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above: Khanna with fraught with conflict as people dangle between language. They are reimagined not just as mythical figures but as metaphors
artists M F Husain,
Nirmal Verma, Tyeb action and reflection, destiny and free will. The of the wilful ignorance of power, those who refuse to see the consequences
Mehta and families artist often revisits the scene of Bhishma Pitamah’s of their authority. Yet, in Khanna’s version, they are also deeply human,
opposite: Khanna’s
eclectic photographic deathbed and the paradox he represents more than flawed, tragic, and strangely tender. By rooting them in everyday emotion,
portraits of artist Bal his wisdom: a man who gives up his agency for a Khanna collapses the divide between myth and modernity. As with his Christ
Chhabda are surreal in
their appeal higher cause and fights for the wrong side in the cycle, Khanna’s Mahabharata works are not decorative or didactic; they are
name of righteousness. Similar to the artist’s eye meditative engagements with power, suffering, and moral ambiguity.
of Christ, he posits Bhishma as a man of passive The artist weaves another powerful reference to the great epic into
resistance, one who, despite having power over his moment of death, endures his visual idiom through the works depicting card players. The reference
pain with dignity but whose idealism is laden with irony. to Yudhishthira, or the embodiment of moral rectitude who gambled away
Painted in 1998, the Last Sermon on the Battlefield reimagines this his kingdom and even his wife, is unmistakable. In his renditions, Khanna
final episode in the moment of reckoning, when Pandavas gather around a boldly strips the character of any grandeur and places him in a contemporary
dying Bhishma Pitamah for the final sermon. At the heart of the composition setting fraught with uncertainty. Nowhere is this more haunting than in The
is the gravely wounded Bhishma, with a sunken expression and a translucent Dead and the Dying, where a group of men continue their game, unmoved by
ghostly form. With the sombre postures and inflexions of those surrounding the presence of a corpse beside them. Khanna hauntingly renders the scene,
him, the artist fills the scene with a sense of profound melancholy. Another capturing the uneasy dissonance between moral ideals and human action, a
work, painted a year later, titled Blessings on a Battlefield, renders these contradiction that reverberates through the episodes of the great epic.
characters in a similar stylised, semi-abstract manner, with mask-like faces The approach of adopting on canvas moments such as these, rich with
and long limbs. allegory and emotional undercurrents, reflects a painter deeply attuned to the
With works like Blind King And Blindfolded Queen, the artist also narrative from his long-standing dialogue with literary archetypes, especially
invites King Dhritarashtra and Queen Gandhari into his modern visual Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where every figure carries within them a private
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