The Brittle, Besieged Sense of the Self

Rita Datta offers the contexts to appreciate Reba Hore's melancholy art.

- Rita Datta

Reba Hore. 1960. Photograph by Jyoti Bhatt. Image courtesy of the Jyoti Bhatt Archive and Asia Art Archive.

Searched aplenty

Searched and searched in vain

But seek, seek, seek I must

I stumble and I fall

The body wracked in pain

But walk, walk, walk I must

Groping, fumbling, walking, stumbling

I'll find my way, I must

(Translated from the original Bengali by Sunandini Banerjee and Somnath Zutshi)

Between gnawing despair and a feeble reassurance there runs an undefined, barely audible longing that's reflected in these lines. Artist and activist, wife and mother, Reba Hore (1926-2008) unwraps in poems such as this one a precarious, brittle, besieged sense of the self that undoes gender parameters and ideological prescriptions. This, at age 78, in 2004, when she was confined to bed for almost a year after she broke her leg. For the third time. She bled profusely, bathed in a “flow of colour and pain” as writer and teacher Aveek Sen puts it while quoting her memory of the injury. That's when she picked up an old diary with lined pages and dates in bold to begin her Bhanga Payer Diary (The Diary of the Broken Leg), the focus of Experimenter's show on her at its Ballygunge Place gallery in Kolkata, titled The Broken Foot Journal and Other Stories. The show extends from the 12th of August to the 4th of October.

When, in another poem she writes,

You've crossed many miles/through alley and blind lane

Lost your way (for) a while, then found it again

When the road was right/the house was not

When the house was in sight/the key was lost

Where will you go now?

Tired as I am/I'll sit a mite/and let the lost key be!

But day will soon turn to night/and where will that leave me?