The Political in Art creation of some of the finest treasures of Bengali short stories and novels, including Rabindranath Tagore's (1861-1941) Gora (1910), Gharey Bairey (1916), Char-Adhyay (1934) and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's (1876-1936) Father Dabi (1926). The non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements and in general the Gandhi-inspired mass upsurge not only had their impact on the short stories and novels of Tarasankar 66 Bandyopadhyay (1898-1971) and Subodh Ghosh, who were in the thick of the Congress movement, but the concept of Satyagraha also played a seminal part in Tagore's symbolic plays like Muktadhara (1922). One of the most significant novels of the post-Tagore era, Satinath Bhaduri's (1906-65) Dhonrai Chant Manas (1949-51), vividly narrated the impact of the Gandhi-Congress variety of the nationalist movement on rural society, especially on the economically poor and socially depressed segments of rural society. Here was a Gandhian Congressman turned Congress Socialist and the narrative of his earlier novel, Jagari (1945), had a built-in precondition in the Quit India movement of 1942. Although the famine of Bengal (as also of Assam, Bihar and Orissa) in 1943 was, strictly speaking, a political event, the kind of political economy which caused it and the political implications of it were rightly noted by the Bengali intelligentsia who reacted from their guts to the human predicament. It was a 'man-made famine', as conclusively proved by the contemporary statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, anthropologist Kshitish Prosad Chattopadhyay, sociologist Ramkrishna Mukherjee and the reactionary politician Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, amongst a host of others. The soul of Bengal had not been so stirred by any other event since the first partition of Bengal (1905-06). Some of the finest of the early poems of Subhas Mukhopadhay, at least one novel and a couple of short stories of Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, a number of short stories and a novel of Manik Bandyopadhyay were written in direct response to the experience of the famine. But, perhaps, the most significant outcome in the arts of the 1943 famine was the birth of a new kind of socially responsive realistic theatre, signalled by the production of Bijon Bhattacharya's play Nabanna (1944) by the newly established Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). A genre of new agit-prop music also developed, and a number of compositions by Jyotirindra Moitra, Benoy Roy and Salil Chaudhuri were composed in response to the famine. The Tebhaga movement of 1946-47, which followed the famine, gave a further push to this objectification of a politically motivated response to societal events in the arts. We have not so far talked about the politicization of the non-performing visual arts in Bengal, but we intend to give intense attention to these media. Our aim is to review an illustrated diary of a person who would become an important print-maker, sculptor and mural painter subsequent to the working out of the diary. This is Somnath Hore. At the time, however, Somnath was not a fully qualified artist, he was a full-fledged political activist. Nor was he the first Bengali artist to respond to a contemporary political event. He inherited a legacy. Let us first see what the legacy was like. Journal of Arts ^ Ideas