Art & Entertainment

An Accountant Of Alternate Reality

From his debut collages to his gay confessionals, Bhupen Khakhar has retained his subversive edge

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An Accountant Of Alternate Reality
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IN 1965 critics spluttered in outrage at the first exhibition of a young accountant-turned-painter from Baroda at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay. "Is this madness?" fumed renowned art critic Charles Fabri. At first take the exhibits looked harmless enough: ambivalent oleographs of little divinities culled from popular calendars, pasted on mirrors,buoyed up with some gestural brushwork and graffiti. But that graffiti. Juxtaposed next to the vermilion-smeared, worship-worthy images was the legend: "It is prohibited to urinate here."

 Cut to 1987. The painter, Bhupen Khakhar, now 53, paints the overtly homosexual Two Men in Benares. Two men stand in naked embrace, their erect penises almost touching. The face of the older man, though masked by the dark, urgent profile of the younger is recognisably Khakhar's. There's no mistaking those elephant ears, the shock of white hair as anyone else's. The image that conjoins genital excitement and a religious setting, marries the sacred with the profane, is Khakhar's ringing proclamation of his own homosexuality. Critics lash out at him for his lasciviousness. Proprietors of the Chemould Gallery, Bombay, stash away the painting in the storeroom two days after the exhibition opens in the face of protests from the Cottage Industries authorities on whose premises the gallery is located.

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Through 22 years, the painter had retained his ability to surprise, provoke, startle, to be artistically himself.

And today, eight years on, even Khakhar's detractors agree with Khakhar biographer Timothy Hyman that his "imagery will become, as Hockney's did in the West, emblematic for a whole generation of homosexuals in India". They have learnt to admire this brave painter's quiet but certain insistence upon the lyric naturalness of what gives meaning to his life in a society which has traditionally been able to accommodate sexual diversity only through rejection or ridicule.

Through the innumerable changes of oeuvres between those first collages and the present "confessionals"; through the various avatars as collagist, neo-miniaturist in the '60s, diarist of the demeaned in the '70s, painter of the narrative in the '80s, gay icon of the '90s; through all the aspersion, appreciation, rejection, acceptance, pannings, panegyrics, Khakhar, 61, has remained unapologetic. And gearing up for yet another exhibition of his work, much of it characteristically, explicitly homosexual in content, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, beginning December 10, he remains undaunted. Favourable assessment whether by peers or posterity is not a concern: "Let me put it this way. I'm a second, no, third-class painter. Not known or respected but still passionate about my work." This from a man whose work has been called "monumental and visionary", who art critic Geeta Kapur says has brought back to painting "the lost reality of the world", whose artistic approach has provoked comparisons with Lorenzetti, Breughel, Bonnard, Henri Rousseau and David Hockney. And whose portrait of Salman Rushdie was bought early this year by the National Portrait Gallery, Britain, for 10,000 pounds. As for his prices: he has been selling consistently in six digits for the last decade. Yesterday's Pop painter is acknowledged today as a "painterly painter", one of the top ten in the Pantheon of Painters in India.

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 Nothing in his lower middle class beginnings held the promise of glory. The son of an alcoholic cloth trader who died when he was four, he was brought up in seedy Khetwadi, a lane just off Bombay's prostitute-infested FalklandRoad. The only man from his family to go to school and college, train as a chartered accountant, gave a rude shock to the family that had invested all its hopes and scarce resources in him by announcing in 1962 that he wanted to become a painter. He opted to go to Baroda for a two-year art criticism course. "Nobody in the family was talking to me. CA, bungalow, car, flourishing practice, a queue of girls waiting to be matched... all their dreams were shattered," he recalls.

Accountancy's loss was the art world's gain. Hungry for knowledge, the Khetwadi boy, urged by teachers K.G. Subramanyam and N.S. Bendre, soaked up Kafka, Ortega, Rilke, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Arnold Hauser, hobnobbed with the Bombay Progressives Husain, Raza, Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar. They "could speak English", had "stayed in London and Paris", they "overawed him". More importantly they educated him: exposed him to the work of Braque, Picasso, Poliakoff. His exchange during this period with Britisher Jim Donovan, a painter who came to Baroda on an exchange programme, proved seminal. Donovan introduced him to Pop gurus Kitaj and Hockney, the subversive possibilities of the Pop approach to art. It was an aesthetic positioning Khakhar adopted to his advantage in his debut collage exhibition. The tawdry, vulgar imagery, the graffiti and gravitas of the seedy wayside shrines in those crowded bylanes, the speakeasies and sirens that punctuated those streets found artistic rendition in those early collages. Two of which actually sold!

