Important Notice

Krishen Khanna “…was introduced to Christianity through the standard route for most upper- and middle-class children – his missionary school in Lahore. At 80, he says affectionately, he ‘still remembers the names of the nuns who taught me at the Sacred Heart Convent’. The artist…often cites, to those interested in knowing the starting point of his abiding interest in Biblical themes, how his father, a history professor, brought home a print of... Krishen Khanna “…was introduced to Christianity through the standard route for most upper- and middle-class children – his missionary school in Lahore. At 80, he says affectionately, he ‘still remembers the names of the nuns who taught me at the Sacred Heart Convent’. The artist…often cites, to those interested in knowing the starting point of his abiding interest in Biblical themes, how his father, a history professor, brought home a print of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper from Milan. The young Krishen copied it and learnt his first lessons in composition and scale” (Nina Martyris, “Christ sups at a dhaba”, The Times of India, Mumbai, 30 August, 2005).

Since this early introduction, Khanna has frequently returned to biblical themes and subjects in his work including, most famously, the Last Supper, the Pieta, and Emmaus. In the artist’s work, however, Christ and his apostles are always replaced the subaltern of Delhi; turbaned truck drivers and wizened tea-stall owners who exist in the shadows at the periphery of urban society, perpetually caught up in a struggle for survival. As the artist explains, “The Christ series are set here in Delhi, Nizamuddin in fact, and appear as current happenings. He is wandering amongst us or sleeping with us followers on the road islands. They are not religious pictures as such… I painted Jesus, not in the image given by European painters, but as on the fakirs one sees around Hazrat Nizamuddin” (as quoted in Chanda Singh, “Looking Beyond His Canvas”, India Magazine, 1984).

In the present lot, an elongated version of the table at Christ’s Last Supper, Khanna substitutes the thirteen Biblical diners for the same number of locals from old Delhi, huddled against each other and sipping on bowls of steaming tea to fight the cold. In executing this exchange, the artist brings attention to the massive marginalized and dispossessed populations of large cities, a subject that has always been close to his heart. By “…taking so exalted a subject as the Christ and placing it in so rude a setting that the artist triggers a sense of shock and awe: the shock of delayed recognition and awe at the subject itself. Through this very mundane depiction, Khanna is in fact merely being faithful to the divine modus operandi of Christianity, where the promise of salvation is realised through that most intimate and earthy of forms, a babe in a manger” (Nina Martyris, Ibid.)

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