Soma Das’s world is one where labour, leisure, and laughter exist in equal measure. Drawing inspiration from her day-to-day existence and the scenes she witnessed growing up, her works feature ordinary women and men leading unglamourous lives yet carving out spaces for community and rest. As she holds up a mirror to these mundane absurdities of daily life, a unique tongue-in-cheek sense of humour shows up, and the strata of society that we often tend to take for granted reveals its many joyful selves.
Drawing on the ethos of the Bengal school of art, Soma Das borrows the perspectives, ornamentation, and detailing from Indian miniature paintings. The traditional miniaturists were documenters of their time, conveying courtly, mythical, and divine affairs through meticulous details. Das reimagines this language and places it in the context of personal and contemporary local narratives, for her nayaks and nayikas are people carrying out familiar rituals in the most ordinary of settings. They are unrushed yet deliberate in their actions. We find them resting, lounging, combing hair, reading books, picking flowers, and stitching garlands. Together, they build a microcosm of a typical middle-class Bengali family – one where every family member takes up space in their own ways.
The subject mirrors the technique. Colour-blocking with opaque goauche and detailing on layers of Lokta paper pasted on canvas require steady, measured effort, often over months at a time. This unhurried way of living and interacting with the world finds itself in the very way Soma Das’s paintings are received as well. They reveal themselves slowly, making sure that the viewer keeps returning to the canvases. A new detail might make itself known at one’s fourth viewing, a previously unnoticed glance shared between two characters might show up when one is least expecting it.
This way, Soma Das traverses the intricacies of homosocial spaces within the house. Some works focus on women carrying out acts of nurturing and building – on the terrace, in the kitchen, and the garden. In others, she places the husband and the wife as equals in the work they do together, focusing on marriage and homemaking as a team effort. At the same time, inanimate things come alive, sharing centre stage with the people. A larger-than-life jackfruit sits between a couple as they rest at their roadside stall; teacups find their place in women’s hands while they gather on the terrace; a cardboard box overflows with the belongings of a new bride as she unpacks it. Emanuele Coccia in Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness writes: “All objects in the home become subjects. Here’s a good definition: home is that space in which all objects exist as subjects. It’s the place in which things stop being things.”
Things thus stop being things, and people stop being passive bodies engaging in work. Soma Das’s heroines move with intent, agency, and whimsy, while also acting as carriers of her own deep-seated desires. The fondness she holds for a cup of tea, for long hair and flowing sarees comes through in her works, and only in her works. Every choice she makes with her brush is a confession: this is the real me; what you see on the outside isn’t.
Das’s ouevre takes into account a multitude of influences including her late father’s livelihood as a carpenter and her mother’s habit of collecting fabric scraps and magazine cutouts, among other things. This has shaped her recent explorations in newer mediums alongside paintings in gouache – she now works with metal, wood, and terracotta – she calls these “3D drawings and paintings”. With such a range of artworks, Soma Das’s practice records a deeply relatable humanity – fulfilling a need for connection in the artist, her community, and the viewer.