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Like many works from the neo-miniaturist series he did in the late '60s. Khakhar "ransacked tradition" in those works that drew on diverse sources; Mughal miniatures, Krishna pichwais, Kalighat paintings, oleo-graphs, for inspiration. The exploration of the past led him to one of the present. "I wanted to examine contemporary themes," he explains. Of barbers, building workers, tailors, accountants. Like Gogol he seemed to perceive all men as "mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs". Bombay's picture buying classes reacted coldly to his "seedy", "pathetic" tradesmen.

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But Khakhar was to challenge middle class sensibilities even further. By finally painting his homosexuality on canvas. The road to Two Men in Benares or for that matter to his entire corpus of overtly, unequivocally homo-erotic work a la Yayati > or the shocking Man With Five Penises scheduled to be displayed in the current exhibition was long and torturous. "I was coward," he says in his untutored syntax unlayered by pretension, "I told lies. I did not have courage to say I was going to meet my boyfriend. Gandhi spoke truth but I was coward. Only at the age of 60 after much travel and exposure to thesethings abroad I have summoned courage to speak about my preferences." Memories of a poor, sexually troubled childhood still rankle. "I don't draw on childhood memories. It was not very pleasant," he tells you even as he dredges up memories of early sexual trauma. Gandhian prescriptions of cold water baths, khadi cloth were tried, adages like " dawai khane se achcha ho jaata hai " (if you have medicine it gets cured) were fervently believed in even as the troubled teenager wondered "when a girl passing by, boys make remark and I feel why I don't feel this way?"

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It is the pain and anguish of concealment, the experience of unseeing dry-mouthed groping at unnamed strangers in unnamed places, the feral, subterranean quality of anonymous sex, the terror and abandon of transgressing sexual frontiers that many ofhis homo-erotic works including those in the forthcoming exhibition portray. Khakhar's men are often simian, minatory, insistent in their ugliness, mouths drawn back in a snarl, tough, shifty, animal, challenging. The answer to a query on this is deadpan, factual: "Because sometimes I like men like that. Ugly, twisted. There's beauty in that." He is brutal in both the articulation as well as the depiction of his homosexual reality. Did he turn to men for intellectual companionship? "No," the reply is categorical, "most men with whom I had love life did not know or care about my paintings. Most people I loved were not very literate. Just lower or middle class. The relationships, at least long ones, were only for emotional sustenance." And invariably with older men like Shankerbhai Patel, the East African widower, 20 years older, who he loved with a passion for 15 years and whose death in 1975 left him broken in spirit.

Much of the work in the current exhibi-tion: dark male shadows cruising in parks, young boy being held in position by another man as his lover awaits his moment, fish-ermen elementally stark, clad only in the colour of their longing, a watercolour gossamer blue painted right across their faces, nude men copulating in seedy metropolitan hotel rooms even as the distant rumble of cars, scooters, the humdrum babble of everydayness holds them in a surround; seem to underline both the ordinariness as well as the extraordinariness of their situation. It's as subversive as a Mapplethorpe or as simple as cinema verite depending on which side of the debate you are ranged on. People like us in places like ours in a world that is yours, mine, ours. And theirs too, Khakhar seems to be saying.

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It is this quality of humanity and vulnerability, an understanding of, an empathy with an alternate reality that makes Khakhar's work so distinct from that of Hockney to whom he is frequently compared. His concern was with men alone, Khakhar's concern seems to be as much the men as the metaphysics of their condition. "Hockney is concerned with physical beauty. I am much more concerned with other aspects like warmth, pity, vulnerability, touch...

 But then Khakhar is a man of many aspects. He has experimented with painting on ceramic and devising installations, is a Gujarati playwright and short story writer. He's painted regularly for six to seven hours a day all his working life. And gave up his job as an accountant with a Baroda engineering goods firm where he worked for a good 27 years for 1,000 rupees only in 1985. That guilt about eschewing an accounts career for painting seems to run deep. "I felt I'd done my work as a social being only once I'd done my morning accountancy." As Hyman says: "Accounting probably helped him balance the books in his head."

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Lack of balance is something no one could accuse Khakhar of. He's candid about his weaknesses: "I don't draw too well. Never went to art school. I had to invent my own language." That, he points out, can often be a strength. "People who are not educated can sometimes write very well. Their own experience is distilled in their writing." He retains a healthy distaste for polemics, the jargonese that characterises much of the discourse on modern painting. "Why are all my reactions to art so polluted by history, culture and friends? Good taste can be very killing," he once complained famously.

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At 61, it's time to take stock. Balance those books. Take account. The Accountant of the Alternate Reality is quiet, pensive. "My contribution? The most significant thing I've done? I think the kind of personal confessional paintings I made. Yes. That was something very near to my heart." Nobody would disagree that this heart is in the right place.

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