REBA HORE, THE ARTIST: Born 1926. Educated at Calcutta University and Calcutta College of Art. She has lived and worked in Calcutta, New Delhi, and in Santiniketan, where she continues to live and work. Over the years she has dabbled very effectively in oils, watercolours, emulsions, wax and terracotta. Collections of her work can be found at Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi; Art Heritage, New Delhi; Netherlands Embassy, New Delhi; Punjab Museum, Bahai Museum, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta and in private collections in India and abroad.

REBA HORE, THE PERSON: During her stint at Asutosh college, she was drawn naturally to the student movement sweeping through the country and she proficiently interlaced strikes, meetings and processions with her studies. In retrospective, she admits that it was great fun. A dynamic woman in her time, she formed, with some of her classmates, a group for the education of village women. In a similar manner, she also went to Sonarpur, a nearby village, to start and run a free library. It gave her, she says, a sense of belonging and all at once, the taste of freedom. The war changed many things in the young Reba Hore. She experienced sirens, rationing, blackouts, air raids and famines with the rest of her generation. She saw, all around her, people dying on the streets, skeletal figures on doorsteps. She watched a baby being born on the footpath on Southern Avenue. She wasn’t just deeply moved—she was troubled. She did join a famine kitchen organized by fellow classmates but was it enough? Could that be her only contribution? She realized there were questions to be faced. ‘What was happening? Why? What could I do? What should I do? Most importantly, what did I want to do with my life?’ It wasn’t a difficult decision. She knew she must equip herself, as a painter.