Belarani's Bangla Boi :a collection of 60 years

  They have travelled a lot ; these books.
From Narayanganj, Dacca, to  30 Park Road ,Allahabad to 7 University Road , Delhi,  via  Roop Nagar. Finally  coming to rest in  dusty unsorted heaps on four steel shelves , up on the third floor barsati of our house in B.D. Estate, called ambitiously Bhaskar's studio /study/ workshop.
   Not all the books  can claim hoary lineage .  There are acquisitions belonging to all the  decades from the 20s.
    From Ma's bedside and the wooden shelves in her ground floor room, books have been transported here to reside amidst the hugger-mugger of colour splashes of paintings, half painted brilliant clay jars , clatter of  wood working, metal working tools on worktables. Artwork are  pinned up on boards, on walls, some floating around on sketchbook sheets under or over tables. Copious amounts of Delhi dust homogenises everything.
   Two grey steel shelves nearby are loaded with National Geographic  copies dating from the 40s to 80s, History of the Second World War in 6 volumes , People and Animals 8 volumes,  Book of Knowledge 8 volumes and various other sets  collected by  Dr Dutt ,the late owner of the house , representing the intellectual interests of a previous generation. Here in this room books cohabit in cheerful democratic huddles -a long line of Frederic Forsyth, Robin Cook thrillers, Enid Blyton's stories, collections of fairy Tales, children's books, historical fiction ,science fiction,  all jostle for space, needing a determined hand  to arrange them.
  The new Mahabharat serial on television has sparked my curiosity about ancient India, and  I have discovered a huge cavern in my knowledge of  culture. I climbed up the steep stairs of this old house, in search of  a copy of  "Otisundor Bharat' -following a dim memory of a worn out book. I think this book maybe a translation of A. L.Basham's " The Wonder that was India" ; let me begin my study with my home resources I think .
 The Bangla shelf induces despair. A whole afternoon's digging, wiping, dusting with the heat coming in from the roof  waits for me before  Ma's books will identify themselves. The lowest shelf gives evidence of  being the nursing home for generations of geckos. Lots of eggshells there.Many books being lifted shower fine yellow dust, and tiny holes to show they have been hospitable to insects.
Nothing for it. I get down to business. Start taking out piles and roughly sort in groups on the floor, according to subjects . Hm- poetry here -  among 15 titles ,'Adhunik Bangla Kobita' ,'Boishnob Podaboli' along with  "Kalidaser Meghdoot', a torn copy of "Atul Prosader Gan'. This proves very tiresome. There are soon tottering piles  on the floor. I  keep forgetting where I put a book by a writer  when I come upon another one by the same person. After years of free unorganised existense Ma's books are resisting  regimentation.
 Often have I disdained the obsession with Tagore's work amongst Bengalis ,especially in Delhi. But  I find together Ma  and I have allowed 'Kobiguru' to occupy major space allover the house.An army of maroon with gold lettering hardbound volumes published by Viswabharati  in the 40s of 'Robibabu's' work, and also  of Saratchandra Chatterjee ,line up at the back of one shelf. Two fat Green volumes with gold lettering of Bonkim Chandra Chatterji's works join the cosy club of Bangla canonical literature. A set of 17 to 16 volumes in ochre with chocolate bands, of Tagore's works, bought by me on his centenary, flank the older volumes.I know downstairs there are other  thick volumes , English translations of Tagore of more recent vintage -a Harvard  publication ,with its Asian edition from Viswabharati - 'The Essential Tagore' ,also Sahitya Akademi's translation in 2 volumes. Here on the roof however, the  3 giants of Bangla literature demand that I gather first all their works scattered here .
  Ten small paperbacks ,lovingly covered in white glossy paper, have ' Bela Dutta' in Bangla  in Ma's hand, written on top corner of  inside covers. Individual books of poetry by Tagore, stories by Saratchandra and Bonkim.:  sample of a  few titles  in random order- 'Shishu', 'Kheya','Mrinalini' ,' Anandamath', 'Pollisomaj'. These are books gifted  to the bride ,on Ma's wedding , in the 1920s. No doubt these were the germ of her 'boi' collection. I could see 18 year old Belarani, sitting in Allahabad home while Baba was at the university, covering her assorted literary possessions carefully.
  Post Bengal Rennaisance, friends & young relatives of the groom,  enthusiastically gifted these ,as elegant ,cultured  offerings.  At Rs 2/ or 3/, they were youth  pocket friendly. Ma  was an object of interest to Baba's friends, having  completed high School at 14, an 'educated' bride. Though at wane,the tradition lasted till my wedding in late 60s, where a copy of 'Sanchayita' was added to the Tagore dominance.
  The Classical shelf  restored,  time to turn to Bangla writers of the last 50 years. All  major names are represented. Ma's collection reflects the growth of  modern Bangla fiction . Anurupa Debi ,once popular woman writer is here, though except for  Taslima Nasreen's 3 books, a late gift from me, women writers are a little scarce.Perhaps Ma  was influenced by the highbrow ' Desh' magazine, which serialised many    'blockbuster' fiction. Tarshankar Bandopadhay seems to have been most favoured, 20 titles monopolise shelf space. Next loved was Bibhutubhushan Bandopadhay, writer of 'Pather Panchali' - at least 10 titles. Sunil Gangopadhay, Shankar, Bonophul ,Avadhoot,  Bimal Mitra,Jarashondho and many  very famous writers are present with not less than 4  works  each. From vertical piles on the floor, i have to transfer them as  vertical piles on the shelves. The only gain being they are categorised now .
  There are  Collections of ' Shreshttho Golpo' ( Best stories) or 'Nirbachito Golpo' ( Selected stories) by well known writers. An interesting volume is  one on translations of Best Urdu Stories. Iconic Bengali journals , 'Shonibarer Chithi', 'Bosumoti' - are present in contemporary selections.
 The books reveal what a lively intellect  Ma had, keenly  interested in various subjects.On the lowest shelf,  I try to accommodate all her non-fiction.  Cheiros Palmistry in 4 books, Freud's psychology, space, geography,  astronomy ,lots of travel books( including the famous 3 volume 'Ramyani Bikkho' ), a biography of Sri Radha , a book on  Badshahi era, esoteric Tantric cults,criminology ( Aparadh Bigyan) - difficult to list here all  her wide interests. She loved biographies  ,it seems;. four volumes of Vivekananda's life, on Ma Sharada, Ramakrishna , and others. Esoteric Indian cults were another interest. I mark several books  to read . A full shelf ,in two rows and two tiers, can hardly contain all these books.
  'Stay there' - till I lay hands on you again.
  Classification, grouping of authors , cleaning of dog eared brown volumes with pages missing ( a discouraging task) , has consumed the afternoon. I descend  downstairs , with  2 volumes of  the famous ' "Tontrabhilasir Sadhusongo' (  A Scholar's Encounters with Tantriks ) under my arm.Nothing like weird stories about how bhairavis are acquired and  about mad dwellers of cremation grounds to while away hot summer afternoons. "Otisundor Bharat" has departed this no longer 'sundor' environment in the Kabariwala's bag, it appears.

