Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi at the exhibition of Somnath Hore’s works. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

The beauty of a work of art need not always please the eye in the same way that feminine beauty does. Aesthetic beauty could bring us face to face with stark realities that may be difficult — even painful — to confront. An exhibition of Somnath Hore’s watercolours, sculptures and prints was opened at Galerie 88 on Friday evening by Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

These works remind us yet again that in a work of art, severity of form has the power of endowing human beings reduced to skeletons by hunger, and with only a tenuous link with life, with a certain dignity.

Somnath Hore’s bare, forked animals challenge our notions of conventional beauty. They force us to rewrite the definition of beauty that does not afford any sensuous pleasures — only the bare bones of a form — a notion carried to its logical conclusion.

The emaciated figures of hordes of human beings who fled the villages during the man-made famine of 1943 had for years inspired Somnath Hore to create sculptures, lithographs, intaglios, drawings, watercolours and his famous white-on-white pulp prints.

What is remarkable about these malnourished figures is the stoicism with which they bear the indignity of this extreme form of deprivation. Their malnourished bodies are all that they can boast of.

So the paintings and the prints take on the quality of his sculpture. Some of his paintings show the victims of the famine unable to face the terror any longer, stretching out their arms in despair. The dead turn into giant insects lying on their back, arms and legs curled up.

Somnath Hore does not use more than two shades in his paintings yet creates an intensely dramatic situation.

The departed artist’s widow, Reba Hore, and daughter Chandana were present at the opening. So was Ganesh Pyne.

Dance for the Sun

Kathak exponent Rani Karnaa’s (picture left) new production is a tribute to the Sun god. Titled Surya, it proposes to be a bouquet of 20-25 dances based on Sanskrit texts, including the Gayatri Mantra.

While performing the Surya Namaskar — a set of 12 yogasanas associated with epithets of Surya relating to breath and movement — on her terrace every morning, the dancer was inspired to look into the concept of the sun as a source of life and energy. In her past productions (Srijan Srishti, Navrang), Karnaa has touched upon the sun as a theme. “Surya is my Guru,” says Karnaa, who heads the organisation Samskritiki Shreyaskar.

The experiment this time will include yogasanas within the Kathak dance form, for which her students are taking yoga lessons from Priyabrata Chakraborty. “We have conceived the music and a broad outline of the dance. The initial discussions for the stage and light are through. I am working with Shankar Mehta on research and script. It’s a challenging task as there are no guidelines,” says the exuberant dancer.

Surya will be staged in early September on the 12th anniversary celebrations of Samskritiki Shreyaskar.

Liberty and law

On Friday, the Calcutta intelligentsia was out in force to welcome the launch of Ranabir Samaddar’s two volume book The Materiality of Politics. The volumes are titled The Technologies of Rule and Subject Positions in Politics. Samaddar is the director of the Calcutta Research Group and was the founder director of the peace studies programme at the South Asian Forum for Human Rights.

Crispin Bates, director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Edinburgh, launched the book. “The practical issues of justice are a central theme in this book: liberty constantly has to be fought for and laws and constitutions are inadequate for this. The book contains an extensive analysis of the Constitution and the effects of the colonial legacies on it.”