Bhupen in Goa — An intrepid ode to India’s first openly gay artist by Gulammohammed Sheikh

Portraits of the late artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), part of the display in 'Bhupen in Goa' show, at recently concluded Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 in Panjim, Goa. (Credit: Navroze Contractor)

At the Directorate of Accounts building, one of the venues of the recent Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 in Goa’s Panjim area, three art exhibitions welcomed you. On the first floor was the pièce de résistance of the festival this year: Bhupen in Goa, an exhibition of the works of Bhupen Khakhar, the pioneering artist who would have turned 90 this year, curated by veteran poet-artist and his close friend Ghulammohammed Sheikh, whom then part-time accountant Khakhar had met in 1958 and who encouraged Khakhar to enrol in Faculty of Fine Arts in MS University, Baroda. Rejected by the painting department, Khakhar joined the arts criticism programme in 1962. Prior to that, the Bombay-born Khakhar had attended evening classes at JJ School of Art, Bombay. The Khakhars were originally artisans who came from the Portuguese colony of Diu.

The show 'Bhupen in Goa', part of Serendipity Arts Festival 2024, was curated by artist Gulammohammed Sheikh.

The display, of Bhupen in Goa, brought together Khakhar’s works from the large private collection — single-largest collection of Khakhar’s works — of the little-known Swaraj Art Archive, established by Vijay Aggarwal. On display were 164 works from the 207 in the collections, across a variety of mediums Khakhar worked in: watercolours, drawings, prints, ceramic plates and ceramic sculptures, and painted accordion-format books (one on his Sri Lanka journey in watercolour and the other on Salman Rushdie’s short stories with lino-cut illustrations). Khakhar was portrayed as “the accountant” in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). The artist returned the favour by making a portrait of the author that he called The Moor, and which is now housed within the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Salman Rushdie in Bhupen Khakhar's 'The Moor'. (Courtesy: Swaraj Art Archive)

Largely self-taught, Khakhar developed a richly coloured style in oil, watercolour and gouache. Figuration and landscape became the mainstay of artistic pursuit of Khakhar, the painter of social and personal narratives, combining daily life and fantasy — in contrast to the abstraction and expressionism of the progressive artists of the previous generation. He further set himself apart when homosexuality became his art’s subject 1980s onwards. “Bhupen was a most colourful character on the contemporary Indian art scene. Self-taught largely but he developed his own mode of work by dint of hard work that he worked day and night and produced a very large corpus,” Sheikh told PTI.

From the exhibition 'Bhupen in Goa', December 2024, at the Serendipity Arts Festival.

After an initial phase of explosive ‘Pop’ collages — affecting the mannerisms of Andy Warhol and David Hockney — he went on to depict urban middle-class life in an intimate realism: small-town shopkeepers (watch-repair shop; men’s hair salon) and ordinary folk. Gradually, before his expression in art found full liberation, there were paintings depicting the clog and clutter in his mind, the confusion and helplessness of being unable to speak his own truth.

The objective to subjective journey of his own art reflects a journey from clutches of his own ingrained conservatism to self-actualisation. Having lost his father when he was four years old, Khakhar was brought up by his mother. Perhaps not to hurt her sentiments, the Gujarati artist came out as a homosexual, the first public figure to do so in India, only after his mother’s death in 1980. “Until he came out around 1980s, his earlier paintings showed his love for the male body in a clandestine, surreptitious way,” Sheikh said in an interview to The Indian Express. Khakhar’s, an openly gay artist’s, portrayal of gay life opened a hitherto closed chapter in the annals of contemporary Indian art. “He was quite upset when he heard that some Indian artists had dubbed his work obscene. He felt at home in England,” said Sheikh. And yet, according to some accounts, the time he’d spent in London had seen Khakhar witness both homophobia and an openness to sexuality which, once prevalent in India, had been curtailed by British rule. To Bhupen, being both Indian and internationalist was not contradictory. Like Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhupen Khakhar was an internationalist, at home in the world.

