concentration with a strong trade union base in the textile industry and the enormous growth in Bombay cinema contributed to the city’s churning and mobile population.

As a young banker at Grindlays, Krishen dealt with several Anglo-Indians seeking to emigrate to England. His portraits of Aunt Flossie in her sola topi, or Miss Amery who taught his mother English, engage the Anglo-Indian as a subject and explore the unsettled matter of identity.

Recalling his early interest in drawing, Krishen would cycle to railway stations and sketch the huddled bodies with fellow artist M.F. Husain in the early 1960s. This established an artistic intention around the primacy of drawing. In 1954, Husain and Krishen held a two-person show of paintings in Delhi’s AIFACS. Ten years later, Krishen helped organise a drawing exhibition titled “Six Painters in Black and White” at Shridharani Gallery in Delhi, featuring artists like Gaitonde, Husain, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Bal Chhabda, and himself.

The present exhibition, marked by its monumentality and ambition, ventures into the realm of the mural. This genre is widely preferred in Indian traditions, evident in cave paintings and the embellishments of palace walls, temples, and other structures that engaged the public. This exhibition traces a continuous arc from Ajanta to Sittanavasal, showcasing the painted murals of Datia and numerous structures from the 18th and 19th centuries. Krishen’s large drawing of an elephant and crocodile, or the elephant and lion, draws from these traditions, broadening the interpretation of conventional subjects in miniature and mural painting. Here, there’s no background in the accepted sense; instead, the bodies are presented in space, displaying a compact of energy and combat.

In contrast to these large, flowing muralesque works, Krishen’s treatment of human figures suggests a shift from narrative to memory. Stella Kramrisch, in her analysis of Ajanta, wrote, “The painter thinks in pictures and when he paints them, he shifts their stage from within his consciousness onto the other side of the limits of his body.” Krishen draws on his twin inheritances of the literature of the Bible and the Mahabharata, a legacy influenced by his education in England. These grand issues of state craft and kingship, central to the great epic, have preoccupied him for the past two decades.

The two texts, differing widely in their tone and forms of address, present contrasting perspectives. The humble carpenter and his followers, drawn from the community of fisherfolk, narrate allegorical tales, standing in stark contrast to the philosophical and ethical inquiries posed by the scions of the Houses of Kuru and Pandu on the blood-drenched battlefields of Kurukshetra. Despite these differences, a shared message and a link across the millennia emerge, suggesting a universal ethical stance.

Krishen Khanna’s remarkable achievement lies in his ability to weave these narratives together within his oeuvre. While these pictorial references and episodes remain distinct parts of the whole, they are united by the unifying thread of Partition. These visual references serve as metaphors, illuminating the doomed heroisms of his past. In “Benediction from the Battlefield,” arguably the central work of the show, the dying Bhishma Pitamah lies propped against his chariot. The prominent foreshortening of the wheel evokes Krishen’s paintings of the cannon Zamzama. Once a landmark of pre-Partition Lahore, a remnant of colonial rule, Zamzama was reduced to a mere plaything for children in Krishen’s childhood. In this painting, the wheel of the chariot symbolically connects the theatre of war, the fleeing migrant with his bullock cart, and Zamzama, a symbol of numerous wars and struggles for freedom. It represents the compact of conflict and occupation that defined the subcontinent. As Arjun and the Pandavas seek forgiveness and blessings from Pitamah during the final days of the battle, the shadow of Zamzama enters the frame, perhaps foreshadowing future events.

In this narrative of uncertain heroisms spanning centuries, Krishen draws attention to the pressing issues at stake: the battle for Indraprastha, the ancient seat of Delhi, becomes synonymous with the struggle over India’s Partition, its mass fratricide, and the tales of migration and loss of the homeland. For Krishen, an artist who had returned to India on the last ship to leave during World War II, the sense of displacement was deeply personal.

Typically, the tone of high seriousness is punctuated by the milieu Krishen sought to capture—a fraternal and identifiable world of the ordinary worker, the man on the street, and the daily wage earner. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, and beyond, during his time in Bhogal, Krishen sought the figures that defined a city in constant movement and transition. These included loaders on city trucks, carrying building material by night, dhaba walas or street-side food stalls that had sprung up with the influx of refugees, masons, and carpenters. These men, always in dynamic gestures or exhausted sleep, bear witness to a nation in transition, remaining on the fringes of its grand and intimate narratives.

Among the group of modernists who emerged from the post-Independence euphoria in Bombay in the late 1940s, Krishen developed the most consistent engagement with the figure of the urban subaltern. His drawings and paintings traverse the epic poetry of the past and return to contemporary street scenes, seemingly untouched by the passage of time.

