Bhupen Khakhar: The “Gay ” Politics And Artistry

Shivaji K. Panikkar

“Queer” Exposures: The artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), eventually “came out of the closet” by gathering his strength for a gradual disclosure from the inter-national gay liberation movement, especially its manifestations in the field of art in the 1980s. Simultaneously his mother’s death also freed him from familial restrictions. While it actually happened frontally, at this time, one cannot ignore a certain earlier modes of disclosures and expression through which he communicated insuppressible desires. The unique portrayal of innocent “deviant” desires in the 1970s takes expression in a painting such as the Portrait of Shri. Shankarbhai Patel near Red Fort (1971). Painted flatly in the “miniaturist” style within the norms of the indigenist trend of the period, in this work the stern profile of an older man, the object of his desire, is juxtaposed with an inviting still-life of fruits that are laid-out over a carpet in front of a garden.

Perhaps, it is the confidence that is derived from the coded messages of such works which gave him the language to represent a homosexual’s’ desires and sad loneliness more overtly in his other paintings of those later years. Bolder still are paintings such as Klan Eating Jalebee (1974) and Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1976). Certain experiences of loneliness, anxiety and alienation are manifest also in an oblique way in works such as the Factory Strike (1972) and in the Man Wearing Red Scarf (1981). And in most other paintings of the 70s where men who are alone or when the central character is presented within a context, what looms large is the silent and tensed uneasiness — which he suggests through peculiar figuration.