To look at artist Krishen Khanna’s bandwallahs, at the Grosvenor online show in London, is to understand both sensitivity and sensibility, says Uma Nair
To look at artist Krishen Khanna’s bandwallahs, at the Grosvenor online show in London, is to understand both sensitivity and sensibility. The colours, the contours, and the charisma of life are what looks back at you in this series called — Paintings In My Sitting Room.
Most of Khanna’s work is figurative; he chose to not explore the abstraction that most of his contemporaries were delving into. In an interview with Saffronart, he says, “I used to do abstracts earlier and I have now moved on to human forms. I thought that the person or the individual is being neglected; the person in a particular situation who is influenced by the conditions around. I want to now emphasise the human beings caught up in their particular condition.”
Khanna’s exploration of bandwallahs began in the early 1970s, these members of local brass bands engaged to play at weddings and other public ceremonies caught his eye for their uniforms and their devotion to the occupation. Speaking of how he came to paint his first portraits of these musicians, Khanna explains that once, while driving out of his Delhi studio, the path was blocked by the marching band of a wedding procession. The image of these musicians dressed all in red with their big brass instruments wrapped around them still remains as powerful for the artist today as it was that day in Delhi.
Khanna’s suite of works this time range from carefully created controlled compositions to gestural, spontaneous works created last year and this year. Between a few monochromatic drawings and coloured paintings, his deployment of colour and strokes that evoke the human situation is deeply heartwarming. His bandwallas series captures not just the quiet energy of a few musicians. In his many monochromatic works, one sees the energy in the frenzy of lines and tension in the tight compositions, with the overall picture pulsating with the interplay of formal elements. Through a lack of physical detail; Khanna’s paintings aspire towards quality of timelessness and universality. As an artist, he defies categorisation as he simultaneously occupies multiple roles — as a narrator, as a formalist, an artist who captures precious moments as a narrative of insight and in-depth understanding.
Using a palette dominated by red, yellow and green, Khanna paints the bandwallah as a tragicomic representative of the subaltern and a symbol of urban life in modern India. Though the artist portrays these men in red — practicing, playing or at rest — as cheery, their cheer is only part of their job. Their celebration is not spontaneous; it is just another mode of survival in the city. He propels us to think of the aftermath of the lives of these humble musicians. When on duty, they play into the night and must also play early morning before twilight hours for the departure of the bride to her new home.
Khanna says, “The sitting room is hardly a sitting room per se; my wife Renu reads a lot so has all her books around. It is part library and part studio with furniture that has to be moved from time to time. It is a completely new experience moving away from my usual studio in the basement. I have to look for paints on the ground which are all mixed up and improvise but it’s all a part of the game in the end.”
“In this current atmosphere, one can become very depressed, but fortunately, for me, there are the bandwallas who are still making noise. When I’m painting them, I have to concentrate fully on them. The bandwallas take prime position in my life right now,” he adds.
Khanna is known for his thematic sensibility, ranging from everyday domestic scenes, moments of historical importance, scenes from myths and poetry to portraits of people from his life and his love for literature. He has continually worked with the contrasts between the mundane and the sublime, the ordinary and the epic dimension. Constantly oscillating between the banal and the spectacular, for Khanna, the personal relativity is the fulcrum of his artistic ferment. The closest friend of the progressives still paints and is happy to create in his own home in Gurugram.