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Of Wounds and Regeneration
Amrita Gupta Singh in this essay reviews the lecture delivered by Dr.Sanjoy Kumar Mallik on the works of Late Somnath Hore. Taking on the Mumbaiites’ indifference for Somnath Hore, she says that had his works been sold in international auction circuits, the Mumbai art frat would have turned up in hundreds for the lecture.
 Somnath Hore passed away on October 2, 2006, and as a homage to the artist, the Mohile Parikh Center for the Visual Arts, Mumbai, organized a presentation on January 24, 2007, titled, “The Oeuvre of Somnath Hore: wounds that refused to heal/wounds that he refused to heal” by Santiniketan based art historian and researcher, Sanjoy Kumar Mallik. Only twenty people attended this fine lecture; I do not speak here from the regional-parochialism of a Bengali who studied in Santiniketan, or endorsing a Bengali artist whose significance is under-estimated outside the geographical boundaries of Bengal. I speak here from the position of an art historian who understands Somnath Hore both as a significant artist and a conscious thinker, whose humanist philosophy has a contemporary relevance that transcends borders of regions, cultures, time and space. I find it strange that many resident artists, writers, theorists or even students in Bombay did not find the time or inclination to be a part of this event, even when it was well publicized much in advance. Is it because Somnath Hore is not known well enough outside Bengal, or was the thematic approach of the lecture via the metaphor of wounds too archaic or sentimental for the fast-paced city of Bombay? Is it because Somnath Hore is not marketable enough; would the inclusion of his works in one of the Sotheby’s, Christie’s or Osian’s auctions made a difference, underscoring the inevitable capitalistic/cultural power of such auction houses to ‘elevate’ an artist’s work, giving it an ‘elitist’ value in today’s art market, where ‘price’ is equivalent to an artist’s worth ? Or is Sanjoy Mallik, despite his commendable scholarship, not ‘glamorous’ enough to merit a larger audience? Whatever be the case, I will opine that many people missed a lecture that introduced Hore’s oeuvre in the most empathetic and sanguine manner, which was both theoretically rich and formally accessible.
One of the pioneers of the 20th century modern art movement in India, Somnath Hore (1921-2006), lived life on several levels. A sculptor, painter-printmaker and art educationist who taught in Kolkata, Delhi, Baroda and Santiniketan, Hore appears as the classic Bengal artist who was deeply affected by the catastrophes that changed the social history of Bengal; yet his work was guided by humanist concerns, his human figure, through traumatized, appears nevertheless optimistic, enduring such catastrophes with a fortitude, that touches the soul. However, there is no authoritative book that contextualizes his contribution to Indian art history, and he remains a mystic figure to many.
Dr. Sanjoy Mallik, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati (Santiniketan), presented a crisp and well-researched paper, aligning with a comprehensive slide documentation of the artist’s works. Starting on a personal note, Mallik said, ”October 2nd, 2006. I had missed him at Kala Bhavana, and was rushing for a final glimpse. When my eyes fell on his face as he lay in front of me at the burning ghat grounds, I had a curious feeling of looking at the face of a seer in meditative withdrawal, complete with a long beard so very uncharacteristic of Somnath Hore; looking at this face it was difficult to convince myself that he had passed away. But that was indeed the truth. Those who had seen him immediately after he had breathed his last, were of the opinion that the face had initially revealed a disquieting exhaustion. By the time I saw him, the expression of having wrested in those final moments had disappeared, and somehow oddly enough, the face now made me recall the famous photograph of Aurobindo in his final samadhi. Probably I risk being castigated and chastised for drawing this parallel; this equivalence must be the ultimate contradiction, because firmly anchored in his faith in Marxist ideology, despite his dissociation from the political party, Somnath Hore should be something like a polar distance from religious austerities. Yet the response, I have to admit, was instinctive and spontaneous…Later, I found a remarkably touching obituary from Gopal Krishna Gandhi, the governor of West Bengal, in one of the English dailies of that very date. He had concluded on the note that though Somnath Hore was no believer, he would like to think that the artist wouldn't mind his ending the tribute with a Sanskrit invocation of a 'believing' kind ― “remember this ― only the works remain, only the works”.
Yes, only the works remain, works with wounds that speak of the human condition, both in its historical and contemporary contexts, wounds that humans continuously inflict on each other, without respite, yet we survive, we endure, we live. The evolution of modern Kolkata has been a complex process, with excruciating incidents such as the Bengal famine, the Partition, the communal tension and the Naxalite movement, tearing apart the very fabric of society. Somnath Hore’s creative trajectory followed the contours of his Leftist political activism and social beliefs, which included the role of an artist as an agent of progressive change. The Bengal famine of 1943 and the Tebhaga peasant uprising of 1946 formed the basis of his initial artistic engagements. In the mid-1940s, Hore studied briefly at the Government School of Art, Kolkata, but discontinued due to family misfortunes and radical political activism. His association with fellow artists and party activists, Chittaprosad and Zainul Abedin stimulated his intellectual and artistic growth. Hore’s first major work was the Tebhaga diary (1946). Written and illustrated along the lines of Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal, the diary documents the Tebhaga Movement, denoting the widespread spirit of peasant consciousness and militant solidarity.
Mallik elaborates, “The pictures of the Tebhaga are mostly affirmative images, of faith in the endeavour, of enthusiasm and expectation. The determination is evident in the faces of the people whose portraits Somnath Hore drew. It is also marked in the pictures of collective group-activity, of harvesting, gathering at a meeting and marching in processions of protest”.
