Tebhaga

An Artists Diary and Sketchbook

Somnath Hore

Translated by Somnath Zutshi

 

9.5 x 7.5 inches, 86pp, illustrated throughout 2009

ISBN : 9788170460787

Rs  750.00 (PB)
$0.00 (PB)
£0.00 (PB)

Buy (PB)

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.

Somnath Hore (b. 1921, in Baroma, Chittagong) taught at Indian Art College and Delhi Polytechnic before coming to teach at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. Also Visiting Lecturer at M. S. University, Baroda, for a short time, Hore worked in various media—print-making, drawing and watercolour—before turning to sculpture in his later years. Author of Tebhaga Diary and Aamar Chitro Bhabona, Hore received the Padma Bhushan (posthumously), the Aban-Gagan Puroshkar, the Lalit Kala Ratna and the Rabindra Bharati University Award, among many others. Hore lived and worked in Santiniketan until his death in 2006. 

 

Somnath Zutshi was a psychonanalyst by training who studied and wrote extensively on cinema. He has also translated works by Somnath Hore and Mrinal Sen.

Culture Studies
Art
200 Years of Marx
Politics