Bhupen Khakhar painting of Indian working classes drinking chai expected to fetch crores at Sotheby’s auction

LONDON: A Bhupen Khakhar oil painting titled "Krishna Hotel" depicting ordinary Indians having snacks and chai on battered-looking café tables, which has not been seen in public since 1972, is expected to fetch crores when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on October 26.
The estimated price is £200,000 (Rs 2 crore) to £400,000 (Rs 4 crore). But it is expected to fetch much more during the live auction.
"Krishna Hotel" dates to a watershed moment in Mumbai-born Khakhar’s artistic career — the beginning of his "trade series", in which the working-classes of India, which had been mostly excluded from the sophisticated realm of art, suddenly found a place for themselves in his paintings.
The first trade series work by the artist to appear on the open market, "De-Luxe Tailors", sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for £1.1 million (Rs 11 crore).
"Krishna Hotel" has been in the collection of American expat and Pune-based architect Christopher Benninger, who has designed many of South Asia’s most important buildings, for almost half a century.
Benninger bought the painting soon after it was painted in 1972 at a small auction of paintings from the New Order bookshop in Ahmedabad.
The exhibition was organised by the shop owner, Dinkar Trivedi, to support Bangladeshi refugees who were flooding into India at the time. Khakhar was not known then but was Benninger’s friend. Benninger first travelled to India in the 1960s when he met a number of Baroda Group artists, including Khakhar.
Khakar only made it onto the international market in 2016 following a Tate Modern exhibition and Benninger overlooked the value of the work until now.
"In 1972 I saw this painting as a radical break away from the dull, lifeless, often geometric modernism sweeping the world," Benninger said. The proceeds will be used to create a non-profit foundation to support artists across South Asia.
"‘Hotel’ is the colloquial term used by working class Indians to describe a café, especially in smaller towns, where the emerging middle and working classes intermingled," explained Ishrat Kanga, head of modern & contemporary South Asian Art at Sotheby’s London. "The radio, a luxury at the time, has pride of place above the café’s owner, next to a framed photograph of one of the owner’s ancestors, another hallmark of middle-class aesthetics."
"‘Krishna Hotel’ appears at first glance a social painting, and yet is pervaded by an unsettling sense of isolation and loneliness, by both the physical space that divides the hotels’ patrons and their forlorn expressions," Kanga said.