Indian Writing

From Gopal Krishna Gandhi’s moving tribute:

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 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…

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”…

Image: Somnath Hore, “The Holocaust”.