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Wounds that He Refused to Heal
Traversing through the works of Somnath Hore and the critical literature developed around them, Sanjoy Mallik says that his works inspire a will to persevere and overcome the historical wounds inflicted on the humanity by power and greed.
Apologies for beginning on a personal note. It is difficult not to do so, the proximity of Somnath Hore's passing away is temporally still too near to overcome. I had enrolled as an undergraduate student in Kala Bhavana in 1986, while Somnath Hore had already retired in 1983, yet it was not so uncommon to find him walking into the campus on mornings ― a tall frail figure with a small cloth side-bag on his shoulder, often a straw hat on his head; he appeared to have a very faint stoop, but a face that bore silent grit and resilience. I do not remember ever having heard him speak loudly, yet he exuded a strength of personality ― intrusion into his privacy implied an extremely strong will and conviction of intention. I would also see him when I visited his daughter Chandana (academically senior to us by six years) at their Lalbandh residence in Santiniketan. As we sat in conversation in the verandah of that unassuming house, I would steal glimpses of him at work on the wax figures that would subsequently be cast in bronze. It wouldn't be entirely wrong to say that I knew him, though that should not imply omniscience either. It was possible to know him only as much as he permitted. He spoke little and one did not feel too comfortable to attempt disturbing his engrossed introspection. (…)
Born in 1921 in their ancestral village in Chattagram, Somnath Hore had lost his father1 at the young age of thirteen. Obvious financial and social crises apart, he completed his Intermediate Examinations with a merit scholarship that he had earned because of his matriculation results. He joined the City College in Kolkata for a B.Sc. course in 1940 and simultaneously came into contact with the Communist Party. The onset of war and a personal financial crisis forced Somnath Hore to leave Kolkata for his native Chattagram2. Chattagram in 1942 faced the threat of Japanese bombardment, and Somnath Hore observed his first sight of devastation and the strewn dismembered bodies in a village near his own. The desire to document the ghastly sight turned him to the world of visual records — these sketches are said to be his earliest essays in picture-making. Through Purnendu Dastidar who was the chief functionary of the Communist party in Chattagram, Somnath Hore came to know Chittaprosad, and initially began by following in Chittaprosad's footsteps. When Chittaprosad was asked to tour his home district Midnapore documenting the infamous man-made “famine” of 1943-44 (culminating in the famous visual-verbal document, the “Hungry ‘Bengal”), Somnath Hore took up the charge in Chittagong, and his sketches began to appear besides Chittaprosad’s in the Communist party journals; the Communist Party soon discovered in the young Somnath Hore a flair for hand-drawn posters as well; he was soon made a party whole-timer. (….)
In November 1958, Somnath Hore left Calcutta to join the Graphic section of the Art department of the Delhi Polytechnic (later the Delhi Art College). Though the artist does not mention the incident in the 1992 catalogue, Pranabranjan Ray relates in considerable length, that a Krishna Reddy exhibition in December of the same year had an immense impact on Somnath Hore, initiating an urge to try out multi-colour viscosity prints from a single metal plate. Aided by references from published books he not only grasped the technicalities of the process but was able to master it with sufficient confidence to hold a solo exhibition of his prints at the A.I.F.A.C.S. gallery by 1960. Dated 1959, the “Genesis” should be a representative example of the period; it reveals how the visual turmoil encircling the mother-and-child is markedly different in tone ― even cosmic to a certain degree ― producing an image that invokes a distinctly different response from his pictures of inflicted pain. The turmoil can be read precisely in the scrambled patches of colours and lines encircling a slightly off-centre, oval, neutral and non-specified space wherein the mother-and-child lie. The non-angular lyricism of the lines that delineate the form of the mother-and-child tend to give the feeling of an eternal embrace amidst the encircling aura of the swirling textures. Genesis therefore, despite the acid-bitten textural roughness, is an image that is not too directly concerned with inflicted wounds and scarred pain. (….)
But 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, Somnath Hore shifted to Santiniketan, where the ambience was most certainly quieter than that of the capital. But within a couple of years, he found a large section of the youth in Bengal involved in a phenomenal political upheaval that urged his artistic response further towards an engagement with the “wound” as a recurring motif.
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 reason3.
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, in the sense that one cannot locate identifiable natural forms in these works; 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.
Somnath Hore recalled that his initial attempts for a sculptural expression began during the summer vacation of 19744, through modest attempts at working with bits of wax. This culminated in the 1977 bronze in response to the 1975 Vietnam war, a 40 inch high 40 kg image of a mother clutching on to her child. The unfortunate theft of the sculpture marked a break in Somnath Hore's sculptural explorations till he could resume after retirement in 1983. His sculptural process involves working directly from sheets of wax that are torn, cut, pressed, folded and attached to each other, suggesting through the resultant shape, the source form that inspired it. 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.
