‘Bhupen Gave Me the Courage to Think of Myself Differently’: An Interview with Nilima Sheikh
August 24, 2025
Bhupen Khakhar had a wide circle of friends, but everyone agrees he was closest to Gulam and Nilima Sheikh, who he knew for the longest time and who influenced his life in many ways.
A renowned artist herself, Nilima Sheikh has the distinction of being the only woman Bhupen ever painted, other than his mother. In an exclusive interview with journalist Dibeyendu Ganguly at Niharika Bungalow, the Sheikh’s home in Baroda, Nilima talks of Bhupen’s legacy, painting style, and the impact he had on her own work. Excerpts:
What do you see as Bhupen’s legacy?
Nilima: Bhupen began a queer movement in Indian art. At a time when heterosexual males were at the centre of the art world, Bhupen decentralised things, making space for other points of view. He opened questions on gender. No artist was as explicit about sexuality as Bhupen was and no one has been so since.
How did Bhupen impact your own work?
Nilima: Bhupen’s development of a gay identity had an impact on me; I drew strength from it. In the early days I did not think I was doing feminist paintings, though I was. He gave me the courage to think of myself differently, as a woman. Bhupen was one of the few who appreciated my style. He would put on this accent and say “You’re so talented, Nilu.” Other than his mother, I am the only woman he painted, though he had other close women friends, like Kinnari Lakhia and Nalini Malini. The portrait he made of me is called Nilima Sheikh Looking at Orange Flower. My mother bought it and it hangs in our house in Delhi.
Does the Nilima Sheikh in the painting look like you?
Nilima: Bhupen worked from a photograph my husband Gulam took of me and I remember he made a grid on the canvas to get the proportions right. But the portrait really looks nothing like me. The truth is, Bhupen could not draw in an academically correct way. His drawings were never realistic. When he painted figures, they always seemed out of proportion. But this worked in his favour. He found a different way to convey his reality that is quite unique.
What would you say were the major influences in Bhupen’s journey as an artist?
Nilima: His early work was influenced by miniature paintings and pilgrimage maps. Then he started painting figures, eventually bringing them to the foreground of the painting. Later, he became more interested in the body.
Bhupen was interested in European art and this interest grew as he travelled abroad. You see some of David Hockney’s tongue-in-cheek style in his paintings. Baroda School artists have tended to have more connection to London than to New York and this was true of Bhupen as well.
Howard Hodgkin, the British painter and art collector, was a big fan and did a lot to bring Bhupen’s art into the international arena. He accepted Bhupen’s homosexuality and I think it influenced Bhupen’s decision to come out. Howard was married at that time, but came out as a homosexual later in his life.
You collaborated with Bhupen on a project. How was he to work with?
Nilima: We all have our own vanities, but I found Bhupen easy to work with. The project was a play on the life of Jaishankar Sundari, a Gujarati theatre actor famous for playing female roles. Anuradha Kapoor, director of the National School of Drama in Delhi, asked me to do the set design and I suggested we rope in Bhupen as a consultant. The two of us travelled to Sundari’s house in Visnagar together. We created the paintings for the set, working from a friend’s textile workshop in Delhi.
Bhupen and I also collaborated on creating posters for various protest marches we took part in. There was a lot of that happening those days. We had quite a few communal clashes in Baroda.
Was Bhupen interested in political activism?
Nilima: He was interested up to a point, but he never wanted a leadership role. It was the same with the gay movement. Even after he came out in the press, Bhupen did not want to be a spokesman for the cause.
Did Bhupen confide in you about his gay life?
Nilima: I always knew he was gay. So did all his other friends. They would gossip about him behind his back, but not in a nasty way. He was not out then and we did not want to burden him with questions.
Bhupen preferred older men and that may have been a factor that prevented him from coming out initially. He was not attracted to personable, sophisticated elderly men. Quite the opposite. People found this difficult to digest. Some thought Bhupen was caring for these old men out of kindness.
Bhupen did start to share his gay life with us later. Shankarbhai was the first partner I met, though I did not get to know him very well. He was very old and his eyesight was bad. Bhupen later introduced us to Vallabhbhai, who lived with him and was the most consistent relationship in his life. They travelled together and he would bring Vallabhbhai to our house.
What was Bhupen’s own house like?
Nilima: Bhupen’s home was an adda, a place where everyone would come together. People were constantly flitting in and out. Bhupen liked conversation and he had a lot of friends, including younger people like the writer Naushil Mehta, who was of great help to Bhupen when he became ill. The house was in a typically middle-class neighbourhood and it was amazing how he managed to live there as an openly gay person. He had created paintings like Two Men in Benares by then and was a famous gay artist.
Gujaratis are reputed to be good neighbours. But how Gujarati was Bhupen? Was he religious?
Nilima: Bhupen was very Gujarati, in terms of culture, language, food. He was a Brahma-Kshatriya, which is somewhere between the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes, and he loved his fish and meat.
His mother was very religious, I recall. She stayed with him in Baroda for quite a few years and was very dominant. After his mother, his widowed sister-in-law came to stay, so it was quite a Gujarati household.
I do not think of Bhupen as religious, though he drew from Hindu culture in his art. He was interested in Hindu mythology from a literary point of view. One of his famous paintings, Yayati, was based on a story in The Mahabharata.
In his later years, Bhupen would accompany Vallabhbhai to satsangs (spiritual gatherings where people meditate, sing and listen to discourses). I do not know if there was a different understanding of sexuality in the satsang environment.
Was Bhupen more your friend or your husband Gulam’s?
Nilima: Bhupen and Gulam were almost like siblings, their lives were so intertwined. They knew each other from when Bhupen lived in Mumbai. Gulam was the one who suggested he come to Baroda and join Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU).
Bhupen and I had a relationship independent of Gulam. I met Bhupen when I first came to Baroda in 1965 as a postgraduate student at MSU. He used to hang out at the university canteen, as we all did. He was a fun person and already well known as a painter. Art historian Ushakant Mehta and artist Jaidev Thakore were part of our group. Those days I did not know Gulam. He was away at the Royal College of Art in London.
Bhupen and I became more friendly after Gulam returned in 1966. Gulam taught art history and I was his student. The culture at MSU was different then and the relationship between professors and students was very informal.
For a while, Bhupen, Gulam and another artist, Jeram Patel, lived in the Residency Bungalow, a building which was originally built by Baroda’s royal family for the British Resident. Their rooms opened out into the billiards room, which was used for seminars and film screenings. Lot of students would hang out there, including me. One of Bhupen’s early works features Gulam in that setting, with the blue flooring taking up most of the canvas. The painting hangs in our drawing room.
Were you with Bhupen in the last stages?
Nilima: I was not at the hospital when he passed, but I was with him when his prostate cancer was diagnosed. My father was a doctor in Delhi and he fixed an appointment for Bhupen with a well-known urologist there. I went along and I remember the doctor assumed I was Bhupen’s wife. We played along and did not correct him. The urologist advised Bhupen to go in for radical surgery. But then Bhupen got a second opinion and this doctor said surgery was not necessary. He never had the operation.
But in his last interview, with Sadanand Menon for The Hindu, Bhupen said they had removed his testes…
Nilima: Bhupen loved drama. He sometimes made things up for dramatic effect. Gulam tells a story of how they were travelling together in a crowded second-class train compartment, where Bhupen got into a conversation with their fellow passengers and made up an entirely fictional life story for himself, complete with a quarrelsome wife and a criminal son. Gulam says he was utterly convincing.