The explosive purity of the sketches, prints and sculptures created by Somnath Hore (1921-2006), was such that they speak powerfully to our times decades after they were made. This was borne out in the year-long celebration of the artist’s body of work in his birth centenary year (April 13, 2021 – April 13, 2022). In this incisive piece, Santiniketan-based art historian and curator R. Siva Kumar provides a glimpse of what made Somnath Hore the artist and human being he was – one who remained true to his art and political worldview till the very end. There are deeply thoughtful artists committed to the cause of art who have changed art radically, and didactic artists committed to a political or social cause and have fought for it. But few have combined the formal and the political as effectively as Somnath Hore.Born in 1921 in a village near Chittagong (in present-day Bangladesh), as a child, Somnath was fascinated by the power of art to capture the world in realistic pictures. Simple illustrations, portraits of famous authors, and the work of village artists all enticed him equally, and they inspired him sufficiently to keep drawing along with his studies into his college years.But it was his effort to document the Second World War and the Bengal famine of 1943 in Chittagong that sealed his ideological commitment and his career as an artist. His fascination for the magic of visual representation and his urge to produce a testament to the violence and suffering of man did not always sit well within him; he could not decide between the two – they gnawed at him and kept him going.His early drawings of war and famine victims drew the attention of Chittaprosad, who became his first mentor, and of the Communist Party, which published some of them in its mouthpiece, People’s War. P.C. Joshi, the general secretary of the party, took note of his talent and helped him get enrolled in the Government College of Art, Calcutta (1945). It fulfilled the youngster’s adolescent ambition to become an artist.Somnath Hore’s Tebhaga Series, pen and ink. Photo: Courtesy of Seagull Foundation for the ArtsAt the art school, young Somnath came into contact with Zainul Abedin whose powerful drawings of the famine victims on the streets of Calcutta became a touchstone for him. Their impact became visible in his drawings of the Tebhaga movement (1946) and the tea garden workers’ agitation (1947) that he documented on his own initiative while he was still a student. In them, he tried to capture the struggle and the hope of organised assertions rather than the suffering of the peasants and workers that he had paid attention to hitherto.These were also the years Somnath was closest to the Communist Party; its workers were his friends. When the Party was banned, he left his studies and went underground (1949-50). He also served two short terms in prison.During his third year at the art college, Somnath was introduced to wood engraving. Around the same time, he came across a book of Chinese woodcuts containing prints against the Japanese invasion, and he was bowled over by their technical virtuosity.(Left to right) Famine – Calcutta streets, mid-50s, woodcut (Somnath Hore used several of his drawings of the Bengal famine in the 1940s for woodcuts later); meeting at a market, early-50s, woodcut. Photos (left to right): Courtesy of Seagull Foundation for the Arts, R. Sivakumar.However, viewing an exhibition of Socialist Realist Art a few years later, he felt it was propagandist, and aesthetically limited. Around the same time, the free collaboration that artists like him had with the Party was replaced by a policy of adherence to party dictates.Although his political sympathies rested with the Left and would remain so till the end, Somnath found this change stifling as an artist. He felt that although he had become an artist “because of the Party, one would never be able to develop true artistic creativity unless one freed oneself from crass material politics.”At least for the moment, his desire to freely pursue artistic excellence won. In 1956 he gave up his Party membership and two years later left for Delhi to take up a teaching job at the Delhi Polytechnic, which later became the Delhi Art College.Somnath spent almost 10 years in Delhi, and they were crucial for his development as a printmaker and teacher. Going beyond wood engraving and woodcut, he experimented with lithography, etching, and the newly invented process of simultaneous colour printing.The Delhi years: print collage, 1962. Photo: Courtesy of R. SivakumarThrough extensive reading and relentless experimentation, in less than four years, he not only became a sophisticated printmaker but also established a modern Department of Printmaking at the college.As Somnath focused on achieving technical excellence, his thematic focus widened and he became recognised as one of India’s leading printmakers, receiving two Akademi awards for his etchings and one for painting during these years.But gradually his old thematic concerns resurfaced, and towards the mid-60s, he found new ways of addressing them and bringing techniques and themes closer. As this happened, he began to feel out of place in Delhi, with its fast-moving life, the formalist art world, and scant regard for social engagement. Most abruptly, in 1967, he resigned from his job at the art school and returned to Calcutta, choosing the uncertainty of freedom over stifling security.Also read: Man, Artist, Wound: Somnath Hore as I Knew HimSomnath’s return to Calcutta coincided with the formation of the United Front government in West Bengal, with both the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India as part of the political coalition. However, he did not stay in Calcutta. Towards the end of the year, he was invited to join the art school at Santiniketan as a visiting fellow. Two years later he joined as a permanent faculty.As a teenager, Somnath had wanted to study art at Santiniketan. Later, while he was in Calcutta, he had looked at the work of its masters from a distance and even visited it once or twice. Now he had a chance of working with two of its artists, Benodebehari and Ramkinkar, whom he admired greatly. Looking at them, he realised that it was possible for an artist to keep to his path and yet plumb the depths of art and life by strategically locating himself on the margins.