Krishen Khanna at 100 is a testimony to time

Time of India

04-07-2025

Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE
Krishen Khanna who turns 100 years on 5th July 2025, has over 70 years , engaged the social, historical and political landscape of India.Krishen's exhibition that unveils in the city of Delhi on Saturday at ITC Maurya consists of works done between 2023 to 2025.
Humans as subjects
Humans have been his leitmotif. His most candid and eloquent work, Refugees Train Late 16 hours, (1947) exhibited at Saffronart , is a lasting frame of India's partition. His compositional clarity of the railway platform blends into a poignant narrative.of intense sadness and pathos.
Inspired by Life
Known for his many series, his son Karan Khanna considers the Christ, Rumi, Music and the Bandwallahs to be his finest. Reminiscing over his poignant bandwallah series, at the Kumar Gallery in 2001, Krishen said , he was moved by Chaplinesque situations which involve dual emotions. The bandwallahs for him have been a relic of the past now reduced to an anonymous appropriation.
His historic Bandwallah exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery London ( 2015) , put the spotlight on individuals who contributed to society in humble ways. His use of colour and brushwork made the mundane rise to the synergy of the creative. More recently his Bandwallah sculptures have been created as monumental entities.
Residue of time
The residue of time remains submerged in Khanna's art and the pathos of the haunting past, pulses in his works.His famed Music series was born in Madras when he was posted at the Grindlays bank and he listened to Carnatic concerts .Krishen the music lover told me last year he would go for western music concerts with F.N. Souza , on his travels to London.
For him art is a discipline that invites chance. Between paintings and drawings, it is his passionate precision that resonates. His Mahabharata , Rumi, Truckwallahs and Music series all become pages of the past brought forward. Benediction on the Battlefield, derived from the epic Mahabharata spelt magic in monochrome.In 2016, one of his most epic exhibitions was held at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi.
Voracious reader, Biblical series
At the same show was his Pieta. Krishen revels in the power of the narrative .The Pieta for him was not born of realism but born of the human experience.The emotive quotient has always been the most important part of the recording of many of his series born of Biblical narratives.
Krishen's most epic work is the mural The Great Procession at ITC Maurya in Delhi.It was created with the help of students from the Jamia Millia Islamia University. The Great Procession' a hand-painted marvel, was created in the 1980s, and it took nearly four years to complete and was designed in the form of a Buddhist rock-cut cave with multiple perspectives. Krishen's mural is a fusion of the Mauryan past with the period of the 1980s – its freshness and richness of Indian cultural roots, stands testimony to his aesthetic and his appetite for creating a work of depth and originality. It also has famous people from Delhi one of them being the author Khuhswant Singh.
One of his closest friends, the artist Jagdish Swaminathan penned the pulse of Krishen Khanna best : ' From the series on the truck — the ramshackle juggernaut hurtling into space piled up with construction materials and brutalised labour, to the generals and politicians negotiating peace around the table with the skeleton of humanity lying under it, to Jesus and his betrayal, to the cacophonic irrelevance of the marching band, Krishen has been preoccupied in his work with the state and fate of man in our times.'
In his larger quest, politics and identity remain fluid. His paintings constitute a powerful psychological engagement, a document of the passage of time in modern India. Biblical themes have been a part of his repertoire because he loved reading the Bible.
His Last Supper, Garden at Gethsemane, Betrayal, Christ's Descent from the Cross, Pieta, Emmaus and The Raising of Lazarus are all his love for a universal idiom of peace.
Krishen the wordsmith , has written many essays on his friends. Tyeb Mehta's first catalog essay was written by him. Krishen has also written about his friend Jagdish Swaminathan for the Lalit Kala Akadami journal.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.