Tea Garden Journal and Other Drawings

16 FEBRUARY TO 20 MARCH

NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART BENGALURU

In the 1940s, the Communist Party of India tasked the artist Somnath Hore with documenting the lives of people working in the tea gardens of Bengal. Nearly seven decades later, this exhibition—organised by Kolkata’s Seagull Foundation for the Arts and Bengaluru’s National Gallery of Modern Art—presented many of the pieces that resulted from this assignment, displaying over 150 drawings from the artist’s journal and sketchbooks. Mostly completed in pen and ink, Hore’s pieces use broken lines and uneven strokes to document the unease and agitation that pervaded the workers’ lives. Some of the drawings seem almost mundane, depicting basic scenes from labourers’ everyday routines. Others are more dramatic, focussing closely on individual subjects’ faces to render their distressed expressions.

~Aarthi Murali