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Lot Essay
Bhupen Khakhar’s diverse body of work has always celebrated the unconventional while incorporating radical social commentary. In the 1980s, Khakhar met the celebrated author Salman Rushdie in Bombay, the city where both were born and raised. Deeply inspired by each other’s work, the two soon became friends and collaborators.
A year after the release of Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, he collaborated with Khakhar to produce an illustrated edition of two of his short stories. Printed in 1989, this book compiles Rushdie’s stories ‘The Free Radio’ and ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ alongside a series of woodcut and linocut prints by Khakhar. While the first story focuses on themes of mass media and nationalism and discusses the coercive sterilization campaign of the Emergency, the latter explores the place of religion in modern life and references the real 1963 theft of a relic from the Hazratbal Shrine, Kashmir.
A few years later, in 1995, Rushdie published the semiautobiographical novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, which featured the character of an accountant with a penchant for painting, clearly modeled after Khakhar, and also referenced his famous 1981 painting You Can’t Please All. Khakhar, in turn, painted a portrait of Rushdie titled Salman Rushdie: The Moor, which incorporated scenes from the novel as vignettes around Rushdie’s likeness, rendered in profile. Now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, this painting was the first by an Indian artist to enter this major institution.
The present lot is one of only twelve special editions of the 1989 publication, privately printed by Sebastian Carter. Bound in leather with gilt motifs, this special edition is accompanied by an additional unbound signed set of the woodcut and linocut prints by Khakhar contained in the book, housed with the book in a specially designed case. This particular copy was originally gifted by Rushdie to Olwyn Hughes, a literary agent and the sister of Ted Hughes. Besides her brother, she represented the literary work of his wife, Sylvia Plath, after her death, and a few other clients including Jean Rhys and Elaine Feinstein, and worked closely with Carter on several publications for her imprint, Rainbow Press.
A year after the release of Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, he collaborated with Khakhar to produce an illustrated edition of two of his short stories. Printed in 1989, this book compiles Rushdie’s stories ‘The Free Radio’ and ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ alongside a series of woodcut and linocut prints by Khakhar. While the first story focuses on themes of mass media and nationalism and discusses the coercive sterilization campaign of the Emergency, the latter explores the place of religion in modern life and references the real 1963 theft of a relic from the Hazratbal Shrine, Kashmir.
A few years later, in 1995, Rushdie published the semiautobiographical novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, which featured the character of an accountant with a penchant for painting, clearly modeled after Khakhar, and also referenced his famous 1981 painting You Can’t Please All. Khakhar, in turn, painted a portrait of Rushdie titled Salman Rushdie: The Moor, which incorporated scenes from the novel as vignettes around Rushdie’s likeness, rendered in profile. Now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, this painting was the first by an Indian artist to enter this major institution.
The present lot is one of only twelve special editions of the 1989 publication, privately printed by Sebastian Carter. Bound in leather with gilt motifs, this special edition is accompanied by an additional unbound signed set of the woodcut and linocut prints by Khakhar contained in the book, housed with the book in a specially designed case. This particular copy was originally gifted by Rushdie to Olwyn Hughes, a literary agent and the sister of Ted Hughes. Besides her brother, she represented the literary work of his wife, Sylvia Plath, after her death, and a few other clients including Jean Rhys and Elaine Feinstein, and worked closely with Carter on several publications for her imprint, Rainbow Press.