Important Notice

“I just react to people as they are. My concern is to portray humanism. It’s about how much you empathise with people.”
- KRISHEN KHANNA

Krishen Khanna is a profoundly humanist painter whose figurative works are often populated by the subaltern- the nameless refugees and migrant labourers of urban India who were casualties of the shifting political landscape and relentless industrialisation in the decades following... “I just react to people as they are. My concern is to portray humanism. It’s about how much you empathise with people.”
- KRISHEN KHANNA

Krishen Khanna is a profoundly humanist painter whose figurative works are often populated by the subaltern- the nameless refugees and migrant labourers of urban India who were casualties of the shifting political landscape and relentless industrialisation in the decades following Independence. He has recounted visiting the old Delhi railway station with his friend and fellow artist M F Husain during the late 1940s and 1950s where they would sketch the people they encountered-“People in transit, in moments of unsettled rest.” (Artist quoted in Gayatri Sinha, “Second String of the PAG”, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, p. 40) By the end of the 1960s-a few years after he had quit his job with Grindlay’s Bank to practice art full-time- Khanna began to deepen his pursuit of social realism in his painting. This transition coincided with India’s wars with China and Pakistan and the subsequent liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. As critic Gayatri Sinha notes, “During this period his themes drew from the little eddies and streams that feed the waters of Indian life. Those that seldom attract a second glance, the non-persons of the Indian streets become Krishen’s unlikely heroes.” (Sinha, 2001, p. 112)

Beginning with a series of paintings on Che Guevara in 1969, Khanna’s work during the 1970s focussed on death, suffering, and the broader theme of marginalisation-a reflection of the turbulent political atmosphere and humanitarian crisis in the wake of the Bangladesh War. Though the present lot is undated, it bears stylistic similarities to paintings from this period, particularly Draped Nude from 1972 which shares a similar composition. The subject is a female figure shrouded in deep magenta fabric. She is seated on the ground with one knee bent and the other leg extended as she gazes ahead with an expression of sadness and resignation. The title of the painting, Figure, suggests she is one of the many anonymous migrants and refugees on the streets of Delhi, who remained on the fringes of society, neglected by the urban citizenry and those in power who had played a role in shaping their fate.

Sinha explains, “...the genesis of these paintings lies in the troubled 1970s. In the massive influx of refugees in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war and India’s failing socialist political model... Khanna’s studies of refugees of the 1940s and 50s now mutate in the migrant figures trapped in the hustling onrush of the growing metro. Their drapes of mainly unstitched cloth that protect their faces against the dust and fumes of the street identify them as rural migrants-probably fleeing the village as a consequence of drought or floods—now confined to the margins of the city.” (Gayatri Sinha, “Krishen Khanna: A Retrospective View”, Krishen Khanna, The Embrace of Love, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2005, p. 13)

Nearly thirty years earlier, the artist himself had experienced the trauma of forced migration. In August 1947, just days before Independence, 22-year-old Khanna and his family fled their home in Lahore and crossed the newly drawn Indian border. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that after resigning from his banking career in the 1960s and settling in Delhi’s Bhogal neighbourhood, he felt a strong connection with the Partition refugees from West Punjab and migrant labourers who had made the area their home, and has repeatedly returned to the theme of the dispossessed in his art.

Yet Khanna’s approach remains that of an observer rather than a participant. While his works bear political undercurrents, they aren’t didactic. His focus remains firmly on painterly expression. Painted with soft, dissolving contours, the figure appears to blend into the background, which further emphasises her anonymity and evokes a sense of quiet erasure. Observes Sinha, “... Krishen’s humanism is patent, but even more striking is what he is trying to achieve in the tense interaction between paint and form [...] Krishen’s interest has lain in an ‘all-over’ treatment of paint, in which the figures advancing or retreating become part of the colour schemata [...] Through creation of an ambiguity in form, he lends his work an ocular conception of depth [...] Krishen’s paintings in an obviously expressionistic mode [...] falls between the two poles of narrative figuration and abstraction…” (Sinha, 2001, p. 123)

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