Important Notice

A deeply humanist painter, Khanna frequently focused on the subaltern in his work. From rural migrants sleeping on the bed of a truck and exhausted musicians returning home at the end of the day, to huddled groups of refugees and labourers catching a short break at roadside tea stalls, the artist magnified and celebrated the unnoticed populations of Nizamuddin and Bhogal, where he lived and worked, on his canvases. "Krishen's phase of... A deeply humanist painter, Khanna frequently focused on the subaltern in his work. From rural migrants sleeping on the bed of a truck and exhausted musicians returning home at the end of the day, to huddled groups of refugees and labourers catching a short break at roadside tea stalls, the artist magnified and celebrated the unnoticed populations of Nizamuddin and Bhogal, where he lived and worked, on his canvases. "Krishen's phase of involvement with the theme of social realism coincided with his activist period. 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" (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna - A Critical Biography, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2001, p. 112).

In the present lot, Khanna offers the viewer a ringside seat and almost voyeuristic presence in one of his most engaging representations of street life in North India. Set at a dhaba or tea stall, a recurring location in Khanna's body of work, this canvas captures a light moment in the otherwise tedious lives of the migrant labourers that inhabit the outskirts of Delhi. As the owner pours hot tea from a kettle in the background, three labourers huddle around a makeshift table in the foreground and exchange the day's news after their meal, escaping for an instant from their misfortunes and from Delhi's biting winter chill.

Unsurprisingly, this scene closely resembles the Biblical story of the 'Supper of Emmaus', part of the narrative of Christ's visitations following his death and resurrection. "Khanna's engagement with Biblical allegory and Hindu myth has served as his instrument of engagement during troubled periods in India polity. The fact that Krishen's labouring men are reimaged in the Christ cycle of paintings indicate how he brings the economically disenfranchised and the religious minority on the same plane" (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 2005, p. 17).

In executing such exchanges, the artist brings attention to the massive marginalized and dispossessed populations of India's large cities, a subject that has always been close to his heart. In such "…very mundane depiction[s], 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, "Christ sups at a dhaba", The Times of India, Mumbai, 30 August, 2005).

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