The modernist centenarian: A hundred years of Krishen Khanna

KRISHEN Khanna, the painter whose brushstrokes helped draw the contours of Indian modern art, is 100. Still painting, still drawing, still sketching.

- MANISH SAIN

The last of the surviving modernists and one of India's most influential artists celebrates his 100th birthday on Saturday, his empathetic brush spanning the history of contemporary India through all its highs and lows.

There has been little romanticism of the subaltern in the brush of Khanna as he drew truckwallas, labourers, fruit and vegetable sellers, fisher folk, fakirs, and bandwallas an artistic sensibility that chiselled out for him a niche in the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) he inhabited with M F Husain, S H Raza and F N Souza.

If his Christ is a man battered by old age, his bandwallas are uncomfortably stuffed inside tight-collared jackets of gaudy colours, and his truckwallas are faceless migrant labourers, their identities obscured as if on an endless journey through time. All of them figure within Khanna's universe that sees and unflinchingly depicts the harshness of life often in colours that are a celebration of it.

Khanna has spent eight of his 10 decades in front of the canvas, reflecting on and putting into paint those who live on the margins. He continues to draw and paint at his Gurgaon home.

"Of course I still paint," Khanna told PTI in 2021 a few days after he celebrated his 96th birthday, a little surprised he was asked the question at all. In fact, said the artist, he is always working on something, still finding out things, still thrilled by the very act of painting.

"Art is not just about making faces or drawing this or that. It's the churning of the spirit inside, which is far more important. Everything else then falls into place," Khanna told PTI in a phone interview.

Four years later, the indefatigable spirit continues undiminished.

"He can't stand for too long, but he doesn't stop working," his son Karan Khanna told the Times of India as his father celebrates his landmark birthday.