About Book
In the winter of 1946, Somenath Hore, one of India's major painter-sculptors, was assigned by the Communist Party to document the Tebhaga movement in North Bengal.
A young art student at the time, Hore witnessed the massive mobilization taking place in a network of villages, and captured the widespread spirit of peasant consciousness and militant solidarity, all the more remarkable at a time when communalism was rife in national politics.
Somnath Hore’s personal diary and sketches of the Tebhaga days are an unusual social document of a peasant movement seen through the eyes of a committed artist. Closely involved in the struggle, the Tebhaga experience remained a source of inspiration for him.
One can see in these sketches the rugged lines since transformed into sculptured forms, but charged with the same intensity of anguish and anger; and the seeds of the vision that infused his later work.
About Author
Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh. He lost his father early and was schooled with the help of his uncle. In his youth he became affiliated with the Communist Party, and his socialist ideologies influenced the early phases of his artistic career. It was through the active patronage of the Communist Party of India that Hore gained entrance to the Government Art College in Calcutta. Haren Das was then presiding over the graphics department, and Hore had the advantage of learning from him.[1] In 1943 he did visual documentation and reporting of the Bengal famine for the Communist Party magazine Jannayuddha (People's War). His coming of age as an artist coincided with the 1946 peasant unrest in Bengal known as the Tebhaga movement. Hore became a follower of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, the political propagandist and printmaker. Hore learned the methods and nuances of printmaking, mainly lithography and intaglio, at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta. By the 1950s he was regarded as the premier printmaker in India. Hore invented and developed various printmaking techniques of his own, including his famous pulp-print technique, which he used in the critically acclaimed Wounds series of prints. At the behest of Dinkar Kaushik, Hore came to Santiniketan to head the Graphics and Printmaking Department. Somnath lived most of his later life at Santiniketan, where he taught at Kala Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva Bharati University. There he became a close associate of the painter K.G. Subramanyan and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij In the 1970s Hore also started making sculpture. His contorted bronze figurines recalled the agonies of famine and war, and became iconic emblems of modern Indian art.[3] One of his largest sculptures, Mother and Child, which paid tribute to the sufferings of the people of Vietnam, was stolen from Kala Bhavan soon after it was finished and disappeared without a trace. Hore died in 2006 at the age of 85. He is prominently represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi