Krishen Khanna turned 100 in July 2025, and is the last surviving member of the Progressive Artists' Group, the Bombay collective that set out to give Indian art a new direction after independence. He was inducted into it by F. N. Souza, M. F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, H. A. Gade and K. H. Ara. Like the rest of the group, he translated contemporary events as they touched an ordinary life, with a close sense of their politics. Khanna was born in 1925 in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and his life carries the turns of the subcontinent's own history: he lived through the freedom struggle against colonial rule and the partition of a nation split into two.
In undivided India, Khanna took evening classes at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, now the National College of Art, while the city's art scene grew increasingly entangled with the rising nationalist movement. Lahore was also where Bhabesh Sanyal and Amrita Sher-Gil lived and worked. Khanna graduated from the Imperial Service College in Windsor, England, in 1940. Back in India, he took a post with Grindlays Bank and was posted to Bombay, where he met the artists of the group. He carries many memories of those years and his association with the PAG.
His fondest memories concern Husain. He recalls how Husain and his family spent their early years in Bombay in a small enclave called Badar Bagh, in a single room that left just enough space to work, so Husain painted only small canvases. As his output grew, so did the size of his canvases, and Husain brought many of them to Khanna's house for storage. As was the practice among the PAG artists, they bought each other's work; encouraged by the others, and especially by Husain, the circle bought Khanna's work in turn.
Rider series by Krishen Khanna.
Khanna recalls his thirteen and a half years at the bank with characteristic humour: "I didn't play golf or go yachting," he has said, so when he finally quit to paint full time there was little in his austere habits left to change. Of Husain he says, "he made me a member of the Group and in exchange I opened his first bank account," and of what followed, "through a series of happy coincidences, I got a show at London's prestigious Leicester Gallery."
An early horse by Krishen Khanna.
The work from this period carries the tumultuous historical events that touched his early life, and the representational language he built to hold them, forceful and immediate at once, became his signature. Khanna's paintings can look as if they are taking apart the settled values of line, form and colour, only to set them down again in a new order, one that stays both progressive and modern. He evokes his protagonists in a few judicious strokes, their histories carried in the wrinkles of a face or the folds of a robe. His recurring subject is the relationship of labour to oppression on one side and to grace on the other, and his paintings and drawings work as nuanced narratives of that shifting, unfolding theatre of human relationships.
Vinayak Pasricha.