The Nehru Centre, London
June 1995

Chief minister Jyoti Basu is coming to unveil a bust of Tagore sculpted by Somnath Hore and being gifted to the Nehru Centre by the Government of West Bengal. I open the crate that has brought the consignment from Calcutta, with excited anticipation. But when I see the piece, I gasp. We have received a tangle of metal scrap. My colleagues move away from the scene of the de-crating so as not to add their disappointment to their director’s despair.

“There is nothing we can do about it,” I sigh.

We will have to put up the piece and go ahead with the function and ask a colleague to finish the unpacking. An hour or so later, as I happen to walk across the lobby where the opened bronze is now placed on a pedestal, I gasp again — in utter amazement. Tagore stands there, in the perfection of his compassionate intensity.

Tongues of bronze have been inter-folded to form the handsome head. The gently patinated bronze head exudes an inner calm, the hollowed eyes a pain and an understanding of pain. This is a true Tagore head and yet very different. How different? There is such a thing as being true to a subject. There is such a thing as being the subject.

At the function on 7 July, 1995, Jyotibabu unveils the masterpiece (not ‘the piece’ any more) by directing a ray of light on it through the darkened hall. The entire audience draws a collective breath of astonished admiration. All those present have known the Tagore ‘presence’ and yet have not. Not in this aspect.

I was to meet Somnath Hore — for the first time — on 7 November, 1998, in his spartan home tucked behind the foliage that covers the laterite grounds between Santiniketan and Sriniketan. I had accompanied President Narayanan as his secretary on a visit to Visva-Bharati for the birth centenary of Professor Tan Yun-Shan. The function over, I sought and got the President’s permission to deviate from his itinerary to call on the sculptor.

Somnathbabu was at the door to meet me, standing tall like a Painted Stork on stilt-like legs, stooped and lost to thought. Rebadi stood just behind him. He was wearing a sweater though it was not cold, and had his head covered in a hand-knitted woollen affair. There were half-finished clay and wax forms placed on the floor and tables, besides books and plants. As he asked me to take a seat, I was struck by his fingers — unusually long and, strangely, as thoughtful as their owner. They moulded the air while he spoke. I reduced our conversation to writing later that very evening on the back of a sheaf of white paper which I now see was the text of the speech of the then vice-chancellor on Professor Tan.

“When Buddhadeb asked me to do the Tagore bust for your Centre in London, I was hesitant,” he said. “You see, my style is different… I was not sure how people would respond to it….” I told him how right he was about the difference factor and also of how people in London had responded.

In the few minutes available to me in my borrowed time, I asked him about his life, his work. “I started as a printmaker in Kala Bhavan,” he said, reminiscing from a past that seemed not some years old, but a century or more so. I could see that detail mattered to him when to “Kala Bhavan” he added “in the graphics department”.

There was nostalgia but no self-validation, recollecting but no romanticizing. “It is only later that I took to this art form. You see, I first do a wax maquette and then there is a person here who casts it for me in bronze.”

Showing me a specimen, he said: “I do these wax sheets and use these ‘channels’ for the hands and legs….” I understood then how ‘sheets’ and ‘channels’ had gone into the making of the London Tagore.

I asked Somnathbabu whether he had ever met Gandhi or sculpted him. “In 1946, when Gandhiji had come at the time of the riots, I made it a point to follow him wherever he went. Even though I was — and am — not a believer, I attended his prayer meetings because I was fascinated by his personality. I did an engraving but did not sculpt him.”

He then told me of the engraving he had done of Gandhi addressing a Hindu-Muslim congregation in August 1947 at the Mohammedan Sporting Club galleries in Calcutta. This is a remarkable work, showing MKG in the distance, standing like a little matchstick on a far platform, with a multitude of Hindus and Muslims in telltale attire, listening rapt. One listener has a child — his future world — perched on his shoulder, as another in a fez sits with a combination of awe and hope. Difference, again. Somnath Hore was showing MKG not as an iconic superman but as the masses saw him through the hectic jostle of their fears, hopes and emotions.

