‘You speak in one language, your thoughts and feelings are all different, yet your work is like ours – we just don’t understand how this is possible.’ When the sculptor and writer, Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998), went to the Munich Art Academy in 1953 to study painting, sculpture, etching and lithography, this is how her European teachers and classmates expressed their bewilderment with her work.

Her teacher of sculpting, Toni Stadler, one of the last of the Expressionists, was even harsher. He would tear up, at the end of each day, everything that she had sketched through the day, while the others in her class would continually deconstruct one another’s work in terms that seemed impossibly abstract to her. Full of despair, Mukherjee turned into an insomniac. One day, driven to the edge by months of sleeplessness, she took up a small piece of wood and crafted a bowl out of it. And, for the first time, Stadler thought that she had got to something with this bowl, somehow managing to put her mind, and its struggle, into the woodiness of the wood and the bowlness of the bowl.

Mukherjee had broken into what she would later, long after she left Europe and its abstractions, repeatedly refer to as ‘identification’ – the miraculous unity of medium, mind, process and finished work that comes, only rarely, at the end of the most exacting physical and intellectual labour. All her life, she could never decide whether this gift of ‘identified’ work was rightfully the artist’s or the artisan’s. And this uncertainty would never cease to complicate the direction and integrity of her self-conscious evolution as a sculptor.

Seeing some of her work together at a gallery in Calcutta a few years ago, I was struck by how this struggle for identification still lived around the work like a restive, irresistible presence. I knew nothing about her, but what I was looking at was not just art. It was the live wreckage of an entire way of being that exacted an absolute price from the person who chose to live it out and give it a few difficult and enduring shapes. Something like this comes through for me when I look at Ritwik Ghatak’s best films – unfinished, imperfect, fearfully untidy, intellectually driven yet always suspicious of the intellect’s despotism, corroded by an absolute giving of oneself to what one’s idea of the work asks for. But Ghatak’s self-destructiveness was very different from the corrosive idealism informing Mukherjee’s art and her craft.

 

My sense of a life fully identified with the work made me read as much of her writing as I could find. There are long, recklessly candid interviews, autobiographical sketches, bits from her diaries, illustrated books for children, ethnographic studies of craft communities from all over India. I met some of the people whose lives were touched and changed by her life and art, and realized that this capacity to influence and bring people together came from a generosity of spirit that was vital to her creativity. I also came upon a set of photographs made by the American photographer, William Gedney, in the late seventies and early eighties that showed her at work in her own courtyard in Calcutta. Gedney’s own restless, solitary, perpetually self-questioning genius had recognized a kindred spirit from what remained, as far as I know, an impersonal distance.

Mukherjee looked back on her years in Germany with characteristic ambivalence. She had felt alienated from the relentless intellectualism of Stadler’s set that seemed to take away from the immediacy of its relationship with the media and the processes of sculpture. This made her decide not to ever want to be an ‘intellectual’ or a ‘great artist’ within this modern tradition. Yet, looking back, from this European perspective, on her early education under Abanindranth Tagore (she was 14 when she started going to his Indian Society of Oriental Art), she felt that his teaching of impeccable draughtsmanship, largely through a close imitation of the Ajanta frescoes, failed to initiate her into forming her own intellectual and critical point of view to what she was copying and imbibing.

Even Delhi Polytechnic, afterwards, failed to teach her to think for herself. Her critique of the Indian masters – ‘blue-blooded feudals’, with the exception of Gaganendranath Tagore – remained fearless and radical throughout her life.

Paradoxically, it was Stadler and some of his colleagues in Munich, who pushed her, via the Louvre and the British Museum, towards a discovery of India and its indigenous traditions. On returning to India, Mukherjee taught in a few schools, and as soon as she saved enough money, went off on a whimsically self-propelled tour of the country, starting with Dandakaranya and then going down South, trying to recover for herself the dwindling traditions of metal artisanship. It was here, in her ethnographic trail, that Mukherjee ran into the most unresolvable of dichotomies, which made her think again of that ideal of identification.

 

These craftsmen – the Bastar Gharuas, Nepali Sakya metal workers, southern bronze-workers – embodied for her a way of working collectively and skilfully, a form of aesthetic labour, which appeared to be entirely free of the tormented self-consciousness that often paralysed her own work. But these craftsmen were also fiercely protective of their knowledge, making her promise that she would never do their kind of work once she went back to the city. And all the time, the question that she kept putting to them was, ‘What do you think about when you work? What goes through your mind as you wield your tools and work with the metal?’ To this, the usual reply would be, ‘Nothing.’ And she would then be sent off to some chore, like making a paste of goat-turds in water, an instruction she would struggle to obey.

Mukherjee realized that perfectly ‘identified’ work – merging the artist with the artisan, urban with rural, labour with thought – was a pastoral ideal, the realization of which in some of the crafts she learnt and studied could not be replicated in the processes and products of her own art. She would have to forge her own resolution of this crisis at every level and sphere of her life – combining the European lost-wax process of casting bronze with indigenous methods of improvised casting, or living a sophisticated and cosmopolitan life of reading, films, theatre, concerts, conversation and unconventional friendships, in the interstices of which would come her gruelling, anxiety-ridden sessions of casting from dawn to dusk in the suburbs. These sessions involved a whole community of co-labourers, and she would return to the city exhausted, her hair full of lice and her lungs of noxious fumes.

