Important Notice

"There is something sad and ridiculous about the band. A legacy from our erstwhile English rulers, whether official or military in pompous regalia... the band is a macabre comment on bourgeois existence." - KRISHEN KHANNA

In the early 1970s, Krishen Khanna began painting his famous bandwallah series, inspired by an incident when he was leaving his studio in Delhi one afternoon, and was held up by a passing band. The... "There is something sad and ridiculous about the band. A legacy from our erstwhile English rulers, whether official or military in pompous regalia... the band is a macabre comment on bourgeois existence." - KRISHEN KHANNA

In the early 1970s, Krishen Khanna began painting his famous bandwallah series, inspired by an incident when he was leaving his studio in Delhi one afternoon, and was held up by a passing band. The uniformed men wielding large brass musical instruments--a leftover legacy from the days of the British Raj--rendered almost comical from the cacophony of their strident music and the garishness of their costumes, particularly struck the artist. "Against the background of the 18th-century Garhi fort with its large, capacious artist studios, the raucous band crammed into the small mean street of Garhi village. The syncopated tunes intended for the jollification of a baraat (wedding party), the quotient of assertive maleness and vigour of the accompanying groom's party, the residual image of the British colonial march past, and sanguine military energy collapsed into a singular image on that warm Delhi afternoon." (Gayatri Sinha, "Serenading Lajwanti," Krishen Khanna, Norbert Lynton, Gayatri Sinha et al, Krishen Khanna: Images in My Time, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing and Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2007, p. 27)

As with Khanna's other genre paintings that depict scenes from roadside dhabas or migrant labourers in the backs of trucks, the image of the bandwallah forms a social commentary on the class divide that continues to exist in urban Indian spaces. "Positioning himself as sympathetic spectator and a somewhat humorous narrator, Krishen Khanna has steadily painted the bandwallah; the heroics of the street have been rendered with a deep humanist sympathy... In their hired uniforms, they resemble the men in trucks; because of their ceaseless movement they become emblematic of the volatility of the city." (Sinha, p. 28)

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