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Lot 28

 

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Beginning in the 1990s, a new archetype entered Krishen Khanna’s oeuvre: the scribe. Khanna’s identification with the scribe’s daily work—the assiduous and quiet transcription of life-is obvious in the empathy with which he depicts the subject of the present lot. Drawing a parallel with his better- known bandwallas, art critic Gayatri Sinha notes Khanna’s humanistic regard for this archetype. “Like The Bandwallahs, the scribe... Beginning in the 1990s, a new archetype entered Krishen Khanna’s oeuvre: the scribe. Khanna’s identification with the scribe’s daily work—the assiduous and quiet transcription of life-is obvious in the empathy with which he depicts the subject of the present lot. Drawing a parallel with his better- known bandwallas, art critic Gayatri Sinha notes Khanna’s humanistic regard for this archetype. “Like The Bandwallahs, the scribe appears an innocuous subject but one that establishes the artist’s own position-as witness and record keeper of the times. It is in works like this that Krishen’s gentle humanism and his foray into the benign figures of the imagination augment his growing body of genre paintings and drawings.” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2001, p. 170) Mirroring a scribe’s inconspicuous labour, the subject here is placed as if entering the frame from the edge of the canvas with his eyes fixed in concentration on an incident playing out beyond the frame. In his hand he carries the instrument of his trade-the book-in which it could be chronicled. Sinha advances that Khanna’s scribe is a figure celebratory of everyday survival. “In his apparent patience and attitude of a certain resignation, the scribe allies with the fruit sellers the quiescent sleeping bandwallahs or labourers in his oeuvre, which when seen together point to the resilience, if not heroism, of the ordinary.” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2005, p. 37)

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