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Literary Review
Warm glow of words
THIS is a new genre of books by artists. It is not quite an autobiography, nor a full-fledged memoir. It is more in the nature of a belle lettres and is filled with cameos of people and incidents that played a part in Krishen Khanna's life. Some of them are walk-ons, others are more substantial. The subtitle explains it all.
Khanna, a well-known painter close to the Progressive Artists' Group of Mumbai, has felicity with words as with paint and brush. These sketches reveal a fine sense of wit and absurdity as well as warm humanism. Take the story of "The Lure of the Veena", in which Khanna writes about his maternal grandfather, a gay blade who enjoyed music and dance. Every evening he would visit the dancing girls with his friends. In an effort to wean him away from his nightly pursuit of pleasure, his wife taught herself to play veena. Ultimately, she became so absorbed in her music that she lost interest whether her husband went out on the town with his friends or stayed at home. Curiously, the pleasures offered by the professional musicians and dancers palled for the husband. He began to be more attracted by his wife's singing and playing the veena and eventually became a mystic.
Khanna's comment on this manifestation of life's ironies concerns "the power of art." He writes, "In her effort to regain her man, Kartaribibi turned to music that transformed her so much that in her ecstasy she quite forgot her man, and dear Bauji, the wild man that he must have been, was catapulted into a domain he had never imagined."
The book is divided into two sections — the first relates to vignettes of "Friends and Family" and the second to "Adventures in Art". The first section has an interesting cast of characters that gathered round the vast extended family set-up at his father's 2, McLagan Road home in Lahore. In the first piece, "A Wise Compromise", there is the story of Gangaram, the shoemaker, with whom his father had developed friendly ties. Gangaram's problem was excessive drinking which his family resented. Khanna recounts how his father brought about a compromise between Gangaram and his sons over a Sunday lunch at the Khanna home.
Then there are the two stories about the canny, but whimsical barrister, Lal Nana, a great-uncle. "Chasing money or success was not his idea of civilized life." Neither did he want any commitment. He gets out of a marriage proposal by pretending to be consumptive. He preferred the laid-back life of a briefless barrister. But despite his best efforts to dodge work, he is given a brief for defending a Jat youth accused of murder and he manages to get his client acquitted. He withdrew from the legal profession after this and continued to live the good life on inherited money.
The second section also has many delightful anecdotes about Khanna's artist friends. The story of how Khanna came to be called a financial expert by Akbar Padamsee is particularly charming. Khanna had bought a painting of Padamsee, which he had loaned to Lalit Kala Akademi for a travelling exhibition. It came back damaged.
The story narrates how Khanna got back the damaged painting and half the insurance money. He restored the painting himself and earned five times as much from the insurance claim as he paid for the painting. After sharing a part of the profits with Padamsee and Bal Chhabda, who had sold Khanna the painting, Khanna made a small packet himself besides owning the Padamsee painting.
One of the most nostalgic stories here is "Delhi's Left Bank". It recalls how Nizamuddin became a lively artists' colony in the 1960s. There is also the delightful story of how he met the famous Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo at the house of Roberto Matta in Paris, where he was invited along with Jean and Krishna Riboud.
The sketches capture the personalities and are lit with the warm glow of humour. Curiously, however, the visual element, which one would have expected from an artist, is entirely lacking. There are no word-pictures, which would help to envisage a scene.
Compare this to Paritosh Sen's memoirs of his childhood and youth in Bangladesh called Jindabahar, first published in Bengali and now to be published in English by Tulika. Each piece, equally witty and warm, resonates with the visual drama of life around him that the artist depicts with great zest. There are many other artists, whose writings have this gift. The stories written by Abanindranath Tagore, K.G. Subramanyan, A. Ramachandran for children are cases in point. Khanna's drawings, however, add value to the book.
The Time of My Life: Memories, Anecdotes, Tall Talk, Krishen Khanna, drawings by author, Viking, 2002, Rs. 325.
ELLA DATTA
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