The talk will discuss how Somnath Hore approached the Leftist aesthetic as a materialist engagement with bodies in movement and the people as the core of ‘body politic’.

We can see a rich corpus of artistic and literary practices of 1940s and 50s in terms of a Leftist aesthetics in India. Somnath Hore and Chittaprosad were the artists who led the visual register of this aesthetic that became critical in the cultural hegemony of Left in Bengal. Their artistic productions were chiefly engaged in figuring the category of the ‘people’ – those who suffered and struggled – and really made up the nation.