Bhupen Khakhar made a virtue of painting pain, he suffered and laughed: Gulammohammed Sheikh
by Vandana Kalra. Originally published in The Indian Express December 14, 2024
Gulammohammed Sheikh on curating an exhibition of Bhupen Khakhar at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, their friendship and Khakhar’s depiction of homosexual relationshipsOne of the highlights of the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, this year is “Bhupen in Goa”, an exhibition of artist Bhupen Khakhar curated by artist and friend Gulammohammed Sheikh from Swaraj Art Archive. In an email interview, Sheikh talks about his curatorial vision, Khakhar’s humour and how his art was a means of self-expression. Excerpts:
Could you share insights into Khakhar’s works in the Swaraj Art Archive, and the curatorial approach to this exhibition?
The principal reason to curate this exhibition was to project a single-largest collection of Bhupen in the relatively unknown Swaraj Archive, established by Vijay Aggarwal. I do not know any big private collection of Bhupen’s work, except an impressive collection of Brian Weinstein (about 100 works) in Washington, who was a friend of Bhupen.
I have selected 164 works out of over 207 in the collection, choosing a variety of mediums Bhupen was adept at, including watercolours, drawings, prints, ceramic plates and ceramic sculptures beside painted accordion format books.
Sukhdev Rathod, my old associate, artist and ceramist based in Alibaug, has worked with me on the exhibition. Large-scale blow-ups of his portraits have been made, including a portrait of him by the ace photographer and friend (late) Navroze Contractor (courtesy Navroze’s partner Deepa Dhanraj). A booklet has been prepared with text from my memoir of Bhupen entitled Buddy. In addition, we will digitally reproduce a booklet Bhupen had produced for his exhibition in Delhi in 1972, which brings out his humour. In this, he wrote a half-fictitious ‘autobiography’ with photographs of him in the role of James Bond posed with Marianne Nicaise, a visiting French girl, and other photographs mimicking a toothpaste advertisement, and another called ‘Made for Each Other’.

Were there works in this collection that took you by surprise?
There were several wonderful works I had known about, but the pencil-and-colour drawings in his early sketchbook were a discovery. These consist of initial versions of his seminal works like Janta Watch Repairing (1972), Deluxe Tailors (1972) and Portrait of Salman Rushdie (1995). I plan to put images of these works alongside the pencil-and-colour sketches. The paintings include Image in Man’s Heart and a couple of glorious watercolours from the Sri Lanka and Thailand series. But the most moving is the image of a skeletal man in bed surrounded with heads of his friends and lovers, somewhat reminiscent of the great Mughal painting Dying Inayat Khan.

You played an huge role in convincing Khakhar’s mother in allowing him to move to Baroda to pursue art. Could you talk about his early years there?
In Baroda, Bhupen discovered that he was far too old to sit with first-year students, but also that he was eligible to join a Master’s course in Art Criticism, having had his university graduation in commerce before getting into the course of chartered accountancy. So, he joined the course and even wrote a dissertation but then he abandoned it all to paint, and painted for more than 40 years till his death in 2003.
You have written about how in an attempt to appear straight, Khakhar played “the double game” skillfully, including romancing Nasreen Mohamedi and Geeta Kapur. Later, he became more comfortable expressing his sexuality. How did this shift manifest in his work?
Perhaps, that is how he covered his sexual orientation and behind this cover-up was a pain that he suffered until he came out around the 1980s. In his earlier paintings, he showed his love of the male body in a clandestine, rather surreptitious way.
Bhupen was also a prankster. Are there any memorable moments of mischief?
He loved to put on roles of various kinds. Perhaps, the most mischievous was the way in which he played an unhappy husband with marital and parental woes to some fellow passengers in a train. I found it extremely difficult to keep a straight face as he recounted the escapades of his wife and tantrums of his children. You were influenced by one another and, at times, even used the same inspiration for different ends.
In art, we had common favourites like Sienese painting, much of pre-modern Indian painting, but I had little interest in popular ephemera, Company painting and Hindi films; he was totally immersed in them. We saw and commented on each other’s works often. As for our pictorial orientations, we had chosen different paths but it is likely that, at times, our intentions matched.

In the ’80s, when works like Two Men in Banaras, Yayati, were shown behind closed doors in Mumbai, did Khakhar express the desire to be able to publicly exhibit his depictions of gay relationships? Did the fact that some artists objected to his work and labelled it “obscene” bother him?
If he painted Yayati and Two Men in Banaras in his Baroda home in Chikuwadi, which was open to all, it can be imagined he wanted to show his explicit works in public. He was quite upset when he heard that some Indian artists had dubbed his work obscene. In contrast, he felt at home in England, where no such questions were raised. I remember him talking excitedly about the Mardi Gras festival in Sydney where he had displayed some of his works.

Artists often communicate their innermost thoughts through their work. Did Khakhar’s art serve as a particularly personal vehicle for self-expression, from his exploration of homosexuality to the pain due to prostate cancer?
It is apparent that artists do express their internal turmoil but such expressions are rarely explicit. Bhupen, however, made a virtue of painting pain in an explicit manner but often with a tongue-in-cheek demeanour. He would both suffer as well as laugh, a proposition quite rare.