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Born in 1925 in Lahore, Krishen Khanna worked as a banker after returning from his schooling in England. Khanna only turned to painting following the displacement of his family during the partitioning of India, when he came into contact with members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay including Souza, Husain and Raza.

Today, Khanna is regarded as one of the country’s foremost modernists, telling stories of the everyday and... Born in 1925 in Lahore, Krishen Khanna worked as a banker after returning from his schooling in England. Khanna only turned to painting following the displacement of his family during the partitioning of India, when he came into contact with members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay including Souza, Husain and Raza.

Today, Khanna is regarded as one of the country’s foremost modernists, telling stories of the everyday and the epic in his work for the last six decades. His extensive oeuvre may be “…arranged into serial narratives, of areas of renewed interest that recur with unpredictable regularity. Krishen Khanna has tended to engage with his subjects as if in an extended and somewhat unstructured conversation between old friends, in which figures from another time often wander in and out of the frame… Effectively, the paintings constitute a powerful psychological engagement, one that also serves as a document of the passage of time in modern India” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2005, p. 6).

In this 1997 canvas, Khanna portrays an ancient scribe, whose job, much like the artist’s own, is to chronicle the events of his times. Like the artist’s familiar 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…there is a deep sense of quietude, as if the rumble of concern around formal issues has now settled into the past and the human narrative has become all important ” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2001, p. 170).

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