Sandhya Bordewekar 

In Salman Rushdie's book, Joseph Anton, an 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 whom he specifically chose to paint his portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Rushdie first saw and was impressed with 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 book, Midnight's Children, was just out then, that celebrated the narrative style in a magic realism mode. When Rushdie came to India shortly 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 MS University. At 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 "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 middle-aged, before his artworks sold enough for him to devote his time completely to painting) 

Since Bhupen passed away on August 8, 2003, 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. 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, that's when he moved to the city from Mumbai) and became very close friends with artists Gulammohammad 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, would 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. He was tremendously interested in the life of very ordinary people and that became the subject of his artworks. "Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers" (1975, collection of National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi) is one of his best-known works, and in his artist's note to the question he asked, 'Why plastic flowers?", and he answered himself, tongue-firmly-in-cheek 'Real flowers fade, a bouquet of plastic flowers is an eternal joy to the eye. That was a 'middle-class' insight which very few contemporary Indian artists would have dared to articulate in those days. In fact, talking of daring, the fact that he never had any formal training in art-making never deterred him from trying his hand out at painting in different mediums, printmaking and sculpture. 

In continuation of 'middle class dreams and aspirations, he conceptualized a solo show at the Chemould Gallery, Mumbai (1972) wherein he got Jyoti Bhatt to photograph him in various avataars (Mr. Universe, Made for Each Other, James Bond, and so on) that he put in the catalogue accompanying the show. Even though the 'performance was really only for the photographer, documenting it as visuals and putting them in the catalogue was a way in which Bhupen shared the 'performance' with the viewers, and also extended what he wanted to express through it to his artworks in the gallery. This was the time when Bhupen was very much influenced by the Pop Art Culture ideology and was essentially working on collages in which to express his sneering/celebrating of popular culture. Bhupen's understanding of the holistic way in which the entire exercise of putting up a show worked choosing the right artworks and their presentation in the gallery space, the importance of a well-written and presented catalogue for the show, the accompanying theatrics that may generate extra footfalls in the gallery, and the crucial element of getting enough buyers could teach an artist-student a thing or two. 

In many of Bhupen's paintings, especially the pre-1980 ones, landscape appears to play a very huge role indeed. In "Portrait of Shri Shankerbhai Patel near Red Fort" (1971), the figure of the blind Shri Patel is in a corner and dwarfed by highly detailed fruit-laden trees and young palms with the fort ramparts in the background and a table with fruits and delicacies. In the very well-known "Man eating Jalebi (1974), the vast, stretching sea with a bay area of undulating hills and palms, linked by a causeway with a luxurious car and a sailboat with a single sailor in it, jump out of a touristy brochure, almost like a 'landscape of fantasy for the wide-eyed man in the foreground. In his later works, such as "Celebration of Guru Jayanti" (1980), "Fishermen in Goa" (1985), and "Jatra" (1997), the background or surrounding landscape throbs with phallic banana and palm trees, water bodies, cloud formations, caves, boats with open and closed sails, land protuberances in the sea and erectile shadows on the water. 

After 1980, when his mother passed away, Bhupen allowed himself to step out of the closet and declare his homosexuality quietly through his works. It was one of the most significant moments in Indian contemporary art history. The most obvious one was, "You can't please all, a large 69 x 69 inches oil on canvas that used the well-known allegorical tale of a man, his son and their donkey, watched by a naked man. As recounted by Brian Weinstein, one of the American collectors of his work, Bhupen explained the erotic element in his works to a "hushed class at the Faculty of Fine Arts of MS University, Baroda... He expanded this idea by saying that his portrayals of sexual intimacy, particularly between men, were not voyeuristic or pornographic because all the relationships expressed in his paintings and prints were based on love. He knew best because he was mainly portraying himself, his intimate experiences, and the lower middle class milieu of his origins in Bombay. Later he explained that the act of creating the erotic works disease that he suffered from released him from his inner passions and torments.  

Bhupen Khakhar was one of the most important and significant artists whom many of us have had the good fortune to meet and interact with. His work, "Celebration of Guru Jayanti" (1980, whereabouts unknown) was selected to grace the cover of the seminal book 

Contemporary Art in Baroda (ed. G M Sheikh). He was honoured with the Kalidas Sammaan (Govt of Madhya Pradesh), the Padma Shri (Govt of India), t the Prince Claus Award (Govt. of Netherlands) among many others. His works are i in the collection of the British Museum and the Tate Gallery (London), the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and he was honoured with a vast Retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain, in 2002, a year before he died of cancer of the prostate in 2003.