“My coming to Santiniketan at this mature age,” he wrote, “was, however, fruitful. I studied the techniques of Rabindranath, Nandalal, Benodebehari, Ramkinkar as though I was a young student.”Somnath Hore with a student, Mimi Radhakrishnan, in Santiniketan, 1977. Photo: Suman DuttaSantiniketan became his permanent home, and the most conducive environment for his work. As in Delhi, he built a fine Department of Printmaking in Santiniketan and continued with his experiments. But the slow pace of life in Santiniketan allowed him to be more reflective and reconsider his work and processes more critically.The world around Somnath was once again in the throes of social violence. This time, it was unleashed from two sides — by the extreme Left, and by the government suppressing it brutally. There was no foreign oppressor here; the people of his own country were up against each other.“There was pointless violent conflict everywhere,” he felt, and “the boundary between friend and foe was obliterated. In the name of class struggle, gratuitous violence was visited upon the weakest sections of society. The movement generated more fear than reassurance. And I became preoccupied with the concept of the wound.”With the shadows of this new wave of violence falling over the memories of old sufferings, Somnath began to see elements of latent violence in his own working process. The marks he made as a printmaker—scratching, scraping, cutting into, and getting the plate bit with acid — these too, he felt, were acts of violence perpetrated on inert materials, and what he produced were also wounds.Even as the distance between the victimiser and the victim blurred in the world around him, as an artist he saw in himself both the aggressor and the healer. That did not stop him from experimenting but led to a closer symbiosis between technique and imagery, regulated by the modernist aesthetics of material and process.‘Wounds’ by Somnath Hore, pulp print, 1979. Photo: Courtesy of R. Siva KumarIn Santiniketan, Somnath went back to woodcut and etching but explored them in radically new ways. He also experimented with colour lithography, copperplate engraving, white on white paper pulp prints, and sculpture. In each, his concerns remained the same, but the medium determined its embodiment differently, and in each, he tried to be as simple and direct as it was possible.In his woodcuts, minimally cut planks metamorphosed into brooding bodies; in the etchings and engravings, stark and taut lines summoned ominous scenes; in the pulp prints, tool marks became lacerations; and in the sculptures, folded wax plates transformed into deformed, scalded bodies. The consummate master he had become needed no symbolism, no rhetoric, or demonstration of ingenuity; effective simplicity and directness itself was dexterity.As a printmaker, his works, except for the two murals he did in Santiniketan, were always small in scale. They called for close viewing. But his later works are tactile, too. The paper-pulp prints, the vigorously cut engravings, the wax sculptures cast in bronze are like old scars over which you pass your eyes slowly, almost absentmindedly, like a caressing hand, and as you do so, you feel the blistered skin, the torn flesh, the splintered bone, and the old traumas come back to life to haunt you.Horse head by Somnath Hore, 1988. Photo: Courtesy of R. SivakumarIn these works, we are looking at the effects of violence, seldom at the acts of violence itself. There are no slogans, no tracts, and no sermons embedded in them; only a compelling presence, an experience that we cannot escape. It is through the deliberately crafted and inescapable materiality of the work and nothing else that he speaks to us.Looking at his later works, it becomes clear that he did not believe in utopian solutions anymore. But he was not altogether hopeless either, as his large sculpture of a mother and child, which was tragically stolen from his studio soon after it was completed, suggests. The image of a woman with her chest blown off, still standing erect with her head held high, cradling a child in her arms, is tragic and quietly heroic, like Somnath himself. It was his homage to the Vietnamese people who stood up to brutal power and triumphed.(Left to right): Engraving, 1983; ‘Mother and child’: a homage to the courage of the Vietnamese people during their war with the USA, 1977, bronze. Photos: Courtesy of R. Siva KumarAfter a lifetime of engagement with violence and suffering, it was evident to him that there cannot be a sudden and permanent erasure of human suffering. It is empathy, without which we cannot feel the pain of others, that he demonstrates in his later works; and seeks from us, his viewers.As a man and artist, he tried to act as honestly and honourably as possible, and like all honest men, even his comrades-in-arms found him a demanding fellow traveller. He knew that political ideologies could turn into heartless abstractions, while men and the experience of violence and suffering remain real. He dedicated himself entirely to art, it was the only way he had to act upon the world and to tell us what he saw, experienced, and believed.Sketch of mother and child, 1999, among the last of Somnath Hore’s works. Photo: Courtesy of R. Siva KumarAnd yet he was very wary of the art world and, as much as possible, kept himself away from it. In the final count, he tried to live honourably without absolving himself of our collective failures.It is 16 years since he died, and his works continue to speak to us, just as he did, in a gentle but unwavering voice. Devoid of scale and sensationalism, it is the beauty of his art that first draws us in, and as we begin to absorb it, the physical pleasure of savouring its material sensuality gives way to the cruel reality it embodies. And we learn that we cannot insulate ourselves from the bitter truth of man’s inhumanities and the tragedy of suffering at the hands of fellow humans.The experience does not spur us to raise our fists in paroxysmal protest; the violence and suffering of others seize us slowly, make us aware of our everyday blindness to it and compel us to recognise our complicity in it. Looking at Somnath Hore’s works is paradoxically a pleasurable, disturbing, sobering, and transformative experience all rolled into one.R. Siva Kumar is a Santiniketan-based art historian and curator, who has contributed to the study of modern Indian art and just retired from Visva Bharati University.