In the present series, Krishen Khanna brings the subaltern into play once again. He frequently depicts statist authority as instruments of war. In his work, The Anatomy Lesson (1972), a reference to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632), depicts a group of generals in conference over a cadaver on a table. This clearly critiques institutional authority. The general recurs in a drawing in the present series. Krishen’s rendering is shadowy, the general devoid of features and his functions not identified with an assignable cause. Yet, he is extremely credible in the extensive violence across the West and South Asia. At the other end of the spectrum, Krishen portrays the victim of the Holocaust of Partition: the ordinary man fleeing, bearing bundles on his head as he coaxes a recalcitrant buffalo to cross a water body.

In Krishen Khanna’s extensive exploration of the journey or procession as a subject, we can find the core of his poetics, both artistic and literary. Central to Western thought is the journey of the Israelites in the Old Testament, a structure replicated in subsequent quests for a promised land. The roots of the procession as a literary conceit trace back to the notion of exile and return, the master paradigm of exitus and reditus, the procession’s outward flow and return. Given that a Great Procession is not merely a period of transition but symbolic of life itself, the artist draws upon it as a stage in flux, petrified in the moment by the idiosyncrasies of the travellers. Like his painting, which shifts from the small and contained to the expansive, Krishen has experimented with scalability. Central to his reading of the journey or procession is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, an influential text he read in England as a schoolboy. It is also one of the most copiously illustrated texts in the English language. Krishen Khanna acknowledges his debts to Chaucer, noting that his depiction of the great procession embodies the timeless theatre of life, a motley group appearing in the garb of a wedding procession or the great exodus of Partition, with all classes of people united in their journey. Even Krishen’s unusually large paintings on the subject are akin to “fragments,” much like the “Fragments” of Chaucer’s writings. Within this medley, he creates characters that interweave and diverge, marking the passage of decades, from the advance and recesses of memory. Although none of the surviving manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales are in Chaucer’s hand, two were copied by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe who appears to annotate transitions in Krishen’s work.

Krishen appears to be completely in sympathy with the structure or ‘frame’ of the pilgrimage, its reading as an existential quest – a journey that extends indefinitely beyond the frame. It suggests a spiritual quest, yet is completely belied by the eccentricity of the procession. In creating his figures, Krishen draws upon everyday life as an ‘open studio’, an unfolding of figures, movement, gestures, and the observations that accompany them, as well as memory and imagination. In Krishen Khanna, this state of movement as a reference to Partition must inevitably be seen as a secular diaspora. It emphasises not the carrying of emblems and fetishes, nor even the promise of land, but rather the journey itself, as an act of making meaning of life. The term for exile in Arabic (mahjer), Urdu (mohajir), and the commonly used term ‘refugee’ – for status, for individual, for colony – packed into bullock carts, pushing on foot, their bodies bent or half contorted in exhaustion, has a sickening rerun through our present times. However, when the procession mutates into a wedding march, it acquires the quality of prarabdha – of a Karmic cycle – which must be fully enacted.

The sites of the pilgrim, refugee, and migrant vary dramatically, creating a sense of ambivalence and contradiction. The artist draws lessons from migration, finding certainty in recurrence and understanding exile as a universal phenomenon. This vision is softened and even deflected by the journey itself, yet never wholly abandoned.

At intervals between the journey, the artist interjects with images of the man with a hawk, a predatory bird outlined in heavy dark tones. David Frawley draws a comparison between ancient cultural symbols of the European, Celtic, and Indic traditions, such as the falcon, cow, and lotus, which are common to these ancient peoples. Krishen’s references to the baaz or falcon are drawn from Indian miniature painting, his childhood in Multan, and the memory of hunting celebrations. This figure of authority underpins the states of flight and persecution within the artist’s oeuvre.

As Khanna’s figures journey forward, they possess a sense of identity, subject to imminent transformation. In the great cycles of journeys across Asia, such as those of Nanak, Kabir, and Buddha, the journey is transformative. It loops back into instruction, its travails elided by an epiphany. However, for the migrant, when there is no return, the journey marks identity devoid of location.

Krishen Khanna continues to paint and sketch the migrant, the journey in search of a home. He seeks to capture the fracture of land and the burden of the colossal tragedy of that time in human history on the traveller’s body. In his paintings, the huddle of moving bodies reveals structures of families hanging by a thread as they cross over states of dispossession into uncertainty. Yet, in every step, the certainty of no return is embedded deeper. The journey, seemingly random and awkward, becomes an end in itself.

Discover more artworks of Krishen Khanna at his official website: www.krishenkhanna.in