Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was born in Chittagong in 1921. As a young man he came into the Communist Party’s orbit, which helped him into the Government College of Art in Calcutta, where Haren Das ran the graphics department. He followed the printmaker Chittaprosad.

In 1943, during the Bengal famine, he drew and reported on the starving for the party magazine Janayuddha (People’s War). In 1946 he kept a diary of notes and sketches on the Tebhaga movement, a sharecroppers’ uprising in Bengal, and some of it appeared in the same magazine. Many of the drawings became woodcuts in the early 1950s, stark images that owe something to Chinese socialist realism and German Expressionism.

By the 1950s he was counted among India’s leading printmakers, working mainly in lithography and intaglio. At Dinkar Kaushik’s invitation he went to Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan to head graphics and printmaking.

Then he developed a technique to match his subject: the pulp print. In the Wounds series of the 1970s, paper pulp is cast on cement moulds taken from clay, so the paper itself carries the cuts and scars, and the image becomes nearly abstract without losing its pity. In the same decade he began making contorted bronze figures on famine and war. One, Mother and Child, a tribute to the people of Vietnam, was stolen from Kala Bhavana and never found.

He lived most of his later life at Santiniketan, received the Padma Bhushan, and died in 2006, aged 85. In 2022 the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art marked his centenary with Birth of a White Rose, named after his etching of 1961.