Recently, while watching Margaret Hoover’s Firing Line interview with Salman Rushdie, I was struck by something that had little to do, at first sight, with what Rushdie was saying. He spoke at length about Knife, the film and book dealing with the 2022 assassination attempt on his life, and also about the continuing tragedy of Israel and Palestine. But what held my attention was the camera angle.
Rushdie was shown in three-quarter profile. His damaged right eye was covered by a tinted lens, while his good left eye appeared behind an ordinary transparent lens. The effect was strangely theatrical. For a moment, he looked almost comically like a pirate. Yet that dark piece of glass was impossible to ignore. It became a constant visual reminder of the stabbing in 2022, of the eye he lost, and of the violence that had permanently altered his face.
And suddenly I thought of Bhupen Khakhar.
Khakhar, a close friend of Rushdie, painted the celebrated portrait Salman Rushdie (‘The Moor’) in 1995, around the time of the publication of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The painting is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. What struck me, looking back at it after seeing Rushdie on television, was the extraordinary prominence—and disappearance—of the right eye.
Khakhar paints Rushdie in left profile, almost like a Mughal prince. His body is frontal enough to give the painting presence, but his face is turned decisively to the left. He holds an obscure object in his right hand, folded across his chest, while wearing a waistcoat. The profile is conventional, almost courtly. The right eye is completely invisible.
At the time Khakhar painted it, this was simply a formal decision. But after the events of 2022, the absence acquires an uncanny charge.
Khakhar was perfectly capable of painting frontal faces. His paintings often contain eccentric, theatrical and deliberately constructed characters. In this work too, there is a peculiar figure on the right, almost clerical in appearance, holding a cat on a leash. The image has the absurdity characteristic of Khakhar: an animal as famously headstrong as a cat being subjected to the indignity of a leash. One could read the scene as a comic meditation on authority, discipline and religious power. The absurdity of attempting to control a cat has its own strange resonance when placed against the extraordinary attempt to control Rushdie's life through a religious decree.
But Khakhar hides something more in the painting.
On the right side, there is an artist apparently working on a portrait of Rushdie. We see the sitter in right profile on the small canvas. And here, too, the eye becomes interesting. From the distance at which the little painting is represented, the eye appears almost like a dark slit.
This creates a curious doubling. The large Rushdie in the centre is apparently the sitter, while the small Rushdie on the canvas is the portrait being made by the artist within the painting. The painting therefore becomes a meditation on the act of portraiture itself—a portrait containing another portrait, and a sitter who is simultaneously present and represented.
Art history has given us many such games of representation. Vermeer, Velázquez and Rembrandt, among others, repeatedly complicated the relationship between the person being represented, the artist making the representation and the viewer looking at both. Khakhar's device belongs to this larger history, but his version is unmistakably his own: theatrical, ironic and slightly unsettling.
What fascinates me is what happens to that little eye after 2022.
Was Khakhar unknowingly prophetic?
Of course, he could not have known that Rushdie would one day be attacked and lose his right eye. To claim otherwise would be to turn coincidence into clairvoyance. But perhaps a work of art can become prophetic without its artist having predicted anything. Perhaps prophecy can occur retrospectively.
The painting has not changed. Our knowledge has.
Before the attack, the invisible right eye was simply a consequence of profile. After the attack, that same absence becomes loaded with an entirely different meaning. We look at the painting knowing something that Khakhar could never have known. The old image begins to absorb the future.
This is what fascinates me about art. It sometimes seems to travel before time. It leaves behind forms and signs whose significance may not become apparent until history catches up with them.
Rushdie's own Knife, his autobiographical account of the attack, makes this connection even more uncanny. The book's visual language of the slit and incision recalls the brutal physical wound inflicted on his body. One cannot look at a slit in a painted surface after such an event without thinking of the vulnerability of the body beneath the surface.
This brings to mind Lucio Fontana, whose famous Concetto Spaziale paintings were violently cut and slashed. Fontana's cuts are not merely representations of wounds; they are actual wounds inflicted upon the canvas. The surface is opened. The painting becomes a body that has been violated.
Rushdie's damaged eye and Fontana's slashed canvas belong, of course, to completely different histories. Yet the visual metaphor is difficult to resist: the slit as wound, the wound as image, the image as a record of violence.
And this is where Khakhar's portrait becomes unexpectedly disturbing.
In 1995, the invisible eye was merely an invisible eye. In 2022, it became something else. We can now look backward and see in that absence a strange prefiguration of the damaged face Rushdie would eventually carry into the world.
Perhaps that is one of the mysteries of portraiture. A portrait does not merely preserve a person at a particular moment. It also preserves possibilities of looking that may not yet have occurred. The future can enter an old image without ever having been placed there by the artist.
The camera on Firing Line did something similar. By placing Rushdie in three-quarter profile, with one eye behind a dark lens and the other visible, it unintentionally produced a living counterpart to Khakhar's painted figure. The television image seemed to complete something that had been left unresolved in the painting decades earlier.
For a moment, the two Rushdies—one painted in 1995, one sitting before a television camera in 2026—seemed to look at each other across time.
The painter could not have foreseen the knife.
But perhaps art does not have to foresee the future to travel into it.
Sometimes we are forced to think.
Art travels before time.
JohnyML
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