During the dhalai, her identification with the process was complete, and intensely physical. If the air channels in the cast somehow got blocked while the molten metal was replacing the wax, dangerously trapping the air inside, Mukherjee’s body would enact, exactly, the suffocation that she imagined the burning kuton or mould to be feeling. She closely describes this terrible and compulsive empathy in a piece of prose called ‘Chhancher gobheer theke’ (from the depths of the mould).

 

Everything else that Mukherjee was drawn to provided her with ways of reflecting on the crisis that rendered her own ideal of identification so difficult to realize and sustain. She was profoundly attracted to Buddhism, which she saw not as a religion but as a way of life that combined creative labour and collective living with renunciation and a meditative inwardness. Yet, she also admitted the truth, and the value, of her own instinctive rejection of this collective ideal for a solitude that she came to see as the painful but necessary precondition of her art. ‘I say Yes to Buddham sharanam gachhami,’ she would joke to her friends, ‘but No to Dhammam sharanam gachhami, and never to Sangham sharanam gachhami!’ Similarly, with the Hindustani classical music that she sang and listened to passionately, the merging of the singer and the song, when the body created beauty of oceanic dimensions out of its own breath, or with the theatre she had dabbled in and always enjoyed watching, where the actor could become his role, the possibilities of identification became exhilarating to contemplate, but impossible to reproduce in her own art.

 

Of what ‘use’, then, would her art ever be, and to whom? Any artist who aspires to the condition of craft would inevitably push herself towards the desolation of this question. For Mukherjee, to affirm the sublime uselessness of Art in the manner of the Aesthete would be to risk the relegation of her own art to the limbo of the gallery and the drawing room. Both nature and the world of ordinary human labour, even as they might inspire her art, could turn out to be indifferent to it in their own, unreflecting self-sufficiency. There was also her sharp dislike of the educated, middle class viewer of art, the bhadralok ‘who thinks he knows a few things’. And sometimes, in her diary, there is the fear of what loneliness and egotism might achieve together: ‘this fear is the fear of growing cold’. Yet, she finishes her most ebullient interview, recorded in 1982, with a vision of self-sufficiency that resolves the crisis of identification in a circularity that is more mischievous than earnest: ‘If you become your own Idea, if you are your own Idea, then whatever you happen to be doing – that will become your Idea!’

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‘I drew to forget the pain.’ That is how Reba Hore (1926-2008), sums up the genesis of her Bhanga Payer Diary (Seagull Books, 2006). This extraordinary ‘Diary of the Broken Leg’ is composed of 87 drawings in pastel and felt pen, interspersed with 54 pithy, rhyming poems, mostly in Bengali, but switching, with startling effect towards the end, into equally pithy and rhyming English.

 

In 2004, Reba had broken her leg for the third time. The injury had bled profusely, releasing what she recalls now as a flow of colour and pain, and subjecting her to an almost year-long, difficult convalescence. For most of this time, she was confined to a room in her house in Santiniketan, unable to walk. She shared this room with her husband and artist, the late Somnath Hore, also gravely ill then, while their daughter Chandana, a painter as well, lived and worked with them intermittently. Reba’s journal was kept for six months or so in an old diary during this period of shared living, working and being ill. Its ruled and dated pages keep a sort of ghostly time, giving this bodily, reflective and creative durée of her life a curiously unreal day-to-day structure.

One of the opening pages of this ‘Management & Planning Diary’ – printing all kinds of data about ‘India’s Ranking in the World’ – has been converted by the artist into her own title page. In a shaky yet firm hand, she writes over the printed data a mischievously improvised epigraph to her journal, alluding to Rabindranath’s song, ‘Amar bhanga pather ranga dhulay’. ‘On a ‘bloodied piece’ of my broken leg/foot,’ she writes in Bengali, ‘has fallen the mark of his/her [taar] foot.’

Through this lyrical self-mockery, the lightness of which never deserts her record of compulsive creativity in the midst of pain, Reba’s work (both the poems and the drawings) wryly positions itself in relation to some of its, and her life’s, shaping forces. These are everything that Santiniketan, where she has spent most of her life, stands for personally and culturally. That would include not only her domestic and creative life, but also the Tagorean (and post-Tagorean) Great Tradition in the visual arts and literature. ‘He chose a place, and I chose him,’ she said to me about coming to live in Santiniketan with Somnath, whom she had met when she was twenty-two. ‘In my life,’ she went on to say, ‘I have seen a great deal of extraordinariness, but have never been extraordinary myself. I have only tried to be myself.’

