The Political in Art type lacks drama. There the drama is composed by the gesture of lines, visualizing the gestures and postures of the figures, like what we see in the portraits ofRupkantada and Mohanda. The drawings and the sketches contained in the Diary have a photographic naturalism only on the surface. Behind their cool informative facade are surreptitious 78 and subversive attempts to emphasize certain things and suggest underlying meanings. The drawings and sketches of the Diary are undoubtedly descriptive, but their stylization often tends to make them quietly evocative of meanings not made explicit. The later development of Somnath as a print-maker and sculptor fully bear out what was not so apparent but was a dormant possibility in the drawings and sketches of the Diary. For those who are interested in charting the course of consciousness and its creative expression, Somnath's Tebhaga Diary offers a readily available case. As we have already said, one should not put so high a premium on wise old Somnath's assessment of young Somnath's writings. It is for anyone to find that there is a complementarity and continuity between young Somnath's drawn and written sketches. Later, Somnath has not written much on his own works, but the writings in the Diary, when read along with a viewing of the corresponding sketches, provide us with a clue about the kind of events and objects of the phenomenal world which stir Somnath's being. The illustrated Diary acts as a key to a fuller understanding of Somnath's later work; here a note of caution must also be sounded. Somnath began his career as a visual artist by drawing sketches of the mutilated, dead bodies of victims of Japanese bombing in 1942. In 1943, he sketched the skeletal figures of the starved and dead victims of the famine. Since then, all through his creative career, it is the suffering of the wounded and the humiliated to which Somnath has reacted with all his being and all his creative resources. His imagery is replete with indicators of wounded suffering. Except during Tebhaga, and once again in 1971 when he was doing lithographs, he has not responded much to the idea of resistance by habitual sufferers, not to speak of celebrating the anticipated victory of resistance, as he has done in some of the drawings and sketches of the Diary. If the drawings and sketches of the Diary disappoint the admirers of Somnath's later works a little, it is not only because they are by a novice, but also because the empathy necessary for the inward intensification of a phenomenal event or object was not there in full measure at the time. The success of the political in art, does not, ultimately, depend either on the loftiness of the political ideology or correctness of the political line. It depends a great measure on the internalization of the ideology and personalization of the political. One should not, of course expect quick, note-like, on-the-spot sketches to function like fully finished objects of art. The author, editor and publisher of the volume under review have rightly included a number of Somnath's wood-engravings done in the early fifties on the basis of the sketchy notes he drew during his Tebhaga tour. These carefully constructed versions show how 'memory recollected in tranquility' (William Wordsworth's defini- Journal of Arts &' Ideas