How Somnath Hore Captured The "Greatest People's Movement In Indian History"

What happens when an artist is commissioned to report on a protest movement? The answer to this seemingly hypothetical question is much closer to home than one might think.

In the winter of 1946, on the eve of independence, Somnath Hore, one of India’s major modern artists, was commissioned by the Communist Party of India (CPI) to document the Tebhaga movement in North Bengal. Originally a sharecroppers’ protest which began in North Bengal’s Dinajpur district, the Tebhaga movement took its name from the sharecroppers’ demand to hold on to two-thirds of the produce instead of the customary half. According to Asok Majumdar — Associate Professor of Political Science at the Zakir Husain Post Graduate College, University of Delhi, and the author of ‘The Tabhaga Movement: Politics of Peasant Protest in Bengal 1946-1950’ — it was “probably the greatest peasant movement in the history of India”. 

Hore — who would go on to become a pioneering painter, sculptor, and printmaker in his later life — was a young art student at the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata at the time. On 17 December 1946, he boarded the North Bengal Express from Kolkata with only a diary and a pen, and over the next 12 days, produced a series of sketches, reports, and later woodcuts that became an unusual document of the peasant movement seen through the eyes of an artist. Hore witnessed the massive mobilisation taking place in villages across Bengal from up close and captured the widespread spirit of peasant consciousness and militant solidarity at a time when communalism was rife in India's national politics.

The Tebhaga movement was remarkable in more ways than one. One of the most important political events in 20th-century Bengal — and, by extension, India — the movement was marked by the large-scale participation of women on par with men. Landless and poor peasant women formed fighting troops called 'naree bahini' (women's army) and took a front-rank role in defending the movement's gains and countering the state's repression and retaliation.

Together with the men — landless labourers, sharecroppers, and peasants — the women refused to submit any longer to the feudal gentry — the zamindars and the jotedars. Within weeks, the movement spread like an irresistible tidal wave to various corners of Bengal from Jalpaiguri in the far north foothills of the Himalayas to Kakdwip and Nandigram in the south where protests took a violent turn into battles with hammers, sickles, and scythes over taking possession of the harvest. Although the Tebhaga movement failed to achieve its immediate goal without clear leadership and cohesive long-term strategy, it became a turning point in the history of agrarian movements in India and reflected the emergence of political consciousness among the peasants and tribal sharecroppers of Bengal.

Closely involved in the struggle as a radical young artist and communist, the Tebhaga experience remained a source of lifelong inspiration for Somnath Hore. His sketches and reports were published in the Bengali literary and cultural magazine Ekshan and captured the intensity of anger, fear, anguish, and hope in the minds of the peasants and the sharecroppers, as well as how the feudal gentry used false news and disinformation to divide the movement along communal lines — much like the Indian State tried to do during the 2020-2021 Farmers' Protests. One can see in these rugged sketches the seeds of the vision that later shaped Hore's body of work.

Somnath Hore's 'Tebhaga: An Artist's Diary and Sketchbook' is available here.

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