Closely involved in the struggle, the Tebhaga experience remained a source of inspiration for Hore as also the inhumanity of Bengal Famine and the horrors of the nuclear holocaust in the Second World War. Hore gave up political activism around 1954, and joined the Indian College of Art and Drafsmanship as a lecturer, and in 1956, he did not renew his membership with the communist party.
As Hore said, “From personal experience I have found out that politics can be abstract to the point of absurdity…Actual events fade away in course of time, but aesthetics engulfs time”. Mallik opines that it was during this time that Hore’s work “began to shift decisively from topical immediacy into transformed images of human suffering irrespective of the specificity of incidents. Elimination of the inessential, determined by the artist's propensity for the essential, went hand-in-hand with his exploration of the line as an expressive device”. Chinese wood-engraving and the work of Kathe Kollwitz were influences which drew him towards printmaking and from 1954 onwards, Hore ceaselessly experimented with the printmaking process. In 1958, Hore moved to teach at the Delhi Polytechnique, (later Delhi College of Art) and an exhibition of Krishna Reddy’s multi viscosity prints impacted his approach towards printmaking in a major way; “… beginning from this point onwards, a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of a medium did extend into an implication of wider significance for Somnath Hore. Technical possibilities of the etched print proved to be pregnant with meaning implications, and the very process of an acid bath that “bites” into the metal plate was suggestive enough for Somnath Hore to read into it his recurrent metaphor of the wounds”.
In 1967, Hore shifted back to the idyllic environs of Santiniketan, but in the years that followed, he found a large section of the youth involved in violent political struggle and Mallik elaborates the engagement with the theme of wounds with a quote of the artist, “Wounds is what I see everywhere around me. A scarred tree, a road gouged by a truck tyre, a man knifed for no visible or rational reason”. A lifetime of inventive experiments with etching, intaglio and lithographs culminated in the first abstract paper pulp, white on white, Wounds series in 1971. “The decade of the seventies was the period when Somnath Hore evolved the distinctive pulp-print series that bear the generic title, “Wounds”, a term that has hence come to assume the status of a qualifying name for his entire oeuvre as a whole. On the one hand, it would be customary to call these works abstract…they appear to be extreme close-ups that do not allow specific individual identity. On the other hand, the pulp prints themselves and by extension the clay or wax sheet on which the initial marks were made, as well as the cement matrix onto which they were transferred for paper to be cast on them, literally became the body on which the wounds were reflected; the scars resulted out of the process of image-making, the thrust of a knife, the scorching heat of a blow lamp or a hot rod burning or melting the wax. And in the process, Somnath Hore virtually came to a cross-road where the undulating textured surface of an intaglio print and the sculptural process of casting from a mould merged into an integral whole as a communicative gesture”.
Hore began doing bronze sculptures in Santiniketan, from 1974 onwards. One of his largest sculptures, Mother with Child (1977) that paid homage to the spirit of the people's struggle in Vietnam was stolen from Kala Bhavan, soon after it was finished and disappeared without a trace. This theft imposed a break on Somnath Hore's sculptural investigations and he resumed working in this medium only after his retirement in 1983. The rugged lines and bony bodies of his sketches and prints were transformed into sculpted forms that always reflected the anguished human figure, reduced to skeletal forms. Rough planes with ribs, slits and holes, torn surfaces and angular modeling produced tactile sculptures, amplifying humanity’s shattered state. Mallik opines, “Invariably, the metaphor of the “wounds” is inseparably ingrained within this method of execution, each cut, gash or termination of a form, transliterates into a recollection of the acts of violence and mutilation; sometimes they even read as suturing of the dismembered strips back to form the figure — and the wound that results out of it, persists from one work to another, making the responsive viewer conscious of those persisting scars that simply refuse to disappear”.
Forgetting is a psychological device that humans adopt to be able to move out of painful histories, it sometimes heals, while at other times, it allows us to be escapists. Bereft of sentiment, Hore’s austere works never allow us to forget the past, his tribute to the victims of history remains inscribed in our memories, transcending the private/public dichotomy. But all is not anguish; there are immense possibilities of hope, compassion and affirmation, and Mallik poignantly concludes, “It would therefore be worthwhile to consider that the perpetuated category of the “wounds” could be perceived from a more open perspective, such that not all of Somnath Hore's works intend to inspire awe merely through a committed social commentary. Somewhere across the thematic concern with a suffering humanity, there is a simultaneous possibility of the element of hopeful regeneration, the battered bodies are nearly blasted open, but they often continue to display a remarkable degree of resilience with the possibility to rise up and strive ahead, despite the wound. We know that there do exist wounds that refuse to heal, but it is also true that Somnath Hore's engagement with the theme probably involved a nurturing of those very wounds that would eke us on, keeping us constantly aware of a world that continuously inflicts scars on one another. He refused to let the wounds in his memory heal, he refused to allow himself to lapse into unproblematic complacence or mere repetition. His statements are dialectically positioned between a near-factual utterance of inflicted suffering, and optimism for deliverance: as images of suffering and pain they are extremely poignant expressions, yet on the whole they do not spell dejection or fatalistic surrender — the more they make the viewer aware of the wound, the more they inspire a will to persevere and overcome”. |