Somnathbabu seemed at that meeting not just frail but afflicted with a controlled anxiety. He spoke with difficulty, straining at every breath. “I am 77 and a half,” he said. “Some years ago I was afflicted by a bronchial ailment. I have had the only allopathic treatment that is possible: antibiotics. But they have been of little avail. I am now taking some homoeopathic medicines. There is some relief. But an attack can come without notice and can be fatal. After dusk, I do not — cannot — step outdoors,” And yet he did precisely that, to bid me goodbye.

Time rolled on and I lost direct contact with Somnathbabu but the Calcutta-based social economist and my friend of many years V.K. Ramachandran kept my interest in Hore strengthened by sending me from time to time news of him and — electronic impressions of the Master’s woodcuts as reproduced in Tebhaga: An Artist’s Diary and Sketchbook. Each was greater than the other — two labourers talking animatedly over a chillum, farmhands at a threshing floor with a pair of sickles, perhaps making, and perhaps not, a political point, a bearded chasi bent over at work, his biceps and calves in comfortable tension, two huts in the smoky hush of dusk, a phenomenally attractive Jamshed Ali at 35, a woman — not Mother Teresa but an archetypal woman anticipating the gift of Albania to India and of India to human conscience — simply called Night, a mufflered Monida listening to something or someone intently, a woman standing with her child on her waist who could be Bengali, Indian, African, a bemused ‘volunteer’ leaning on a staff… each a living document.

Several years were to elapse before I was to see Somnathbabu and Rebadi again. My wife Tara and I were visiting Santiniketan for the first time after I had taken over my present assignment. My diary entry for 22 January 2005 reads: ‘Call on Somnath Hore. At 84, he is frail but clear of mind and speech. He shows us a piece of sculpture in black bronze inspired by Pokhran II. It depicts a human, a dog, a tree and a bird — all dead — killed in a nuclear winter. It is powerful beyond words, a masterpiece. Who am I to compare the Greats but I feel the composition is ahead of Picasso’s Guernica. I feel that piece must be acquired by the United Nations. Talking of nuclear plans, he says “we are mad”. And then he gives us a rare gift — another sculpture by him — a Hindu and a Muslim united in death. I cannot check my tears at his generosity. I say to him “I do not deserve this”, to which his daughter says “How do you know?” I cannot respond to that.’

Calling on Somnathbabu on subsequent visits to Santiniketan became a habit. On one such, when I went to his home with members of a team that the Visitor of Visva-Bharati had appointed to suggest plans for the university’s future health, he said with infinite sadness: “Everything is changing, everything, everywhere….” He was on a plane that seemed new, philosophical. There was no recrimination, no sense of the new generation being unkind to the earlier one and the mood suggested a Buddhist understanding of decay.

Somnath Hore was more than an artist. He was a witness of the human drama but a witness with a skill that translated his witnessing into art. In an age when secularism, socialism and peace can be seen — or rubbished — as shibboleths, he knew them to be vital needs. In times when art can become a plaything of drawing rooms and auction halls, he kept it close to its springs — his very human sensibility.

When Tara and I met him last, on September 27, he was prone, oxygen being ducted into his lungs, nourishment into his veins. But he could talk clearly. His sensitive fingers, bearing the tubes and needles of life-support, moved to his eyes as he said: “Your Excellency, I have lost my vision, I am blind now….” The honorific, never a favourite, was crushing. Here was a man navigating the twilight between this world and the next, maintaining the courtesy of terrestrial constructs.

“I do these wax sheets,” he had told me when I first met him, “and use these channels for the hands and legs.” I felt like wax, my hands and legs weakening as I rose saying “Get well soon, Sir”. I cannot remember how I responded to Rebadi as she too said in a courtesy of yesteryears “you have been ever so kind”.

Somnath Hore was, as he had said to me, no “believer”. But I would like to think he will not mind my ending this expression of grateful tribute with a Sanskrit invocation of a ‘believing’ kind: Om krito smara kritam, smara krito smara kritam smara. Remember this: only the works remain, only the works.

Gopal Krishna Gandhi is the governor of West Bengal