Lot 103

 

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Distinguished by their bright red uniforms, peaked red caps, and gleaming brass instruments, Krishen Khanna’s bandwallas have remained a recurring and much celebrated leitmotif in his art for six decades. They first appeared in his work in the 1970s, coinciding with a significant shift in his practice, as he began to foreground the lives of marginalised individuals within the rapidly urbanising landscape of Delhi. Alongside depictions of manual... Distinguished by their bright red uniforms, peaked red caps, and gleaming brass instruments, Krishen Khanna’s bandwallas have remained a recurring and much celebrated leitmotif in his art for six decades. They first appeared in his work in the 1970s, coinciding with a significant shift in his practice, as he began to foreground the lives of marginalised individuals within the rapidly urbanising landscape of Delhi. Alongside depictions of manual labourers and refugees, the bandwallas reflect his investment in dissecting the continually shifting social fabric of modern India. Through his perceptive and empathetic gaze, these figures who were often overlooked in everyday life emerge as protagonists in their own right. As the artist’s biographer Gayatri Sinha observes, “Positioning himself as a sympathetic spectator and a somewhat humorous narrator, Khanna has steadily painted the bandwallah; the heroics of the street have been rendered with a deep humanist sympathy.” (Gayatri Sinha, ‘Serenading Lajwanti’, Krishen Khanna: Images in My Time, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing and Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2007, p. 27)

Inspiration for this series struck Khanna one day while he was held up by a passing wedding procession led by a cacophonous brass band on his way home from his studio in Garhi, New Delhi. “The syncopated tunes intended for the jollification of the baraat (wedding party), the quotient of assertive maleness and vigour of the accompanying groom’s party, the residual image of the British colonial march past, and sanguine military energy collapsed into a singular image on that warm Delhi afternoon.” (Sinha, p. 27). What would have been a passing spectacle to some was in his mind a tragically comic scene. “They dress up but are actually in tatters. It’s grandiose and comic, but also tragic at the same time. They are poor chaps…. It proves that life is neither comedy nor tragedy all the way through, it’s Chaplin- esque,” the artist once remarked. (Artist quoted in Vandana Kalra, “The Music and Melancholy of Krishen Khanna’s Signature ‘Bandwallas’”, The Indian Express, 6 July 2025, online)

These uniformed men wielding large musical instruments are a colonial import from the days of the British Raj. Once employed in military bands, they later adapted to performing popular film tunes at wedding processions to make ends meet. Despite being indispensable to these celebrations, they remain anonymous participants in a fleeting spectacle, receding into the night once the baarat or groom’s party reaches its destination. They are hired to generate an atmosphere of festivity but are seldom included in it, embodying instead a performance of joy on command, rather than its genuine experience.

These musicians are often depicted in motion yet seem suspended in an endless performance. Much like the labourers crowded into the backs of trucks in his Rearview series, the bandwallas in the present lot are compressed into a tightly knit formation, thrusting the viewer into the heart of the action. Krishen Khanna constructs their forms through thick impasto and gestural brushwork, animated by a saturated palette of reds, blues, purples, and oranges, which lend the composition a palpable sense of rhythm and movement. The viewer is compelled to linger over each figure as the eye moves across instruments, arms, caps, and torsos that seem to emerge and dissolve within layers of paint. In Khanna’s words, “...the very idea of communicating an image is subsumed by a desire. For me the area that has to be painted has to be cultivated like a piece of earth which will produce a rich yield. The image is withheld and not forced on the ground, it isn’t drawn out and then filled in [...] the image is planted rather like a seed in prepared ground which is ready to receive it. It surfaces and often enough does not correspond to what I had thought it would be.” (Artist quoted in Gayatri Sinha, “Idylls of the Past”, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, p. 171)

Rather than depict these men as caricatures, Khanna elevates them to the role of protagonists in his art. As Sinha observes, “Their unmistakable energy and sanguine cast, lends them a vigorous propulsion across his canvas. What Krishen Khanna seems to indicate here is the status of recognition afforded by casual encounters. In this dialogic space that he creates […] he confers recognition to the forgotten fragments of India’s social fabric. In breaking with the conventional tropes of representing people of the street, he makes possible a different level of engagement, one that is sustained by a continuous arc of sympathy.” (Sinha, p. 37)

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