Page 51 - TheArtsTrust Krishen Khanna

above: Khanna at his contradiction. These works offer a powerful lens
studio in New Delhi
opposite: The artist through which to read his work: as a meditation
and his creative tools, on the fragile balance between fate and the choices
a peek behind the
master’s process that shape us.
The Bandwalla series is among the most
enthralling intersections between lived experience,
social observation, and painterly creativity in Khanna’s artistic canon. These
works focus on the figure of the bandwalla, the marching band musician,
a near-permanent fixture of North Indian wedding processions decked in
gaudy, British-style regalia and carrying large brass instruments. Though
first seen as minor or humorous, he transforms the bandwalla into a potent
metaphor for performance and survival.
This series has its roots in a chance meeting when his car was halted
in a wedding procession leaving the Garhi Studios in Delhi one afternoon in
the 1970s. With the sounds of synchronised Bollywood melodies ricocheting

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