The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.) 

An India viewed through French eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

For screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who died on February 8, adapting the Mahabharata was both a way to enter Indian culture -- and to look at it from the outside.

"Writing for film is filming," Jean-Claude Carrière used to tell his screenwriting students. "You have to know that what you write, is not written to be published. It is written to be forgotten and to be transformed into something else. Into another kind of matter. [That is] absolutely essential."

The legendary French screenwriter, who died on February 8 at 89, exemplified the art of collaboration so necessary when writing for cinema. Over a wide-ranging career, he worked with some of the finest directors of the 20th century, from the masterfully comic Jacques Tati (who originally hired Carrière to novelise his films), to the surrealist Luis Buñuel (with whom he wrote six memorable films, including Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), Louis Malle and Jacques Deray, the master of thrillers (their La Piscine was recently remade by Luca Guadagnino as A Bigger Splash). His ability to think with - sometimes within – other minds gave him a rare talent for reworking the literary greats: He adapted Günter Grass and Marcel Proust for Volker Schlöndorff, Dostoevsky for Andrezj Wajda, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac for Jean-Paul Rappeneau and Milan Kundera for Philip Kaufman.

But he was most famous, certainly in India, for having adapted the Mahabharata.

Even by Carrière's standards, the epic may have provided him with his most ambitious project. An idea that grew out of a chance conversation with the maverick British theatre guru Peter Brook, turning the twelve-volume Sanskrit poem into a nine-hour-long French play became, for Carrière, much more than a job. I've never seen Brook's play, first staged in Paris in the 1980s, and I confess that the 3.5-hour English film version felt impossible to enter when it was shown to me as a young student. It is on YouTube now, and it remains hard to get past the odd mishmash of 'Indianness' sought to be evoked by Rabindra Sangeet, cave-like temples lit with diyas and a comically masked Ganesha - or the international actors speaking in English. But whatever one might think of the aesthetics and politics of the thing, its makers clearly took it seriously. 

None more so than Carrière, it became clear to me this week, when I finally read his Big Bhishma in Madras: In Search of the Mahabharata with Peter Brook. First published in French in 1997, it is a stunning little book about his journey into India and the epic. Part-travelogue, part-diary, and illustrated with Carrière's quirky sketches, it was delightfully translated into English in 2001 by Aruna Vasudev (herself an iconic Delhi figure who edited the Asian film magazine of my youth, Cinemaya, and founded the film festival that became Osians' Cinefan).

If you've grown up in India, you know the Mahabharata. Or you think you do, when all you likely know are the barest bones of the most capacious story ever told. Something similar is true of India: We live in our own little corners of it, hemmed in by walls of class, caste, language and religion, and imagine that what we're clutching in the dark is the whole elephant. Sometimes it takes an outsider to cast fresh light on a thing - and Carrière is that outsider.  

Like an ignorant but sharp child, he sees things an insider would ignore – and paints them with the lightest touch. Cows seen in the darkness of Delhi's avenues are "like pale ghosts"; a Calcutta hotel is "a British masquerade". He observes our turns of phrase, our ways of being. Meeting Rukmini Arundale, he talks of how in India the word "beautiful" seems reserved for women over 50, "a quality that is acquired". In Purulia, the actors return from the fields and are made up for Chhau, and as "the peasant becomes a god," his co-villagers treat him more respectfully.

Of course his references are Western, often Orientalist, the modern European's view of the past: The Meenakshi temple "possesses and swallows up the city...it is Babylon dreamt up by Cecil B. De Mille and directed by an Indian"; a Kerala meal served to them by an army of servants, supervised by a white-haired man in a lungi "could easily be a patrician home in ancient Rome".

But Carrière's vision is vivid and free. His glimpses of our dance, music and theatre, while preliminary, often catch something essential. At a dhrupad rendition at the Dagar brothers' home, "among all the instruments of music, the human voice reigns supreme. And one understands why". Bharatanatyam dancers seem to him to return over and over to the earth - which he perceives as the opposite of ballet, whose movements seem always poised for flight. 

There is also that rare thing, especially in the Westerner in India: Self-reflexiveness. And with that comes clarity. "Tradition here is very strong, with an energy that is constantly renewed...We cannot hope for anything to equal it. In the West we will, on the contrary, present an unknown story. Therein lies the danger of exoticism, of picturesqueness...".

Whether Carrière successfully avoided that danger, I don't know. But he manages, as always, to ask the sharp question. "On the other hand, in India, this all-powerful and omnipresent tradition must have a paralysing effect on contemporary expression. And even beyond that: To continue a tradition does it not mean, in a way, that the order of things is good as it is, that the caste system is excellent and nothing must be touched?" As he says quietly, "It is at least worth thinking about." 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Feb 2021.

A Closer Look

My piece on a marvellous new Google Arts exhibit, for India Today:

The National Museum’s miniatures are now in augmented reality, on a screen near you.

Swami Haridasa with Tansen and Akbar at Vrindavana. Unknown, 1700 AD - 1760 AD. National Museum, New Delhi.

If you’ve ever admired a miniature painting on a museum wall, you might know the feeling of wanting to hold it in your hands for a closer look. Life in Miniature partially fulfils that desire. The latest India-centric project by Google Arts and Culture makes over 1,000 miniatures, from the National Museum’s and 24 more collections available in gloriously high resolution. “These paintings were not meant to be viewed from behind glass. You now have an experience close to that of the original patrons,” says Kavita Singh, professor of art history at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has also written an essay for the virtual show.

So, for instance, if you were to click on a painting of the Mughal emperor Akbar accompanying Tansen to meet the latter’s guru Swami Haridas in Vrindavan, the painting, at first glance, simply shows Tansen kneeling before his mentor, while the emperor stands behind him. Then you might notice Tansen’s tanpura, richly ornamented, sitting quietly by his side, while he looks reverently at the saint plucking his simple brown one. You’ll see three white-clad figures, but a closer look at their clothes reveals their social positions. The swami wears only a loincloth, while Tansen and Akbar wear jamas with a gold-edged sash. But then you might notice that Akbar is barefoot: perhaps in deference to Haridas?

The pleasure of these paintings extends beyond social analysis. As you zoom in, monkeys, squirrels and many birds become visible in the foliage. Google’s curators urge viewers to “find the parrots” or “spot the weapons”, and group images into “stories”, instead of the dryer chronological or geographical approaches. “A lot of older arcane scholarly work did not serve these paintings well. Narrative and thematic approaches are more prevalent now. This exhibition is rooted in visual delight, which was the intention of the painters,” says Singh. “Grouping images by subject or colour offers lively pathways into the art for people outside the academy. Perhaps the next step can be to make these resources available in other Indian languages. But this is a great start.”

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020