REMEMBERING BHUPEN

Sandhya Bordewekar

In Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s autobiography that spans the 14 years he spent in hiding after the Ayatollah’s fatwa in the wake of The Satanic Verses, there are a good three-four pages devoted to Bhupen Khakhar. Rushdie was extremely impressed with Bhupen Khakhar whom he specifically chose to paint his portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London, even when a British artist was trying very hard to bag the project. Rushdie first saw Khakhar’s paintings at the Festival of India in Britain in 1981-2 when he was included in a group show of contemporary Indian artists that was dominated by artists from Baroda working in the narrative style. Rushdie’s prize-winning novel, Midnight’s Children, was just out then. It celebrated the narrative style in a mode of magic realism. When Rushdie came to India shortly afterwards to promote the book, he came to Baroda where he spoke at the Faculty of Fine Arts and at the Dept. of English at the M. S. University. In one of these talks, he spoke about how Bhupen painted almost intuitively, sometimes getting up in the morning and walking straight to the easel and beginning to paint, even without brushing his teeth! Bhupen was also very excited about the National Portrait Gallery commission. “I felt like I was James Bond!” he had told me, smiling away, his eyes twinkling. “Being taken from one place to another in dark cars escorted by the Secret Service, to wherever Rushdie was, for the sittings.” This painting was titled “The Moor” after Rushdie’s book, The Moor’s Last Sigh in which Rushdie has an accountant whom he has styled after Bhupen (who incidentally was a trained Chartered Accountant and worked as one till he was almost middleaged, before his artworks sold enough for him to devote his timecompletely to painting).

This is the tenth anniversary of Bhupen Khakhar’s passing away, and really, Baroda has never been the same ever since. It is not as if there are no longer any good and great artists living in this city, but somehow Bhupen was different. Dramatic, with a sharp intelligence, a wry and witty sense of humour, empathetic, multi-talented, and equipped with survival skills typical of a person from a lower middle-class Gujarati baniya family from Khetwadi, Mumbai. And he loved gossip! He was a self-taught painter who developed his own unique style; he studied art criticism at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (in 1962, when he moved to the city from Mumbai) and became very close friends with artists Gulam Mohammad and Nilima Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Amit Ambalal, Jyoti Bhatt, P. Dhumal and others. He worked diligently on his painting skills and had his first exhibition in 1965. He sketched tirelessly, knowing that his drawing needed to be improved; his sketchbooks, if they are preserved carefully by whoever has them, will be very valuable indeed. Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings came as a surprise, even in the kind of unusual, experimental, exciting work that was then (1965-80) being done at Baroda, whether at the Faculty or outside of it.