Krishen Khanna A Critical Biography by Gayatri Sinha 

An Excerpt  

...In 1964, living and working in Delhi, Krishen's paintings underwent a gradual metamorphosis  that  propelled him forward in a new direction for the next two decades. The verdant fullness of Madras, its musicians and brown bodied hawkers of fish and fruit disappeared like a fading tropical sunset, and were replaced by the arid city environs of a growing New Delhi. In the aftermath of the Chinese aggression, Delhi was a city that grew from the youthful confidence of a new capital to an uncertain and nervous adulthood. In the overarching Soviet model, state patronage of the arts was de rigueur and the  intellectual climate, in the absence of real cultural and literary institutions, was somewhat unpredictable. Raj Thapar, who moved to Delhi in 1961, in her autobiography contrasts the ordinary man on the street with the overwhelming official culture of  the city. In comparison to Bombay,  she  said, `People talked more,  smiled more, seemed less subservient. Was it the proximity of a rural past, or the lack of industrial overtones and undertones?’ Of officialdom, she complained of the coolness of New Delhi, its undistinguished  population of civil servants and politicians who cared little and knew even less about the city in which they lived. “No wonder its future growth was to be marked by haphazard, thoughtless expansion”. She wrote, “If you don't know the past, how can  you know the future”? (All These Years  by Raj Thapar, Seminar Publications, Delhi, 1991).

From 1960 to 1965, Krishen frequently travelled to Europe and America, exhibiting with Charles Egan in New York and the Leicester Gallery in London. Delhi gradually registered its presence on Krishen's canvas with its sharp economic disparity, its overbearing political presence. As a city of political bosses and a swelling labour force, it became an ideal backdrop for him to realize what interested him most: the continuity and contrast between the mundane and the sublime, the ordinary and the epic dimension. It would  not be wrong to say that Krishen's interest in human endeavour is really pitched at the opposite ends of the banal and the epoch­making: the oscillation between these extremes determines his responses to the personal and the political........