Somnath Hore is known as an artist with a singular focus on human suffering. He saw suffering not as an ontological fact of existence, but as the outcome of an unjust social system we have built and continue to perpetuate. This meant that it could be changed, and to him, the solution lay in socialist political action. Early in his life, he joined the Communist Party to be a part of this process. But while trying to do this he soon realized two things. One, art guided by the Party can degenerate into propaganda and the production of art can be reduced into an unthinking mechanical process. Two, that to keep emotions alive and intense, and the message fresh, one had to innovate. In art, he realized, one had to change even to remain the same. So he adopted, mastered and extended available mediums, and developed new ones. The white on white prints made by pouring paper pulp into matrixes prepared from moulds made from clay or wax surfaces, and the singular sculptures made by cutting, joining, and hand modelling of thin wax sheets, and then made permanent by casting using the lost wax process were two of his last and more personal innovations.

1. Somnath Hore is known as an artist with a singular focus on human suffering. He saw suffering
not as an ontological fact of existence, but as the outcome of an unjust social system we have
built and continue to perpetuate. This meant that it could be changed, and to him, the solution lay
in socialist political action. Early in his life, he joined the Communist Party to be a part of this
process. But while trying to do this he soon realized two things. One, art guided by the Party can
degenerate into propaganda and the production of art can be reduced into an unthinking
mechanical process. Two, that to keep emotions alive and intense, and the message fresh, one
had to innovate. In art, he realized, one had to change even to remain the same. So he adopted,
mastered and extended available mediums, and developed new ones. The white on white prints
made by pouring paper pulp into matrixes prepared from moulds made from clay or wax
surfaces, and the singular sculptures made by cutting, joining, and hand modelling of thin wax
sheets, and then made permanent by casting using the lost wax process were two of his last and
more personal innovations.
Of the two, sculpture, which he preferred to call bronzes, came last. He began doing sculptures
in 1974, the year I joined Kala Bhavana as a student. I vividly remember him working on a little
sculpture of a braying donkey seven or eight inches in size. In those days we often encountered
small packs of donkeys on the campus, and occasionally heard them bray. Furthermore,
Somnath Hore often represented animals as companions of human victims and as fellow
sufferers. So it was not surprising that one of his first sculptures, if not the very first, should be a
sympathetic response to the ungainly call of a modest animal.
Following this, he made a standing figure, a little larger than the small donkey. The work he did
after these first efforts was considerably larger and certainly more ambitious. It showed a woman
with her chest blasted, yet standing with her head held high, cradling a baby in her arms with one
of its hands raised high—reaching up in a gesture of freedom, of hope. The upper part of her
body is like the remains of a battered house, walls torn apart, the skeletal structure exposed,
parts unhinged and dangling. What was once solid is made hollow, what was once whole is
precariously held together. In contrast, although her legs are composed of mangled sheets, her
feet-apart stance suggests stability; and her head, whole, calm and held high suggests
determination and invincibility. This is the image of a stoic and undefeated mother and her child,
who rising out from her ruined body symbolizes new life.
We know the context of its making from Somnath Hore’s own account. He began it soon after the
fall of Saigon in 1975 and the end of the long-drawn Vietnam War and it took him nearly two
years to complete it. Vietnam was on his mind since the first student protest in Calcutta in early
1947 in support of Vietnam’s anticolonial movement under the communists. With the American
decision to intervene in the affairs of countries ‘threatened’ by communism it turned into a brutal
ideological war, and became a matter of concern for Somnath Hore. ‘I had fostered Vietnam
within me for many years,’ he later wrote. ‘Reading everyday news about that difficult struggle I
often felt frustrated. When that struggle of 29 long years ended in total victory, I did the most
important bronze [sculpture] of my life, the Vietnamese Mother.’[i]

2. Somnath Hore, Mother with Child, Bronze, 1977
Measuring 40 inches in height, it was the most successful among his larger works, and certainly
a very important one. But the importance of this work to Somnath Hore, however, was not merely
artistic. Badly battered but victorious Vietnam was a living proof of his deepest ideological
avowal, a moment of his hope coming true. While the representation of the victims of an unjust
social system and their suffering was his constant theme two of his early projects were the
documentation of the Tebhaga or sharecroppers’ movement (1946) and the Tea Garden workers’
struggle (1947). These were protests that gave him hope but they were not wholly successful.
The Vietnamese victory was decisive and, therefore, the sculpture was of utmost importance to
him.
Looking at the sculpture, two other images come to mind. The first David Brunett’s 1972 photo of
a Vietnamese mother running with her fatally wounded child documenting the disastrous effect of
the American Napalm bombing of Vietnam. This sculpture is a reversal of that image. The
second image comes from a written testament. Looking back at his early life Somnath Hore had
noted: ‘In the December of 1935 I lost my father and my mother became a widow. My mother
was 30, with five children. I the eldest was 14, the twins younger to me were 10, then two sisters,
one 6 and the other one-and-a-half-year-old. I intensely realized the blow my mother received as
a woman in her full-blown youth after I grew up. Five children: and one of the twins was
congenitally and completely insane. Until the age of 20 she had to protect him from varied

3. attacks of neighbours. He died at 24. I have no measure of her suffering. For 72 years, mother
bore her suffering determinedly. She had no complaints about her children, neither expectations.
She only wished that they be happy in their own ways.’[ii]
His mother, stoic and courageous as the young Vietnamese Mother in his sculpture, probably
died while he was working on the sculpture. And her memory, we might assume, is also behind
his image commemorating the Vietnamese victory.
As we have noted this sculpture was a long time in the making. It was finally completed around
October 1977. Janak Jhankar Narzary who was working on an essay on modern Indian sculpture
for Marg had come down from Baroda and wanted to photograph the sculpture. It was brought
out and we saw it in its final form and admired it. The patina was yet to be done and so it was left
in a common studio. But soon afterward the sculpture was stolen from the studio and was never
recovered. Somnath Hore was so pained by its loss he did not do any more sculpture while he
was in Kala Bhavan and returned to sculpting only after he retired in 1983.
Somnath Hore’s Vietnamese Mother also reminds us of another sculpture, Picasso’s Man with a
Lamb. The two are completely different in subject matter, size and technique, and Picasso’s man
is not battered like Somnath Hore’s mother. But made in 1943 during the German occupation of
France, Picasso’s sculpture is also an image of stoic determination and hope. The man and the
lamb, like the mother and child, invokes an ancient bonding, and together they invoke a
composite image of the strong and gentle. Picasso gifted it to be installed in the market square in
Vallauris. Wonder where Somnath Hore would have liked to place his sculpture had it not been
lost.
[i] Somnath Hore, Kshatachinta, Bhangan, Debabasha, Kolkata 2019, p.26.
[ii] Ibid, p.9.