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Drawing Room: Yasha Shrivastava on Bhupen Khakhar’s polarising art
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Not everyone understood Bhupen Khakhar’s work. Beneath the bright pop colours and everyday scenes were subjects that polite society preferred not to see
Few Indian artists have been as polarising as Bhupen Khakhar. When the self-taught painter and writer from Mumbai who died in 2003, had a massive retrospective of his work at the Tate Museum in London in 2016, it set off a bomb in the art world. The Guardian published an unfavourable review of the show, dismissing Khakhar’s work as “old-fashioned” and “second-rate”, his figures “too sloppily drawn to be engaging”. It prompted Indian artists and critics to rustle up an affronted defence. Khakhar, they said, possessed a unique, creative and forward-thinking artistic outlook. The show’s title: You Can’t Please All. Fitting.
And yet, Khakhar’s work – he started painting in the 1960s and is considered India’s first pop artist – is hard to ignore. It brings personal experience, everyday life, sexuality, taboos and the human body into the story of Indian art, and often does so with jaunty exuberant humour. In one work, figures might be calmly bathing in a sea of vivid, almost comical colours, in another a man might be getting a haircut at the barber’s, in yet another, there’s just a watchmaker peering into his loupe in his stall. But several will also feature nudes and explicit homosexual encounters.
His 1981 work, You Can’t Please All, is widely considered to be his own coming-out moment. The central figure, believed to be Khakhar himself, is shown standing nude on a rooftop, his backside on view. He looks on to a vivid scene below, where a father and son take turns to climb their donkey, a repairman disappears into the open trunk of a car, and tired labourers rest along with their animals. Could the title be the artist’s own acknowledgement that he might as well be himself, criticism be damned? Could the architectural setting of the scene – its buildings, balconies, windows, and rooftops – stand in for how viewers must peel back layer upon layer to get at a truth that might not please them after all?
Khakhar trained as a chartered accountant and only enrolled in a course in Art Criticism at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda at the behest of his painter-poet friend Gulammohamed Sheikh. His talent lay in closely observing people, relationships, intimate moments, and familiar surroundings, and presenting them in ways that turned the mundane into something worthy of a second look. Most of his figures appear to be vulnerable and emotionally complex – it’s hard to gauge what they’re feeling, particularly since few of them ever face the viewer.
Look closely at Lost Souls, his 1993 work that shows a blue, cloudy sky filled with figures of all shapes and sizes – naked humans, birds, and creatures of his own imagining. They twirl, whirl and fly above imposing buildings. They’re not lost in the literal sense of being trapped in a maze and yet, there a kind of shackling in the mood of the work. They’re all floating, but never seem quite free.
Khakhar’s vivid paintings make me wonder why an artist chooses certain subjects. They impress upon me how personal experiences can become part of a larger artistic language. Whatever people may feel about his work, his visual language is his alone. It’s an artistic gateway to a wider discussion on who gets to define artistic value and modernity.
Artist bio: Yasha Shrivastava is an illustrator, visual artist, educator and researcher from Sagar, Madhya Pradesh.
From HT Brunch, September 19, 2026
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