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It is one of those mid-May afternoons in Kolkata. One moment the sun is shining harshly down on your back, the next, dark clouds swoosh in out of nowhere and the rain comes down hard, like large tears pouring out of the huge Kalipath eyes of the gods above. Perhaps this is what happens at other times of the year as well. I wouldn’t know — I am visiting this bewilderingly exciting city after over a decade.

But it is just during one of those very sunny, bright moments that I enter the gallery of the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre. And, it is — almost literally — darkness at noon. It is also a minor epiphany. A couple of blinks and, gradually, a form emerges out of the blackness, subtly lit from above — as if by two distant, yellowing moons.
There, placed on a large, raised black wooden plank is one of the most powerful sculptures I have seen in a long time. Composed of four separate pieces of sculpted bronze, this never-before-exhibited work by the late Somnath Hore is a silent cri de coeur against violence: a woman’s stoic, erect head in the centre with the fallen, ghost-like face of her husband on one side, and the face of her dying child with hollows for eyes on the other. A large, bony hand placed in front of the three heads appears to be underlining their tragedy. A horizontal exclamation, perhaps!

If there is something theatrical about this mis en scene, it is meant to be. The illusionist here is Naveen Kishore, publisher-photographer-impresario of the arts and much else, besides being the man behind Seagull Books and the Resource Centre. He started out as a lighting designer for theatre. Interestingly, this poignant group is the only piece of sculpture in the exhibition. The rest is comprised of Hore’s early woodcuts as well as his drawings and prints, displayed in the rooms on the floor above.

Luckily, the artist’s daughter, painter Chandana Hore, who has just come in from Santiniketan, is there to tell me about herfather’s work — especially the interesting history of the untitled sculpture. Hore, who usually worked from memory, made it in the late 90s. He was profoundly affected by the 92-93 riots, just as years earlier the Bengal Famine of 1942 had permanently marked him and led him to bring the tortured agony of the poor and marginal to life in his sculptures and drawings.

However, it wasn’t until 2002 — after Godhra and its aftermath — that Hore wanted this sculpture to embody the ‘resistance’ and strength of the mother figure in the face of violence and riots. “My father empathised with women. He understood the agony of women…The mother in this sculpture is trying to protect her family.”

It is so easy, in our age of increasingly smart-alecky instant, often-photo-shopped art, to become deaf to the heartbeats of suffering humanity. Where, it has become increasingly difficult to hear anything above the din of the discourse of market and auction. I am certainly not advocating polemic or propagandist art. Nor even art that wears only its heart on its sleeves.

But somewhere and somehow there is need for a space where artists can work towards making art that can move others. That can stop people in their frenzied tracks to look at the less fortunate around them, with just a little bit of empathy.

You can walk out into the sun from this show and pick up life where you left before you entered. But it won’t be too long before you come across — around some corner or lying on the pavement — scrawny, bedraggled figures that are just skin and bones hanging together perilously. And it is then that Hore’s drawings of the skeletal figures of peasants and the urban poor, bent in despair, will return to haunt. It might just make you stop to take a second look, lock eyes with poverty that is no longer abstract. No matter where you live: Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi — take your pick.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com