The late Balraj Khanna (1939-2024) distilled his extraordinary life story into a simple title for his 2021 autobiography: Born in India, Made in England. But this one-liner belies the breadth of six decades of work by a figure who was not only an artist but also an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction, a curator, and a gallery founder.
“He was a relentlessly active person, whether in his writing or his painting,” says his daughter Kaushalia, who has followed in her father’s creative footsteps, working as an architect and designer before recently completing a master’s in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. “He had the faith of being ‘the artist’. He would wake up and know that he had to work—and that work would account for his existence on Earth.”
Born in the Punjab region of India, Khanna moved to the UK in 1962 intending to study English literature, but instead fell in love with drawing and painting. In London he found a community of artists, including compatriots F.N. Souza (1924-2002) and Avinash Chandra (1931-91), and by 1964 he had joined the Indian Painters Collective, which advocated for the representation of Indian artists in Britain. Labeled as “Commonwealth” artists, Khanna and his friends experienced a great deal of racism from British society and fought for opportunities to exhibit their work.
Balraj Khanna, A grasshopper's eye view, 1966, oil on canvas, 118.5 x 184 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Balraj Khanna and Jhaveri Contemporary.
A transformative moment in Khanna’s early career came in 1965 while he was recovering from a motorcycle accident at his wife Francine’s family home in Metz, France. The sense of safety and comfort he felt there allowed him to experiment with his style, and he found a deep connection with nature in the nearby forest. From then on, Khanna focused on expressing what he called “the theatre of the natural world,” a phrase which titles a special display of his work at Tate Britain in London (until July 6th). Three of the paintings on view—Autumn Forest (1965), Saffron Field (1967), and Out of the Blue (2) (1987)—were acquired by the museum in 2024.
Foregrounding color and form, Khanna’s unique abstract paintings also drew heavily on his experiences of Indian and British culture. “He merged his imagination in the two realms [of England and India] to create a third space,” Kaushalia says. Sometimes the forms in his paintings approach figuration—evoking kites from childhood memories or the leaves of British trees—and at other times they resemble the kind of cellular structures one might observe under a microscope.
Khanna had his first solo show at the New Vision Centre in London in 1965, and went on to exhibit widely in the UK, France, and India. He also ventured over the pond in the 1970s. Without a gallery in New York, he optimistically brought several canvases rolled up in his suitcase, including the monumental work Festival (1970). His hosts in Manhattan helped him secure an introduction to the Herbert Benevy Gallery, where he held two exhibitions in 1971 and 1972.
Balraj Khanna, Pond on Hampstead Heath, 1986, acrylic and sand on canvas, 114 x 149 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Balraj Khanna and Jhaveri Contemporary.
Balraj Khanna, Pond on Hampstead Heath 5, 1999, acrylic and sand on canvas, 106 x 106 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Balraj Khanna and Jhaveri Contemporary.
Balraj Khanna, Pond on Hampstead Heath, 1986, acrylic and sand on canvas, 121 x 121 cm, Courtesy of the Estate of Balraj Khanna and Jhaveri Contemporary.
Jhaveri Contemporary’s upcoming presentation at Independent 20th Century will bring Khanna’s work back to New York for the first time in more than 50 years. The selection of three later paintings, dating from 1986 and 1999, is united by a common theme: ponds. “His interest in ponds and lakes probably stemmed from his passion for the Romantic English poets,” muses Kaushalia. “It’s like he wanted to feel close to them in some way.” John Keats lived near Hampstead Heath, with its famous ponds, and often wrote of its beauty. Khanna frequented the north London neighborhood, undertaking the mosaic decoration of a private swimming pool there. He also took many trips to the Lake District landscapes favored by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Ruskin.
Khanna developed new approaches to materials from the mid-1980s, moving from oil paint to acrylic. He blew paint through handmade cut-outs overlaid on the canvas, creating diffuse layers of color and “infusing his own energy—his breath—into the painting,” as Kaushalia puts it. The technique lent itself well to depicting the movements and reflections of water. Khanna also applied sand to the canvas surface to add depth and texture.
Balraj Khanna, Evolving forms, 1989, acrylic and sand on canvas, 121 x 121 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Balraj Khanna and Jhaveri Contemporary.
The pond compositions share a more subtle tonality than is typical of the artist’s vibrant color palette. “They feel a bit like Impressionist paintings,” says Amrita Jhaveri, the founder of Jhaveri Contemporary. She describes the 1980s as the period that Khanna found his voice and a new-found prominence. In 1989 he participated in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, the landmark survey exhibition curated by artist Rasheed Araeen at the Hayward Gallery, conceived as a response to the “racism, inequality, and ignorance of other cultures” still pervasive in the UK at the time.
Kaushalia, her mother Francine, and Jhaveri are currently sifting through Khanna’s studio, which holds hundreds of works, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures, along with a rich archive of letters, diaries, and other documentation. “He never threw anything away,” laughs Francine. Days earlier, she had stumbled across a rolled-up canvas—a forgotten portrait that Khanna had painted of her in 1963. Jhaveri Contemporary and the Estate are also preparing to publish a new book surveying Khanna’s oeuvre, following a recent study day with art historians and curators at Tate Britain.
“Working on the archive, organising the works by decade and finding where they were exhibited, I can definitely see Khanna’s progression, evolution, and experimentation—it was relentless!” Kaushalia says. “He never stopped looking at different things all the time. And that's what makes the work always exciting.”
Aimee Dawson is a freelance art writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in Apollo, Artnet News, Artsy, V&A Magazine and Cultured, among others, and she was a contributing writer to the book African Artists (Phaidon, 2022). She is a columnist at The Art Newspaper, where she was formerly an editor, and a guest lecturer at SOAS, University of London.
