Krishen Khanna

Krishen Khanna was born in 1925 in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and grew up in Lahore. At thirteen a Rudyard Kipling scholarship took him to the Imperial Service College in England. Back in Lahore he took a degree in English. On 12 August 1947 the family left Lahore by car for Shimla.

From 1948 he worked as an officer at Grindlays Bank in Bombay and painted on the side. He came to know Souza, Husain, Raza, Ara, Gade and Bakre of the Progressive Artists’ Group. News of Gandhi’s Death, showing Hindus and Muslims reading the paper around a traffic island in Delhi, won him the critic Rudolf von Leyden’s praise. His first sale, Spring Nude, went to Homi Bhabha for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. In 1961 he resigned from the bank to paint full time.

His early pictures took the fishing people of the south as subjects. In the 1960s he moved through abstraction, influenced by Japanese sumi-e ink painting, and after visiting the battlefields of the 1965 war people came back into the work, with violence as a theme. From the late 1960s he painted street life: fruit and vegetable sellers, storytellers, crowds in cafes and dhabas, bandwallahs in red uniforms and braid. The Truck series followed in 1974. He has often painted Christ, as an ordinary man among others.

His mural The Great Procession fills the lobby of the ITC Maurya hotel in New Delhi. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and turned one hundred in July 2025.