Marching to his own beat
The first time we met was at a gathering of luminaries at a retreat in Goa intent on saving 'Democracy in India'. We did such things in those distant days of the 70s. Goa was still an unexplored destination. There were dancers, poets, historians, political activists, the odd freedom fighter, one of each. Manohar Malgoankar the novelist lived in Goa and was our unofficial host to discovering the state, in between the long sessions at the conference table.
Krishen Khanna, well known by then, was the artist. He was then as he still is now a handsome man; with a fresh pink complexion from his Lyallpur childhood in Pakistan, the thick swatch of hair falling over his forehead, a secret smile playing over his pursed lips.
When he finally spoke, we listened. 'Let us not forget,' he said 'the leela of this ancient place, let us not forget to live!' In that one moment we forgot who we were as individuals. We danced.
Khanna was the band-master of every world he entered. In much the same way that the red and gold brass buttoned Bandwallas in his paintings who emerged from his canvases in the 1980s played their trumpets through marriages, parades, political rallies and funerals. They marched to their own music.
They could be said to reflect the trajectory of his life. In his autobiography, The Time of My Life: Memories, Anecdotes, Tall Talk, of a childhood in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and then in pre-partition Lahore, followed by a very privileged schooling on a Rudyard Kipling scholarship at the Imperial Service College of England in 1940, Khanna describes how his father would eat a piece of fruit at the table. 'He would almost attack the fruit and examine it while chomping to see where strategically he needed to bite next. While his teeth sank into the fruit, some kind of a process of suction would be set in motion, simultaneously, so that not a drop of juice went astray…' In 1947, the family as with many others, left their home driving across the divide in a car. They found a second home in Shimla.
'I remember my interview with the top brass at Grindlays Bank,' Khanna says with the same mischievous smile. 'It was a formal dinner with full tableware and cutlery that also included a marrow spoon. When they served a marrow bone, I used the marrow spoon as I had done in my schooling days in England.' He got into Grindlays in 1948.
Khanna's Bombay chapter
By then he had met Renu Chatterji and married her subsequently. She belonged to an equally distinguished family. Her brother P.C. Chatterji is considered a doyen of Indian Broadcasting and has written several books on the subject.
When they moved to Bombay, the artist in Khanna began tugging at his tailored suits. His 1950 painting, News of Gandhiji's death, attracted the attention of Rudolf Von Leyden, the émigré art connoisseur from Europe. Von Leyden went to anoint the mixed cabal of artists that would put Bombay as it was known as the front runners of post-Independence Indian art.
As Khanna described Von Leyden's influence in a recent biography: 'He belonged to a generation of immortals… He never said as much but he was a votary of beauty and was not given over to tightly held theories, there was much open mindedness which made discussions [more] lively.'
Another immortal was Homi Bhabha, a great collector as well as being a scientist. As the head of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), he bought one of Khanna's paintings for ₹225 in the late 1940s. He created an extraordinarily prescient collection of art that decorated the walls of the TIFR. He had started a trend for corporate collectors to discover and create a renaissance of Indian art in all its varied manifestation.
'He never stopped being an artist'
In the early 1950s the Khannas came to Chennai where their daughter Rasika was learning Bharatanatyam, and met S. Krishnan, a cultural advisor to the USIS (U.S. Consulate General). Khanna's first solo show was at the USIS in 1955. Subsequently, he was to paint a great mural on the maritime glory of the Cholas for the newly built ITC Chola Hotel. The same mural now gilds the walls of the ITC Grand Chola.
Long before that Khanna's connection with the ITC Welcomgroup Hotels was fulfilled with the wonderful series of paintings that decorate the foyer of the Grand Maurya Hotel in New Delhi. Called The Great Procession, each panel tells the story in glowing colours of the daily lives of people in our world. It combines the tales from the Jataka of birds and animals as elegantly as those that appear in our miniature tradition, on street corners and albums.
When I met the Khannas again many years later, it was at one of the ITC hotels' travelling 'Art Camps' organised by Monisha Mukundan, the editor of Namaste magazine at the time. She had the gift of creating a vivid collage of artists from different affiliations with other crafts people and writers. It was a moveable camp from New Delhi, to Agra, to Jaipur in stages. Khanna may have been the doyen of the group but he never stopped being an artist who sat at his scroll of paper with his pastels and Conte crayons drawing with all the vigour of a four-year-old.
When Renu and I stopped to bargain for a necklet of beaten silver being sold outside at a market, Khanna laughed and said: 'How typical, you ladies want your freedom but are everywhere looking to be locked in chains!'
We still bought the silver chain.
The writer is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.
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