The Art by Dr Ved Prakash Bhardwaj - HTML preview

The Art

Krishen

Khanna

Krishen Khanna, a genre painter and a narrative seems to set up threads of connectivity.

narrativist who weaves and spins images

To all families, like his own which suffered the out of the fragments of time was born

ravages of the Partition, the accumulation of

on the year 1925 at Lyallpur, now Faislabad in

family and community narratives, of loss and

Pakistan. His art practice is embedded in the

survival became like a bank of stories, shared

unfoldment of his own life experiences. With his and adapted over the years. It was partition

colleagues, he belongs to the generation that

that drove the first wedge of displacement and

experienced painting and independence, painting

deep anxiety into everyday experience of many

for independence and painting from a position of young Indians growing in the Punjab but for

independence.

Krishen, the actual sense of displacement came

In a paradox, his art springs from the

much earlier during his schooling in England at

observation of life lived around himself but it is not the Imperial Services College. When war broke

an intimate act of confession or self examination.

out, shelling and air raids became a part of the In this way, Khanna is central to his own practice student’s experience.

as mediator and interpreter but never as a subject.

He returned to Sultan and then joined the

He assumes the position of the ‘katha vachak’ or Government College at Lahore where he studied

narrator, looking outward to the other rather than English literature. The violent displacement from the self. The central image then is of the artist as their home was compounded with Krishen’s need commentator, who through painted gesture and

to seek work. He befriended the artists who made 58