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.) 

Angry River

In May 2014, I wrote this short text for the photography quarterly PIX. The theme of the issue was Habitat (downloadable for view here) and the images my text accompanied were from a superb series called Life on Water, by the young Bangladeshi photographer, Rasel Chowdhury. My text as well as some of Chowdhury's exceptional images, below.

“It was over twenty years since the river had flooded the island, and at that time no-one had lived there.” So went one of the opening lines of Ruskin Bond's remarkable children's classic, Angry River. As a city child, the book was my first inkling that a river wasn't only what lay below the Howrah Bridge: flat, grey, unmoving. A river could be alive. It could be angry. And it could be beautiful.

Photo: Rasel Chowdhury

Looking at Rasel Chowdhury's images of the 2012 floods in Bangladesh's Kurigram District, it was Angry River I remembered. I thought of Sita, the little girl-woman through whose eyes we watch the river's terrifying transformation. In the morning, the water is muddy instead of green, and her favourite rock has disappeared, “the one on which she often sat dangling her feet... watching the little Chilwa fish swim by.” By noon, the water has oozed its way into the hut, and a horrified Sita climbs into the big peepul tree. But as the water rages around it, “a dragon on the rampage”, the old tree gives up its grip on the earth.

Sita, clinging to the tree, is set afloat on the swirling water. But what is remarkable is that Bond chooses to evoke awe rather than plain fear. His river is an elemental force against which it would be foolish to struggle, but it is also the giver of life. It is the river that gives Sita's grandfather his fish, and the silt it leaves in its wake is where the villagers grow their vegetables – and Sita her mango tree.

Photo: Rasel Chowdhury

Chowdhury's images, too, have that strange quality of calm. A tubewell in a surging sea makes human efforts look foolish. But people are not fleeing the river's rage. They do not fight the water; they inhabit it. Boys appear to be preparing to fish as they wade through waist-deep water. Women stand stoic, even striking a pose for the photographer. Two men stretch out on the roof of a submerged house.

Photo: Rasel Chowdhury

A horse stands still, and waits. There is a sense that this is temporary. Books wait expectantly in the flooded schoolroom. But what will be, will be. Even the gods seem resigned to an early immersion.

Photo: Rasel Chowdhury

Perhaps, like them, we assume that the river's wrath will recede, and then the world will be reborn.

“We are part of the river,” says the boy who rescues Sita. “We cannot live without it.” 

Published in Pix Quarterly, Volume 10, May 2014.

Picture This: Remote Controlled

My BL_Ink column today:

Filmistaan isn’t half-bad. But it reminded me of a Bangladeshi film, also featuring a remote village, and the media as the central theme

Among the funniest sequences in Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan is one where the abducted Sunny Arora persuades his Islamic fundamentalist kidnappers to perform for the camera. The kidnappers hope that the evidence of an abduction — even if that of a single Indian aam aadmi, instead of the intended many Americans — will gain them some bargaining power. But none of them know how to actually operate a video camera. After some blaming and shaming among the group members for not having acquired prior training in this clearly important skill, Sunny speaks up: if the gentlemen don’t mind, he could do the recording?

The next thing we know, the unwilling abductee has become the very willing star of his first real film appearance. But after several rounds of ‘Rolling’, ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’, Sunny decides it isn’t him who should have the speaking part; the burly, kohl-eyed Mehmood Bhai, delivering his threat to Sunny’s life, is much more likely to create the desired cinematic impact. And so Sunny directs, and Mehmood Bhai acts.

Comic tone notwithstanding, the film is threaded through by a sense of mutual incomprehension between Sunny and Mehmood Bhai that constantly threatens to turn violent. Much of that incomprehension is because neither can grasp the other’s attitude to cinema. Sunny’s total adoration is evenly matched by Mehmood’s pure hatred. It is one of the film’s failings that we hear about that adoration in so much detail, and practically nothing about the hatred.

Filmistaan’s desert village has a faux-timeless, elemental quality that’s definitely bumped up by Kakkar’s decision to portray it as nearly media-free. There’s no television, no mobile phones, no computers or internet — even the radio (on which this particular bunch of Pakistanis listen to World Cup commentary) arrives aboard a colourfully decorated truck. All there is, rather too conveniently fitted to the film’s romantic aims, is a khatara VCD/DVD player on which a pirated version of Maine Pyar Kiya is played to a captive audience seated on the sands.

Filmistaan isn’t half-bad. But it reminded me of a Bangladeshi film I watched six months ago at the International Film Festival of Kerala, also featuring a remote village, and the media as the central theme. And Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s film is way better.

Television, as Farooki’s film is called, gives us a much more sympathetic figure to represent the Islamist perspective. The village’s chairman shaheb, a doleful old man who reads a newspaper specially covered up for him, has banned the villagers from watching television, since according to his reading of the Hadith, the depiction of any human image is haram. But when a Hindu family acquires a TV set, he cannot bar them. He froths and fumes as almost everyone in the village proceeds to go stand outside the house, requesting mirrors to be placed for their viewing benefit.

