Important Notice

The bandwallah series, much like other genre work in Krishen Khanna’s large oeuvre, finds provenance in personal experience, as well as a sustained and empathetic engagement with that experience. His early bandwallah paintings date to the early 1970s, when Khanna had already been painting street figures, labourers and unorganised trade members that made up the city, and by extension, their lives, aspirations, class positions and... The bandwallah series, much like other genre work in Krishen Khanna’s large oeuvre, finds provenance in personal experience, as well as a sustained and empathetic engagement with that experience. His early bandwallah paintings date to the early 1970s, when Khanna had already been painting street figures, labourers and unorganised trade members that made up the city, and by extension, their lives, aspirations, class positions and negotiations concerning survival.

As with Khanna’s other genre paintings that depict scenes from roadside dhabas or migrant labourers, the image of the bandwallah is a form of social commentary on the class divide that continues to exist in urban Indian spaces. However, by “working serially with the same idea over an extended period, Krishen manifests his own relationship with these figures as an observer-interlocutor, one who maintains an objective engagement.” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001)

In the present lot, painted largely in red and yellow tones and blocky figures, we see the figures of two bandwallahs, seemingly resting with their massive instruments. As the trumpet almost merges with the backdrop, so do their epaulettes with the rest of their uniform. Khanna paints the bandwallahs with the heterogeneity they embody and the myriad positions they occupy in society – as traces of a time past but also of a commonplace culture in the social fabric of contemporary society.

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