‘We first confront the ascetic in the startling portrait Hathayogi 1978 in which a hollow-eyed figure is surrounded by miniaturised scenes of ritual self-mortification’.
Hatha yoga, from the Sanskrit word hatha – ‘force’ – is a form of yogic practice with strong physical techniques. References to this application of yoga date back to the 11th century, from the Sanskrit manual Amṛtasiddhi. Over the ensuing centuries, hatha yoga held strong associations with extreme asceticism and self-violence. In the current lot, an iconic painting by Bhupen Khakhar from 1978, the artist explores the tradition of hatha yoga through his vivid kitsch aesthetic and quintessential candor.
Photograph by Virendra Kumar© Kumar Gallery
Right: Photograph by Virendra Kumar© Kumar Gallery
Hatha Yogi is among Khakhar’s most renowned works. Exhibited at the iconic show at Kumar Gallery, New Delhi in 1978, Six Who Declined to Show in the Triennale, the painting was shown alongside works by Gulammohammed Sheikh, Gieve Patel, K. Laxma Goud, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Vivan Sundaram, artists who, along with a number of Lalit Kala Akademi commissioners, rebelled and refused to take part in the government-sponsored Triennale in Delhi.
Archives of Kumar Gallery, New Delhi
Almost 40 years later, the painting was exhibited once more, at the landmark retrospective at Tate Modern, London and Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin: You Can’t Please All. This show represented a pivotal moment in the artistic legacy of Khakhar and, more widely, for the understanding and recognition of modern & contemporary South Asian art.
Photo ©Tate.
In You Can’t Please All, Hatha Yogi was exhibited in the room titled ‘The Insignificant Man’. This selection of works centered on Khakhar’s 1970s ‘Trade Series’, in which the tradesmen and ordinary people of the artist’s home in Baroda, were transposed from their shops and bazaars, to inhabit the vibrantly-colored, Pop-realist world of his canvases. This placement of Hatha Yogi within this space is note-worthy, aligning the life of an ascetic with a trade profession.
‘In [a] series of paintings, portraits from the 1970s, the artist observes different characters in the fabric of life of his city: the watch repairer, the window cleaner, the accountant, a hata-yogi meditating. Khakhar has worked as an accountant most of his life, and he is clearly familiar with the condition of those… people who are trapped in their caste and their profession. In these series, Khakhar's gaze sways between naiveté and a sharp observation of the social space around him, while his paintings seek to shine a light on the nameless people comprising the hierarchic world of castes in which he lives.’
Sotheby's New York, 16 March 2016, lot 878
In the current lot, Khakhar’s yogi is shown nude, with a skull-like face, sagging body and exposed phallus. He sits atop a tiger skin, often seen in imagery of Shiva, before a hanging green textile. The ground of the canvas is a searing red and below the figure, three people in miniature are absorbed in ritualistic practice. One seated piously bearing a flower garland, another walking through fire, and the last laying impaled upon a bed of blades. This use of a narrative band, in conjunction with a central protagonist, recalls the Pichhwai tradition, as described by Nada Raza:
‘Khakhar’s 'awkward' perspective is a visual device gleaned from devotional iconography. Pichhwai - painted backdrops that depict Krishna - originated at the Shrinathji temple in Nathdwara in Rajasthan. These were produced from the seventeenth century in a hybrid style, often with a band of narrative vignette running in a strip along the side, and a lotus pond below. Intended to be seen from the point of view of supplicant seated on the floor, in these altarpieces the deity looms between a high horizon line towards the top and a low, defined plane in the foreground, allowing the viewer to look up into and enter the picture plane.’
Reproduced from C. Dercon and N. Raza, Bhupen Khakhar:You Can't Please All, Tate Publishing, London, 2016, p. 41
Right: Current lot
Raza cites Khakhar’s 1976 painting, Man with a Bouquet of Flowers (Fig. 2), as an example of this compositional device, in which the eponymous subject is flanked by small-scale vignettes. In this work, the viewer is struck by the figure’s haunted expression and the paradox found within the seeming vibrancy of his surroundings, deftly captured by Adil Jussawalla: ’The eyes are starkly open, the face gray, catatonic… The man is mad. He hasn't been destroyed; but his way of surviving his environment is to have gone mad. His bouquet of plastic flowers makes sudden chilling sense… That look of intolerable inner oppression is not new to Khakhar's work.’ (A. Jussawalla, ‘Candour and Secrecy, The Figures of Bhupen Khakhar’, U. Mirchandani, Bhupen Khakhar: A Retrospective, The Replica Handbags Resource, Mumbai, 2003, p. 21) This anguished figure finds his ascetic counterpart in Hatha Yogi. The symbols of everyday mundanity and companionship are starkly absent in the current lot - he is alone, aside from the tortured figures in the foreground, perhaps imagined within the yogi’s consciousness, or formed from memories of his own ritualistic practice.
‘[Khakhar’s] portraits captured the modern male subject with extraordinary pathos, echoed in the hollowed eyes and piercing gaze of Hathayogi 1978 or Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers 1975.’
Hatha Yogi makes early allusions to the homoeroticism that was not to declare itself unequivocally in Khakhar’s art until the 1980s. Jussawalla describes the increasingly explicit imagery that appeared in Khakhar’s work during this period:
‘Compare the phallic joke of the gardener with the watering hose in Goa: Church (1972) [Church and Gardener, 1970] with the exposed genitals of Hatha Yogi (1977) [1978] where even the animal skin the man is sitting on appears to flow towards the viewer, more slimy than furry, a product of the genitals themselves. If this is vulgar in the extreme, too crude for most tastes, consider that an artist can be forced into crudities because of that very good taste which politely ignored his earlier, much milder phallic joke. And subverting polite taste is exactly what everyone has praised Khakhar for! Presumably this a commendable act only if it is restricted to the hygienic contexts of social criticism and art history. Khakhar, the much-applauded clown, would appear to have had the last laugh. Our hypocrisy has been fathomless. He has barely touched it. We always thought he was making fun of the other lot - the bourgeoisie. The joke's been on us.’
Sotheby's New York, 15 March 2016, lot 543
Hatha Yogi, depicted on large-scale and with a vibrant vulgarity and honesty, is considered one of Khakhar’s most recognizable and prized paintings.