Important Notice

Krishen Khanna's earliest paintings of bandwallas followed a period in which his work largely meditated on war, death and persecution at the hands of authority. Almost as if a natural progression, in these paintings, "…the soldiers elide into the bandwallahs, and the military style uniforms are now rendered faux or even comic. The comparison of the bandwallahs with warlords is in fact ironic and overt; both these sets of gentlemen wear uniforms... Krishen Khanna's earliest paintings of bandwallas followed a period in which his work largely meditated on war, death and persecution at the hands of authority. Almost as if a natural progression, in these paintings, "…the soldiers elide into the bandwallahs, and the military style uniforms are now rendered faux or even comic. The comparison of the bandwallahs with warlords is in fact ironic and overt; both these sets of gentlemen wear uniforms and peaked caps, but while one set ordains the destiny of nations and sets armies marching to war, the other marches to tawdry tunes on India's roads in cheap imitation of the army band. The shift in context from the malevolence of war to small tunes of the roadside band touches on different registers of social comment… On the streets of Delhi, like an off-register palimpsest in his ill-fitting uniform, the bandwallah recalls the British colonial band. Instead of the military march past, the national anthem or the funerary dirge, his heavy brass instrument is now used to belt out slightly off-key Bollywood tunes" (Gayatri Sinha, "Serenading Lajwanti", Krishen Khanna: Images in My Time, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 2007, p. 28, 29).

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