the London look vs the Delhi look

Dehli to Delhi

Renaming the blog (again) after consideration that the intentional phonetic spelling of Dehli might be misconstrued as a mistake. Hmm. What we need here is a Hindi-English blog title...

A Dinosaur find in India

Holotypic caudal vertebra of Titanosaurus indicus in bottom, side, and front views (from Falconer 1868).

In 1828, Sir William Henry Sleeman (whose journals I have been reading and who is credited with helping to eradicate Thuggee cults in India), discovered remains of a dinosaur near Bara Simla hills. He was stationed at Jabalpur when he collected the specimens. These were eventually passed on to Henry Falconer (of the Geological Survey of India) in 1862 who measured and described the pieces but did not assign a name. As late as 1877, richard Lydekker used these three bones (pic) to form the basis of a new Taxon Titanosaurus indicus. 

You won't find it exhibited in any museum under this name, however, because the adjunct "indicus" was long since thrown out while the Titanosaurus taxon remains.

Read a lot more about the Titanosaurs and these findings here.

A walk through Limehouse

At long last, a website and project of immense historical and sociological interest for anyone following the history and peopling of London. The project tracing the Evolution of British Chinese Workforce is online.

Most interesting is the route the authors follow down and around Limehouse. So little remains of what was once a lively, thriving pre-war cosmopolitan community. This short montage of recent photographs (at the bottom of the page) attest to how much was lost and gives intriguing hints of tiny clues that still remain.

Could understanding the tangled web of this early history help today's Chinese community feel more rooted?

I'm certainly relieved to see more sources of information and authentic perspectives on life in old Limehouse. Other than the jaundiced writings of Thomas Burke (see previous post).

Brown faces in old limehouse

From Nights in London, Burke's overly colourful and lurid account of travels around pre-war London:

Each whispering house seems an abode of dread things. Each window seems filled with frightful eyes. Each corner, half-lit by a timid gas-jet, seems to harbour unholy features. 

A black man, with Oriental features, brushes against you. 

You collide with a creeping yellow man. He says something—it might be Chinese or Japanese or Philippinese jargon. 

A huge Hindoo shuffles, cat-like, against the shops.

At the mouth of Pennyfields is a cluster of Chinks. You may see at once that they dislike you. 

You are in Limehouse. The peacefulness seems to be that attendant upon underhand designs, and the twilight is that of people who love it because their deeds are evil.

The stone collector

They call him the Stone Man or Kalmanidhan because he loves to collect fossils. To me, he is a reminder that not everyone in India regards these stones as religious icons but values their scientific significance. As A.R.K.Arun also calls the ones he collected from Nepal, "Saligrams", but remembers to explain their mundane geological provenance.

Where are the fossils in India?

I'd always wondered that. Now I realise the answer was (literally) at my doorstep back in Delhi. Like most other mysterious and inexplicable objects, fossils too have been venerated in certain forms of Hinduism.

