Art on his sleeve: Celebrating Krishen Khanna at 100

He's been a banker, art collector, art administrator and a mentor to generations. He is now the last surviving member of the pathbreaking Progressive Artists' Group. Through it all, Khanna has painted, using myth and the mundane to represent 'the human caught up in their condition', and to immortalise workers, migrants, truck drivers, bandwallas and others denied their due. How would he like to be remembered? 'A person looking at my paintings should think: This man had a calling,' he says, in an exclusive interview

- Lalita Panicker and Dhamini Ratnam

On July 5, the legendary painter Krishen Khanna turned 100.

The last surviving member of the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) — a motley crew of Modernists formed around the time of India's independence, which included MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, Akbar Padamsee, KH Ara, Bhanu Athaiya, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Ram Kumar — Khanna's life stands testament to the journey of modern India, and Modern art.

As a young man, he witnessed both the horrors of Partition, when he and his family were forced to leave their home in Lahore and move to Shimla, and the joyous beginnings of a newly independent country that found its moral core in a unique blend of secularism, welfare and tradition.

Khanna was born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, in Pakistan), to Kahan Chand Khanna, a teacher, and Shiela Khanna, a homemaker. At 13, he received the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship to study in England. His study there was interrupted by World War 2, however, and he returned home.

He eventually earned his degree from Government College, Lahore, and began to work at an art press. He kept training in art alongside, a subject he had studied in school and college.

He was 22 when, two days before Pakistan was born, the Khannas moved to Shimla, leaving almost everything behind.

Though deeply interested in art — by 1946, a work of his had already been exhibited by the Punjab Art Society, and he had bought his first work of art — financial stability was a necessity. The year 1948 would prove to be a critical one for him. He began working at Grindlays Bank in Bombay. He bought a painting by Souza, an artist he would later befriend.