God of small things

In a self-published booklet accompanying his 1972 exhibition Truth is Beauty and Beauty is God, the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar had himself photographed as the kind of urbane man-of-action who was then ubiquitous in international advertising. Sporting dark glasses and a natty Western-style suit and brandishing a toy gun, Khakhar cavorts with a British woman friend in images that provide many insights into this elusive and supremely ambiguous artist.

In real life, Khakhar appeared far from the cosmopolitan he-man: a gay chartered accountant who came to painting relatively late in life, he had a talent for gentle – and sometimes not-so-gentle – self-mockery. Khakhar had a profound understanding of the “awkwardness” he saw as his defining characteristic, a quality which pervades the paintings that have made him one of India’s best-loved contemporary artists.

In its Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sale in London, Bonhams is offering a painting from a pivotal moment in Khakhar’s early career. Residency Bungalow (1969) shows a colonial-era building in the city of Baroda, where he trained as an artist and spent most of his subsequent life. The Bungalow, where he lived with several other key artists of the period, represented the realisation of his long-held dream of becoming a painter. It is captured in a haunting and deceptively simple image, under the evident influence of traditional Indian miniatures. At the time of its creation, Khakhar was starting to achieve commercial success, and about to embark on the works that made him famous. Yet he was still working part-time as an accountant, taking care of the financial affairs of the owners of the building: the Royal Family of Baroda. It was an arrangement that I’ve no doubt proved very satisfactory to all parties.

Khakhar’s visionary paintings of urban Indian life have been interpreted by some critics – both Indian and Western – as faux-naïf pastiches of traditional miniature painting, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Khakhar’s evocations of people and places are, like those of his close friend Howard Hodgkin, highly sophisticated distillations of memory and observation, realised in transcendent – at times near-hallucinatory – colour. Yet, where Hodgkin sublimated his feelings in semi-abstract compositions, Khakhar made his reactions to his subjects very evident on the surfaces of his paintings, to the discomfiture of many viewers.

Khakhar was born in Mumbai in 1934 to a Hindu family of high caste but modest economic status – which no doubt explains a lot. Precociously able at school, he was the first member of his family to attend university, but after gaining only a third-class degree in Economics and Political Science – to his intense mortification – he switched to accountancy, obtaining “the highest marks in Bombay University in public finance and administration”. This fact is noted in his 1972 booklet with a pride that feels only partly ironic. Khakhar is regarded as a great observer of the status-obsessed mores of India’s urban middle classes, which was precisely the world he himself came from.

Excited by art from an early age, Khakhar began taking evening classes in drawing in his early 20s, though he was unimpressed by the teaching – “they only talked to the girls” – and had the despairing sense that he would never be able to explore his life’s real passion. But around 1960 Khakhar met the young Gujarati poet and painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who was to become his mentor – and it feels somehow typical of Khakhar that his mentor should have been three years his junior.

Sheikh had attended the then recently founded Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, an ‘experimental art school’ with a more open approach than the academic Mumbai colleges. Sheikh was now teaching at the Faculty himself, and when Khakhar summoned the courage to show him his portfolio, he suggested he too might benefit from a period of study there. Khakhar jumped at the chance of finally pursuing art full time at the age of 28, and escaping his interfering family who would “never allow me to become an artist”.

Turned down by the fine-art department, he took a master’s degree in art criticism, adding greatly to his knowledge of art history, but compounding his enduring sense that he would never quite be a ‘trained artist’ – an assessment many of his critics were to agree with. After graduating in 1964, he returned to Mumbai, but was soon back in Baroda. “I needed complete freedom,” he later said, and while he often complained that Baroda was “a pretty dull place”, he clearly found it on some levels magically exciting: its backstreets and bazaars filled with the sounds of popular religion and people pursuing their time-honoured trades. This is the atmosphere that permeates his best-known pictures.