Running alongside this central narrative is a whole set of other events, all of which involve media forms of one kind or another. The chairman’s son Sulaiman is in love with a young woman named Kohinoor, and since it is hard for them to meet, a cell phone — and later Skype — forms the ideal vehicle for their budding romance. When we first see Kohinoor, she is speaking to her father from a cybercafé, and later enters an adjoining photo studio to meet her lover secretly. The cell phone and computer, like the romance, are kept secret from the chairman, but all hell breaks loose after the old man discovers her amid the Muslims watching TV at the Hindu family’s house.

The television is seized and thrown in the river, but when villagers start to cross the river to watch TV, the chairman’s men come up with an inventive solution, what they call a halal TV. A live theatrical performance is staged inside a massive TV-shaped box. But then the chairman, passing by, bowls his last googly: if the role of Akbar is played by Sattar, then that’s a lie. “But that’s imagination,” says his man Jabbar. “Imagination is very bad. It can take you to terrible places!” says the chairman, putting an end to the show.

All through the film, people are framed in windows and doors, seen through the slats of windows or parted curtains, as they might be on a TV screen. There are other marvellous ways in which Farooki evokes the television as metaphor for imagination. In one great scene, a man tells a woman that he has a private television on which he can imagine her, and on that television they have set up home together. The make-what-you-will-of-this tone here is an example of Farooki’s ability to weave a tragicomic tapestry, where recognising the absurdity of something/someone does not preclude sympathy for it/them. In the moving climactic scene (let me not give it away), the chairman is forced to confront the fact that the television as a form — or the imagination as a medium — is not deterministic. It is a powerful comment on what the media can mean.

And yet this is too optimistic a conclusion. Because if cinema and television can be essential to opening up the imagination, they are also avenues of colonising it.

'No, not everyone in Bangladesh is a drug addict!'

SHAZIA OMAR’s first novel, Like a Diamond in the Sky, was published by Zubaan in August 2008. She spoke to TRISHA GUPTA about drugs, being Bangladeshi and the English literary scene in Dhaka.

Your first book is about heroin junkies in Dhaka. Why did you choose the subject?
A group of my friends in Bangladesh are recovering addicts. They’re beautiful people, but they have such dark pasts, and they’ve had such a struggle to get where they are. There’s a growing problem of drugs in Bangladesh, cutting across all classes – depending on what you can afford. But nobody talks about it: even in elite society, good schools, it’s completely taboo. Parents don’t recognize signs or know how to deal with addicts. I grew up in Canada where we had drug awareness classes from Grade 4! So I wanted two things: to share the story of the struggle that my friends had been through, and for people to start talking, to know more about what an addiction is: how you prevent it, how you get out of it.

How do you see your relationship to Bangladesh? Since there are so few novels in English coming out of Bangladesh, do you feel that you’re pushed to represent the country to the outside world?
After Canada, I spent the last two years of high school in Bangladesh, before going to the US for college. Then I worked in New York and London before going back to Bangladesh four years ago. I hope people aren’t going to think that this is the entirety of Bangladesh after reading one novel. I’ve been told that I haven’t been given a fair representation to Bangladesh – and no, not everyone in Bangladesh is a drug addict! But that’s the world I tapped into in this novel.
I personally do feel a certain sense of responsibility, although I don’t think writers have to. I think being both an outsider and an insider is a good thing: the window I gave my readers in this novel is an insider’s perspective that even most people in Bangladesh don’t have access to. On the other hand, having lived abroad, I question a lot of things that maybe people who live there have become desensitized to: like poverty on the streets and the question of whether things have to be this way.

What kind of research did the book involve?
I did my masters’ in Social Psychology in London, and I worked on representations of happiness amongst ultra-poor women. I spent a month in Bangladesh, understanding what they believe happiness to be and what their different sources of happiness were.. That led to the character of Falani, the dealer in the basti. She’s the only happy character in the novel – and that’s because of faith. I also spent two months in a rehabiliation centre in Bombay – that was earlier, when I was exploring whether I wanted to pursue that as a career.

What’s the English writing scene like in Bangladesh?
It’s starting out. It’s very fresh. Nothing like India, or even Pakistan which has done very well. There’s been one novel by Tahmima Annam, and there’s a book of short stories coming out this year by Mahmud Rahman, which is being published by Penguin India. I’m part of a Dhaka writers’ group called WritersBlock, about ten people who will all be publishing books over the next five years. There’s a vibrant Bangla literary scene – though there are few young voices – but the readership for English is very small. If you had a festival – like the Jaipur Litfest – in Dhaka, there would be some five people attending. Thankfully Indian publishers have opened up their doors to Bangladeshi writers.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 05, Dated February 06, 2010