Echoes of a Master

KRISHEN KHANNA'S LEGACY } AN IMPACT ACROSS GENERATIONS

- Shaleen Wadhwana

In 2019, while taking a group of Delhi University students around the National Gallery of Modern Art in that city, I stopped in front of The Black Truck. This 1974 oil-on-canvas by Krishen Khanna depicts two shrouded figures sitting in the back of a truck hurtling into the night, swallowed up by black, white and grey strokes.

"How does it make you feel?" I asked the 20-something-year-olds. “Sad.” “Empty.” “Morose.” “Emotionally dark,” they replied.

The figures on this truck are the most invisibilised, the migrants who helped build India after Partition but never benefitted from its progress. Khanna, a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, consistently documented the overlooked, using scenes both mundane and mythical, I explained.

Last week, Khanna turned 100, and I want to pose another question: What does it mean for him to be the last living Modernist of our times? In his over-80-year practice, Khanna has played many roles: artist, curator, writer, public arts administrator, poet, collector.

I spoke with over 75 artists, curators, gallerists and collectors across India to understand his impact on them. Each had connected with the arts polymath in some way.

Among the contemporary artists (at least 60 years his junior), most connected with the riot of colour on his canvases, and his style: largely figurative but tinged with abstraction. Riya Chandwani, 29, said she felt “ek sannata aur bhaari cheekh (an eerie silence and a loud scream)” when she viewed Partition-era artworks such as News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948). Like Khanna, who fled with his family from Lahore to Shimla, her grandparents fled Sindh.

Chandwani’s Carrying Across-2 (2022) centres the radio, bringing life-altering news of Partition, just as the newspaper does in Khanna’s canvas, announcing the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.