Indian artist Krishen Khanna at 101: “The moment you stop looking is when you truly begin to age”

I grew up around my grandfather’s studio, the smell of paint, tubes of colour, the placid concentration of his working day. Back then, I had no idea his paintings would come to mean so many things to so many people. To me, they were simply part of our house, part of my childhood, part of the world I lived inside. I remember watching Dada paint and sometimes painting alongside him, not fully understanding the magnitude of what he was making, only sensing that something important was happening in the room.

In July, when I walked into the living room of our family home in Delhi to surprise him for his 101st birthday, the scene hadn’t changed much. Dressed in a crisp white kurta with a black shawl draped around his neck, Dada sat in his favourite chair, sketching away, completely absorbed. My grandmother sat on the other sofa, humming softly to herself as she knitted. It was ordinary—one year after his big­ cen­tenary—and extraordinary at once: the rhythm of their lives, the tenderness of­ routine, the understanding that creativity didn’t require occasion. Between bites of buttercream cake and brushstrokes of vivid colours, we spent the afternoon talking about everything that made him and everything that keeps him going.

Kajoli Khanna: You’re turning 101. When you look back at this extraordinary century, what images come to mind first?

Krishen Khanna: At this point, it’s mostly fragments: a face, a railway platform, a room filled with afternoon light, a hand raised in farewell. There is childhood, of course. There is Partition, friends now gone. There are studios, laughter, streets, loss. There are rooms I cannot return to, and people whose voices I still hear very clearly. Every morning, on the street in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad in Pakistan) where I grew up, the postman would pass by chanting “Chitthiyaa, chitthiyaa.” I can hear him as though he were walking down the street just now. And there are colours, always colours. Greys, browns, sudden reds.

Kajoli Khanna: What’s surprised you most about reaching this stage of life?

Krishen Khanna: That one can still be surprised. At 101, people imagine you must have grown world-weary. But life remains mysterious to the very end. A small thing can still move me—an expression on a face, a child saying something unexpected, a line from a song. The body becomes old, yes. But the eye must not become old. The moment you stop looking is when you truly begin to age, no matter how young you are.

Kajoli Khanna: You were first a banker and then an artist. Do you think artists are born observant or do they learn to notice?

Krishen Khanna: Both. Some people are born with a habit of looking. But looking is not the same as seeing. Seeing has to be learned. Banking taught me discipline, but art taught me attention. An artist must notice what passes others by: the tiredness in a man’s shoulders, the absurdity of a wedding procession, the loneliness inside celebration. These things are all around us. The artist is simply someone who cannot look away.

Kajoli Khanna: What are you most grateful for today?

Krishen Khanna: For having had work to do. It has meant everything to me. Work has given shape to my days and, fortunately, to my inner life as well. I am grateful for having loved and been loved. For seeing my family grow around me—my wonderful wife and our three children, who are my pillars of support. For friendships that enlarged my life. Many of those friends are gone now, but friendship does not disappear because the person is no longer there. Some conversations continue within you. And I am grateful that painting never left me. It has been a demanding companion, not always kind, but faithful in its own way.

Kajoli Khanna: Last year marked your retrospective at NGMA Mumbai, Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive, which I had the privilege of co-curating with Dr Zehra Jumabhoy. Although you weren’t able to physically see the show, you saw images and videos of the installation. What did that feel like?

Krishen Khanna: I never painted with the expectation of having a retrospective dedicated to my work one day. I painted because something insisted on being painted. That’s how it is: you work, you struggle, you continue. Then, suddenly, after many years, people gather the work and call it a retrospective. I wish I could’ve been there but even seeing the images and the videos—the bandwallas, the trucks, the figures from Partition, the myths, the witnesses brought together in those rooms—was touching. A life looks different when it is arranged on museum walls, even when seen from a distance. But what moved me very deeply was that you were part of it. It made me realise that my work had travelled further than I knew, and then, in a beautiful way, also returned home through family.

Kajoli Khanna: If I could spend one ordinary day with you at any age—your 20s, 40s or 80s—which version of you would you want me to meet?

Krishen Khanna: Perhaps the young man in his 20s, because he would make you laugh. He was serious but uncertain—full of ambition and doubt. He did not know where life would take him. He did not yet know how much he would lose, or how much he would be given. Although I would also want you to meet me in my 40s, when art had begun to take hold of me more completely. Or in my 80s, when I had less need to prove anything. Each age has its own foolishness and grace, but I’m sure that I would’ve loved you at all of them.

Kajoli Khanna: When I was little, I remember watching you paint and painting alongside you. How did that make you feel?

Krishen Khanna: Children in a studio bring a different kind of life. They are not impressed by reputation. They are interested in the colour, the mess, the freedom of it. To have you paint alongside me brought me so much joy. Art shouldn’t be placed on a pedestal so high that children cannot touch it. You must be able to sit beside it, smell it and make a mess with it.

Kajoli Khanna: What is your favourite memory of me?

Krishen Khanna: You looking. Always looking. Sometimes asking too many questions: “What shall I paint?” “Can I copy you?” “Why do the figures in your paintings have such ugly hands and feet?” I see that has continued. Mostly, I remember the ease with which you entered my studio. You did not come in as if it were a sacred place. You came in as a child enters a room in the house. That was the right way to do it.

Kajoli Khanna: What has family given you that art could not?

Krishen Khanna: Art has given me intensity, perhaps even a kind of solitude that I crave, but family has returned me to the ordinary rhythms of life—meals, laughter, arguments, children running in and out, someone asking where something has been kept. Those things may seem small, but they are not. As a painter, I spend a great deal of time alone with images, doubt and work. Family brings me back into the world of affection and responsibility.

Kajoli Khanna: After 101 years, what do you know about love that you didn’t know when you were young?

Krishen Khanna: I used to think love was possession, intensity and longing. Later, I learnt that love is also patience and forgiveness. As you grow older, love becomes less dramatic perhaps, but more profound. You understand that love is made of attention. When I was young, my days had a routine. I would have breakfast with your grandmother, then go downstairs to paint. A few hours later, I would come back up to have lunch with her, then go downstairs to work again. At tea time, I would return to her to discuss her day and the book she was currently reading. To remember what someone likes, to sit with them, to ­ forgive, to continue—these are not small things.

Kajoli Khanna: What should young artists today protect most fiercely?

Krishen Khanna: Their honesty. And their patience. There is too much hurry now. Too much pressure to be seen before one has properly learned to see. Fashion will change. Markets will change. Recognition may or may not come. What remains is whether the work had truth in it.

Kajoli Khanna: What do you hope I remember about you years from now that has nothing to do with your paintings?

Krishen Khanna: That I loved you. That I had humour. That I enjoyed talking to people, reciting poetry by TS Eliot, Alfred Tennyson and Li Po, being mischievous and eating chicken curry. That I was a painter standing before a canvas, but also a man who lived among people.

This article appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2026 issue. Subscribe here.

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