Born at the beginning of the 1920s, and acquiring academic training during the mid 1940s, Somnath Hore represents a generation of artists in Bengal, India, who actively redefined the language of visual art from an earlier phase of nationalist self-redefinition, in the face of a long colonial history of British socio-political and cultural domination. In response to the imposition of an alien taste and the hegemonic proclamation of the colonizer’s perspective as superior, Indian responses of the nationalist dimension had harked back to the pre-colonial past in an attempt to invent a contemporary that would visibly retain links to ‘tradition’.