When Somnath Hore renamed his 1989 bronze Compassion to include a subtitle Draupadi Holding Abhimanyu, for his 1995 exhibition, the sculpture alluded to the epic narrative of the Mahabharata, qualifying the initial title. A close look at the sculpture reveals that the emphasis is primarily focused on a single, completely defined unit ― the mother’s palm as she cradles the head of her dead son. In contrast to her stoic verticality, the limpness of the figure of the son, suggestive of a lifeless body, is brought out through the bare minimum of two sheets of metal welded together by three smaller pieces at the junction, forming the slumped curve of the body. The rest of the sculpture is a minimal expression where parts of the human anatomy are reduced to the barest, simplest essential of the folded sheets of wax-cast metal and thin cylindrical units for the limbs (that doubled up as channels for the metal to pass through during the process of casting). On the one hand, the figural ensemble refers to a theme of the mother holding the body of her dead son ― it may not be too erroneous if one is reminded of Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta ― on the other hand, there is no strict iconographic specificity for the figures’ identification as the mythic characters that the title suggests.
What emerges therefore, from primarily visual response to the sculptural form, is a concern with the humanitarian expression, and generates a secularised ‘Pieta’, extending the implication of the theme beyond the realm of mythic narratives to relatively immediate and contemporary relevance. What also emerges from such a reading is the complementary relation between technical necessities/possibilities of the direct-wax bronze-casting process, and the adjustment of the same for an optimum expressive configuration. An example like Compassion: Draupadi Holding Abhimanyu definitely deals with pain and suffering, but not necessarily with obviously visible inflicted scars of the ‘wound’. The scars are no doubt present, but subdued ― as in the three ‘shreds’ of metal that join the two halves of the limp torso of the son, or the abrupt termination of the mother’s palm and arm a little beyond the wrist, or even the roughness of the texture of the cylindrical form of the limbs and the edges of the sheets of metal ― but the dominant tone is that of compassion/felt-pain, which almost stills the mother into immobility.
What is of consequence is the fact that, while the theme of ‘wounds’ has been of persisting concern to Somnath Hore, he has been simultaneously considering other aspects of humanity as well, even if these were not obviously conspicuous in equal measure in all his images. His concern with humanitarian attributes of compassion, assurance, and optimism, were intrinsically woven into the artist’s perpetual and long-standing quest for the technical possibilities of each media he chose to work in at various points of time. Even sculptures that directly deal with visible scars/‘wounds’, the technical explorations are integral to the process of image-making and the content that the image holds within it.
The 1985 Dog displays dexterity in malleable manipulation of a single sheet of wax for the torso of the animal ― it is pressed, bent and folded to suggest the cloak of skin falling over, and into, the hollow ribcage. Parts of the animal's body, for instance the conjunction of the neck connecting the head and shoulder, or the front legs, are nothing more than the ‘channels’ retained as-it-is to play the role of the anatomical segments. It is the malleability of the material wax that confirms and amplifies the expression of pain and suffering of the pitifully lean animal, transferring a meaningful emptiness onto the hollow sculptural form.
The linguistic mode and personal stylistic predilection from within which the artist expressed himself, is noticeable in an untitled lithograph of 19775. Though the reclining man is obviously lean and emaciated, as is evident from the frailty of the body indicated through the linear treatment that stresses the skeletal structure, the expression of the posture is not exactly that of anguished pain. On the contrary, there is a surprisingly relaxed feeling in the way one leg is supported atop the other knee, and the hands support the head beneath, combining apparently contradictory opposites in the expression of contentment and the deplorable condition of the body.
For an artist like Somnath Hore, the recurrence of theme and the persistence of the motif of ‘wounds’, does not lead to a diminishing impact of the experience or the relevance of his concern. As R. Siva Kumar has pointed out, the artist “struggles to save it from melting into memory and nostalgia and give it the quality of an ageless vision. By analogy he turns every new experience into some further confirmation of the ‘first’ anguish…..”6
Although K.G. Subramanyan had stressed that in Somnath Hore’s work it is the “spectacle of man’s suffering that steals the show”, he has also pointed out that these are far from being “loud pictures of suffering whose messages passes over our heads like barked out slogans ….. They are insidious; they slip slowly in. Then they disturb us and shade into the didactic. We start thinking, what is this world that we see daily? And run our hands over our faces. And find that the bone lies only a little below the flesh.” 7
… For Somnath Hore to have us experience the world as he experiences it, to constantly hold up to us the evil we haven’t overcome but we would like to wish away, to protest against the unjust even when victory is not in sight, are both a political and a moral responsibility. And even in the darkest labyrinth of hell ‘hope is a dream worth living with’.
In varying degrees in his sculptures, prints and paintings, besides the haunting sight of an anguished struggle, it is a sustained feeling of the possibility of endurance and hope that permeates the work of Somnath Hore, whereby all is not altogether bleak. The work-process allows technicalities to lead on to a more forceful statement of sensitive emotive contents, as can be observed in the specific instances sighted, rescuing them from immediate topicality, thereby harnessing experience into expression.
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.
(This is an edited version of a commemorative lecture that Dr.Sanjoy Mallik delivered at the MPCVA, Mumbai. Edited and reproduced here with the permission of the MPCVA. Original lecture is available at the MPCVA website)
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