Important Notice

“...more than an incident, a fragment of narrative or a subject, Krishen Khanna is a painter of the human condition.”

Krishen Khanna’s move from Kanpur to New Delhi, after having quit his job at Grindlay’s bank in 1961, signalled an important turning point in his artistic practice. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he embedded himself deeply into the cultural locus of the city and his art took on a deeper social narrative influenced by... “...more than an incident, a fragment of narrative or a subject, Krishen Khanna is a painter of the human condition.”

Krishen Khanna’s move from Kanpur to New Delhi, after having quit his job at Grindlay’s bank in 1961, signalled an important turning point in his artistic practice. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he embedded himself deeply into the cultural locus of the city and his art took on a deeper social narrative influenced by its rapidly changing socio-economic structures. At this time, Delhi was a rapidly expanding metropolis, with the building of residential colonies, government housing, shopping centres, institutions, and office blocks. Yet, despite these signs of economic growth, the city also saw a rising population of homeless and marginalised communities. This included daily wage earners, migrant labourers who had arrived from nearby villages in search of work, and refugees displaced by the 1971 Bangladesh War. Khanna routinely encountered these subaltern figures around his home in Bhogal, a post-Partition settlement of Punjabi migrants, and often made them the subject of his art, just like in the present lot.

Critic Gayatri Sinha explains, “Delhi gradually registered its presence on Krishen’s canvas with its sharp economic disparity, its overbearing political presence. As a city of political bosses and a swelling labour force it became an ideal backdrop for him to realise what interested him most: the continuity and contrast between the mundane and the sublime, the ordinary and the epic dimension. It would not be wrong to say that Krishen’s interest in human endeavour is really pitched at the opposite ends of the banal and the epoch-making: the oscillation between these extremes determines his responses to the personal and the political.” (Gayatri Sinha, “Art and Activism”, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, p. 98)

From his vantage point at a local teashop, Khanna observed the city’s labouring classes closely and developed a quiet sense of kinship with them. Though ever-present, these figures remained largely invisible to the broader public, even as they laboured to build the very fabric of the city. Sinha remarks, “These figures are always anonymous, they are always witnesses, they are enablers but never participants in the fruits of modernity.” (Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, “Krishen Khanna in Conversation With Gayatri Sinha and Roobina Karode on His 96th Birthday”, YouTube, 6 July 2021) Khanna’s empathy for the displaced was rooted in personal experience. As one of the few Indian students at Imperial College, London, he was forced to return to India at the onset of World War II. Later during the Partition in 1947, he and his family had to flee their home in Lahore and resettle in India.

The present lot unfolds like a vignette, as Khanna momentarily draws a pair of labourers-perhaps a husband and wife-out of obscurity. He recognises their struggle for survival and pursuit of a better life in a hostile city as an act of endurance, portraying them with a sense of dignity rather than pity. A langur playfully reaches for the bundle atop the man’s head-a tender, almost humorous gesture that reveals the artist’s empathy and wit. In contrast to many of Khanna’s other works from the 1970s and 1980s, where thin layers of pigment allow for light to refract through the surface, here the figures “are sharply defined and hard-edged, the colour fields well differentiated and the application of paint restrained to evoke the overall narrative.” (Sinha, “Rear View”, 2001, p. 134)

The artist has noted that the present lot is a precursor to the expansive mural at the ITC Maurya in Delhi that he completed in 1983. (Artist in correspondence with Saffronart, May 2025) Spread across a large dome, it features a cast of ordinary people and animals and captures the rhythm of everyday life in the city. Like Khanna’s wider oeuvre, the mural is “rich in irony. As an image of ordinary India at this site of wealth and global interface, the mural is an insistent affirmation of the values he brings to his painting.” (Gayatri Sinha, “Krishen Khanna: A Retrospective View”, Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2005, p. 15)

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