 

These footprints on blood and broken bone, in her epigraph, speak of indeterminate, half-recognized visitations. They suggest presences that are also absences, arrivals becoming valedictions, the past suddenly come upon, yet never properly grasped, in the present. They leave their mark on the images of her art and poetry. But they also press upon, and through, her body, keeping alive its mortal struggle, driving on its compulsion to create, but inevitably leaving it ravaged and depleted.

The maker of these footprints, a person of unspecified sex, is referred to in the singular. But the living and the dead richly people the journal. There are faces and figures in the drawings (portraits or, very often, three people closely bound together); people tenderly remembered, gently rebuked or directly addressed in the poems; and human influences implicitly or allusively invoked (Rabindranath, Somnath and, in her preoccupation with not being able to see properly, Benode Behari Mukhopadhyay).

In spite of its ministering and consoling presences, illness is a solitary experience of being left inwardly alone with one’s body and one’s mind, with their essential inseparability and their tragic incongruity. Yet this solitude, this vitally divided unity of body and mind, is always already broken (bhanga), and broken into. And what breaks, and breaks in, is Art itself, the artist’s indomitable will to make. This is an exacting, incessantly destructive process, which must be continually transformed into what Reba describes as ‘another kind of making’ – ‘arek rokom gora’: ‘I paint every day, for that is what I must do and can’t help doing. But I’ve also seen, from very close, how Art can take everything away.’ ‘Everything,’ she repeats, with a clear, quiet emphasis.

 

The Hores have known – at the most literal, bodily level – what it is to be preyed upon by the material processes and substances of Art. Fumes from the nitric and sulphuric acid used in print making had irreversibly damaged Somnath’s lungs. Toxic pigments (ultramarine blue, for instance) had begun to affect Reba’s vision and skin, forcing her to use terracotta, crayons and encaustic wax. In her journal, therefore, the story of continuing to work in spite of the dimming of the eyes and the dwindling of the body, is inextricable from the enactment – the actual living out – of her creativity. This is an inexorable movement towards minimalism, mastering the vanishing game of letting oneself be reduced to ‘nothing’ (‘naught to touch and naught to say’): ‘I turn and twist and shove and pinch./And strain my muscles every inch./Yet all amount to nothingness./Till life itself grows less and less!’

Yet this poem about fading and falling also ends with the resolve to fight: ‘For everything is never lost.’ As the poem works its way to the bottom of the page, the hand becomes shakier and the ink flows less and less well, for she is writing lying down. Throughout the diary, lying down and standing or walking upright correspond to the horizontal and vertical planes of writing and drawing respectively. The poems can be read up-closer from a horizontally positioned page, while the drawings can be properly understood only when held vertically and viewed from a distance. And this is how the space of her creativity, and thus her relations with other people, animals, objects and the reader or viewer, become axially differentiated in terms of closeness and distance, curiosity and indifference, empathy and withdrawal.

In her hectically coloured drawings, the ruled page, instead of paper-white, shows through the bits that are deliberately left uncoloured. These uncoloured spaces are usually rectangular shapes. They are doors, windows, mirrors or canvases propped-up against the wall, which begin to look like blank pages, or openings in the prison-house of colour through which the artist might look outwards at the possibility of writing.

 

Fantastical faces and figures steal out from between the words and lines in some of Rabindranath’s late manuscripts of poems, often cancelling out the writing itself with a sort of mad cross-hatching. In Reba’s drawings, the opposite happens. Spaces are cleared out in the chaos of colours and lines, as if for writing to happen. Yet they remain blank, and the writing is only negatively invoked, creating a kind of visual silence within pictorial space, a resonant absence of language that many of the poems also gesture at.

Owing to the very high quality of reproduction in this facsimile edition, one looks at the disturbing vividness, even violence, of the densely coloured portraits, and then, on turning the page, the lines of the face and figure, drawn with a black felt-pen but hidden underneath the colouring, show through clearly on the other side of the page. The effect is profoundly disconcerting. It is like being able to see through the flesh and look at the skeleton within, a gaunt scaffolding of black lines. From a tender acknowledgment of somebody’s presence, the portrait turns into a coldly disassembled form, an unsparing memento mori.

 

The within doors world of the broken-legged artist is enlivened by paying attention – closely and sometimes dispassionately – to the presence of other people and things. Yet the familiarity of faces, the solidness of objects and the stability of spaces are all threatened by dissolution. In Reba Hore, this is a condition of the failing eye, relentlessly confronted, as well as a vision of the opacity and elusiveness of things, and of the relations among things. Spaces – rooms and cityscapes – come apart into a profusion of trilling, curly lines like skeins of unravelled wool, faces become grimly featureless and muzzled, mirrors mist over or dazzle and blind, and pieces of furniture dismantle themselves into straying patterns, losing their distinctness from one another.

The most remarkable achievement of this journal is to work through – quietly and doggedly, with body and mind – to a visual and verbal language for grasping, yet letting go of, this radically unstable world. But what is never lost in the process is the will to make sense of, and play with, its fugitive and unconsoling truths: ‘An aged woman totters on/Shuffling slowly stick in hand/She stumbles fumbles, moves along/Peering closely at each stand./She only knows she has to go/Where and why she does not know.’