The late style

On his drawing room wall is a canvas depicting the migration that followed the division of the country in 1947. Partition forced Khanna,then in his twenties,and his family to leave their home in Lahore and head to Shimla. That exodus has always haunted his work. His last solo The Savage Heart at Cymroza Art Gallery,Mumbai,in 2008,was nostalgia-imbued,as he revisited the event in his pencil drawings on paper. Select frames from that exhibition will feature in the show.

In 1948,Khanna,a graduate in English literature,took up a job with Grindlays bank in Mumbai. For Indian artists,it was a time of experimentation. Khanna soon found himself attracted to the ideas of the Progressive Artists Group,formed in 1947 by FN Souza,SH Raza and MF Husain as a platform to encourage artists to find their own language in post-colonial India. Khanna was among the second rung of artists,along with VS Gaitonde,to join the group in 1950. By then,he had been noticed in a group exhibition held in Mumbai in 1949. The first solo came in 1955 at the USIS,Chennai. Till then,art was a passion he had to devote to during free hours,after his 9 to 5 job. But in 1961,he quit banking to pursue it full-time. “There was no money in art,but when I decided to quit my job,my family stood by me. My wife knew my calling. When I showed some interest in advertising,it was she who dissuaded me,” says Khanna.

His father Kahan Chand had introduced him to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper when he was seven. As a young child,Khanna remembers picking a paper to sketch his own version of the masterpiece. He has revisited it over the years. One of his most famous works is an oil painting The Last Bite,where Indian painters,from Manjit Bawa to Akbar Padamsee and FN Souza are gathered around a Christ-like Husain in a dhaba — reminiscent of the several discussions that Khanna participated in. “We inspired each other and were also critical of each other,” says Khanna. He remembers bargaining with the owner of Kumar Art Gallery,Delhi,to pay artist Tyeb Mehta a stipend of Rs 500,equivalent to what he and Ram Kumar were getting.

Apart from a brief stint of abstract expressionism in his early years,Khanna has been primarily a realist. After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi,he painted News of Gandhiji’s Death,which showed people poring over the newspaper the day after Gandhi was shot. “I was not much for inordinate exaggeration in art. I painted what I saw and felt,” says Khanna. In the Eighties,he did an entire series was dedicated to truck art. Gyaniji’s dhaba,frequented by migrant labourers in Delhi ‘s Nizammudin,also recurred in his work.

Khanna was fascinated by the culture of brass bands and bandwallahs crop up in many of his paintings. The preoccupation began after a traffic snarl. It was the Sixties and the artist had shifted to Delhi. He was stopped on his way from out of the Garhi studios by a raucous wedding procession. Stuck in that jam,he saw this staple of north Indian weddings in a new light. “In a way bandwallahs are a relic of the past,a legacy of the British rulers,who now belt out Indian film tunes in traditional celebrations. The uniforms add grandeur and also give certain anonymity to them,almost like the military personnel,” says Khanna.
One of his earliest buyers was Dr Homi Bhabha,who picked his work for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1953. “I was posted in Chennai at that time and had left a few of my works with Husain. Bhabha bought a canvas Spring Nude for Rs 200,” he says.

The art boom changed things for all artists. Khanna now finds it difficult to keep tab on the owners of his work. “They change hands so frequently,” he says. At a recent Saffronart auction,his oil Gupshup at Gyanijis was sold for Rs 23.75 lakh,in autumn his 24 x 72 inch canvas So He Looked Away — an elongated version of the table at Christ’s Last Supper where Biblical figures are substituted by inhabitants of old Delhi — fetched Rs 27.14 lakh. “Friends call and tell me about prices my work fetches at auctions. They were sold for a few hundreds or thousands,and now go for lakhs,” he says.
More than 40 solo exhibitions later,the urge to pick up the paint brush still takes him to the basement studio of his home. “There are always things to discover. You might not succeed with every picture,but it is the chase that matters,” he says.