With a population of more than 2 million, Baroda was hardly a small town, but compared with Khakhar’s home metropolis Mumbai it had a quality of provincial ordinariness, plus a large population of artists connected with its Faculty of Fine Arts. It was a combination he clearly found congenial. Apart from a few visits abroad, he remained in Baroda for the rest of his life.

The atmosphere of Residency Bungalow is serene and otherworldly rather than frenetic, the painting imbued with a dream-like clarity and calm. The jumble of fields and other dwellings that no doubt surrounded the building in real life is stripped away, leaving an ethereal plain that might be interpreted as desert or cloud rolling away towards distant hills and a sky of intense blue. A path of red carpet leads towards the pillared verandah, flanked by beds of minutely detailed shrubbery, giving the impression of a blessed domain that exists in its own realm of time and space.

In the right foreground, a white-bearded figure sits at a table in the garden: Khakhar’s close friend and mentor Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, the man who brought him to Baroda and enabled his career as a professional artist. The fact that he looks far older than his 32 years indicates his significance in the artist’s life and his seniority in their relationship.

Further back on the terrace, Sheikh is seen again, drinking tea with the sculptor Nagji Patel, also then resident in the house, while from an upper window K.G. Subramanyan, another dominant figure in the Baroda art scene, looks out with his wife and daughter. Subramanyan devised the Faculty of Fine Art’s ethos of ‘living traditions’, under which contemporary art drew on still-extant traditional forms. At the time of making this painting, Khakhar had been through a Pop Art phase, employing found popular and religious imagery under the influence of British artists Derek Boshier and Jim Donovan, who both taught for a time in Baroda. He was now making his own exploration of the ‘living traditions’ concept, travelling round India and absorbing traditional painting techniques. These efforts come together in Residency Bungalow in what feels like a stripped-back, contemporary response to traditional miniature painting, with beautifully balanced shades of deep red and blue standing out from the overall cool tonality in an image that feels like a summation of his experience in art to date.

If the vegetation in the painting is rendered in the kind of organic ‘tasteful’ hues, muted greens and browns, that made Khakhar’s paintings of this period appealing to wealthy art buyers, he was soon to decide that “good taste can be very killing”. In his paintings of the early Seventies, he turned up the intensity of his colour in eye-popping combinations of cerise and deep turquoise, orange and ultramarine that reflected the garish neon-tinged textures of the densely populated urban area where he now lived, but which were considered ‘vulgar’ by his former buyers and admirers.

In the most radical works of this period, Khakhar shows the crowded world of the Baroda backstreets as a stream of chronological events visible in a single image, in a manner that recalls both Hindu ‘pilgrimage chart’ paintings and the works of Quattrocento Sienese painters such as Duccio and Sassetta, of whom Khakhar was a great admirer. In the most remarkable of them, You Can’t Please All (1981), which has been described as Khakhar’s ‘coming out painting’ – and which provided the title for his 2016 Tate Modern retrospective – the various stages of an Aesop fable are played out through the streets of a modern Indian city. A father and son heading to market take the advice of passers-by on which or both of them should be riding their donkey before the animal dies from its exertions. The stages of this allegory of failed good intentions are viewed from a downward tilting angle, as though from the upper floors of a neighbouring building. Indeed, Khakhar has made what he described as a late “addition” to the painting: the near life-size figure of a man standing watching these farcical events from a balcony in the foreground, stark naked. It’s quite some addition. The pensive grey-haired figure is, of course, Khakhar himself, in a painting that points up the closeness of the public and private worlds in Indian life. The artist appears relaxed and at one with the surrounding urban spectacle, with his nakedness, hidden by the balcony, perceptible only to himself – and, of course, to the viewer of the painting, as Khakhar announces his gay nature to the world at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in India. It’s a daring work from a painter who may have liked to project himself as a timid, even somewhat bumbling figure, but was in fact as courageous and as iron-willed in his intentions as any artist in history.

Mark Hudson is chief art critic of the Independent.

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