Bhupen Khakhar's painted poster for the Gay Games Amsterdam, 1998.

Also, part of the Serendipity display is Khakhar’s 1998 Untitled painting, a 20x16 inch poster, with the caption “Bhupen Khakhar for Gay Games Amsterdam 1998 Cultural Program” for the Gay Games in Amsterdam, for which organisers reported an attendance of 250,000 people, the Gate Foundation curated a show of selected works by Khakhar taken from Dutch and German collections.

In 1981, in a first-of-its-kind in India and an audacious move in a rather conservative South Asian art, he painted a series of iconic works such as You Can’t Please All. These paintings were among the first in India to delve into themes of relationships between men and societal taboos around homosexuality. Fishermen in Goa (1985) depicts a group of three men — one fully dressed, another in a vest, and the third naked. Two Men in Benares (1982) witnesses two naked men, one with silver hair and the other with black, in a warm embrace. It reflects the mystical Bhakti spiritual traditions, in which the idea of love between men, master and disciple, was a form of devotion. Then there are magic-realist dreamscapes of his, depicting men, god, devil, fairies — in which the fantastical and quotidian come together.

A work by Bhupen Khakhar, part of 'Bhupen in Goa' show. (Courtesy Swaraj Art Archive)

Khakhar, who died of prostate cancer in 2003, aged 69, produced a series of paintings during his prolonged illness, capturing in art the deterioration of his own body.

Bhupen Khakhar's 'Emaciated Man in Bed'. (Courtesy: Swaraj Art Archive)

In one image, ‘Emaciated Man in Bed’, a dreamscape, a shrivelled man, his ribs jutting out, lies on the bed, reflecting on either the lives he couldn’t live or the same-sex love that he did experience and the lovers he might have had. Sardonic humour was a veneer he laced his pain with, which he poured into his art and would say things like “Good taste can be very killing.” Sheikh added in his interview, “Bhupen made a virtue of painting pain in an explicit manner but often with a tongue-in-cheek demeanour.”

Bhupen Khakhar's 'Image in a Man’s Heart' at Serendipity Arts Festival 2024. (Courtesy Swaraj Art Archive)

In Image in a Man’s Heart (1999), acrylic and oil on canvas, a young man, painted in blue, in the grips of melancholia, but also the colour of divinity that sets it apart from the corporeal, he sits amid a darbar of older, gloomy-eyed men, a big hole on his chest gives us a glimpse into his heart: in the void of his heart reside many men — only men. In another painting, a man, his wife by his side, has in his heart men, in a sign of repressed life and love.

On his passing, The New York Times wrote, “Khakhar, who published short stories and a play, was the subject of a book by the British artist Timothy Hyman and a film by Judy Marle. Among his friends he was known for his self-deprecating attitude toward his art. He had so little confidence in its value that he maintained a full-time job as an accountant until he was well into his 50s.”

A photograph of Bhupen Khakhar, painting at his home, part of the show 'Bhupen in Goa'. (Courtesy Swaraj Art Archive)

Khakhar was unimpeachable. That lack of confidence was but natural. In spite of the reading down of Section 377 and decriminalising of same-sex relation among consenting adults in 2018, same-sex marriage remains illegal in India, a largely homophobic country, where essentially gay love can meet to never meet, with social sanctity. The pain that Khakhar painted bleeds current truths and will keep telling the stories of gay love, closeted, repressed or banished, at home and in the world. “An artist must be vulnerable. His paintings must reflect all his weak points,” Khakhar had said, who, through his art, also reflected on his own self, his own hypocrisies to garb his then-closeted reality until he found liberation of expression, albeit in a world that sat in judgement. His gaze remained as much outwards as turned inwards. Bhupen Khakhar, among others, would go on to inspire the Bombay poet, playwright, painter and physician Gieve Patel, who died last year.