That's what a Shaligram Shila is. An Ammonite fossil. If it happens to be shaped like a phallus or conch or other yantra relating to Vishnu (one of the more ancient deities) then it has been preserved in a temple. A rather more scriptural discussion and website here:

A Saligrama – at least according to geological notion – is believed to be a flintified siliceous much-eroded ammonite shell – found only in the high Himalayan rivers and more especially in the river Gandaki, one of the tributes of the Ganges, which flows through Nepal. It is usually a rounded, well-polished stone, having at times one or several holes with visible spiral grooves inside of them, resembling the chakra. It is on account of this peculiar configuration, that a Saligrama is considered as the symbol of Vishnu.

In this South Indian temple of the turtle, there exists a fossilised giant tortoise. It is the only temple of its kind (or extant one anyway, the Meso-american ancients had their version of temples to the turtle).

Some examples of temple fossils:

NARSIMHA SILA

CHATURATMA DASA's excellent collection

Many images here

Apparently you can join a pilgrimage to Nepal or the Himalayas organised for the purpose of finding Shaligram Silas. One excellent prospect being the Kali Gandaki river bed. Hmm. If only I had known...

Into the Wild

[Sean Penn on location for the shoot of 'Into the Wild']

Well. 2 years. A very long hiatus indeed.

I feel like I've been to Alaska and back, on my own harrowing personal journey.... possibly having died on the way and come back as a zombie... no, that's a different film. The one that prompted me to put finger to keyboard is none other than Sean Penn's directorial offering "Into the Wild".

Based on Jon Krakauer's book, who in turn based it on the terse jottings of the real life Christopher McCandless. If you've read Krakauer's Into Thin Air, or his article, you would understand my curiosity. The TV Guide's pithy one line synopsis made it sound less thatn compelling but Penn's past filmic genius spoke in its favour. And, whatever the average multiplex-goer (yup, that's me) might think of it, I surprised myself by enjoying this film. 

The journey that Christopher McCandless, a bright college graduate from California, takes across America is a pretty uncompromising one. I can think of another young man who made a similar journey, but one that ended in a profound accomplishment. Two thousand years ago in India, a young man called Siddhartha left his wife and child and headed into the wilderness seeking the truth.

What Christopher (Emile Hirsch) finds in the wild lands beyond Californian borders are a Hippie couple, a besotted 16 year old girl and a lonely old widower. The last two he proceeds to wound by rejecting their love while the first two he treats as ersatz parents. A saint this hero is not. He is also guilty of no little cockiness as he stands on a steep hill taunting an old man, who the climb could easily kill, and warbles 'King of the Road' while stowing away on a goods train. Nothing can stop his onward motion, nothing can stamp out his drive. Woven throughout the journey, later into the film's flow than most of us would have liked, are the clues to his driving need to move on. Bickering parents, forever on the brink of divorce but never quite rent asunder; a father with a dirty secret, a first wife he was still legally married to and a son that he had neglected; a life of materialist greed and petit-bourgeois ambitions. Yeah, so far, so boohoo you might say. Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch tread lightly on these worn-down tracks, richly mined by other indie filmmakers. Yet somehow it works.  Under Penn's sure direction, the flight 'away' from a dysfunctional family transforms convincingly into a quest for something, a moving towards and upwards. 

The camera, the light and the circuitous path of each scene feels constructed from a fragmented memory of some trauma. A hit-and-run victim lying on a baking hot road looking up at one's rescuers against the midday sun might feel like this.

Ultimately it is the wilderness into whose arms he fled, Nature red in tooth and claw, that defeats Christopher McCandless. I won't give away the ending. Suffice it to say all stories about city folk roughing it in the wild should realistically end this way. 

I can't say I liked where this film took me or what it had to show. But its enduring message still resonates. Happiness is only real when it is shared.

As a final caveat, it just hit me (its nearly midnight and I haven't slept much in, well, the past year) - why do I like these Boy's Own stories? They don't appeal to any other women I know. Somewhere inside me is a dirty-kneed 12 year old boy/girl still struggling up that hill, on the brink of some magnificent discovery. Frozen in time in that moment, before an ocean of hormones swamped him/her, Life overcame dream and she became a mother. That make sense?

Wake up and smell the underclass

Old news on new ghettoes?
The CRE is waking up a tad late to the reality of Asian ghettoes in Britains cities.
The reality of the segregated life here was a shock to me when I arrived. To see how little Asians and White British communities mixed together. It seemed I had to make a choice, belong to one or the other. Each side with its own quasi-tribal behaviour, affiliations, attitude and accent. You couldn't hang with one set and sympathise with the other. Not any more. Not after 7/7.
Being an Asian in Britain is depressing. Bad enough that one is lumped together into an amorphous characterless entity titled Asian, where one ceases to be Indian/Pakistani/Hindu/Muslim/Brahmin etc., which labels actually meant something to one for most of one's life. It is worse that this amorphous lump is then damned unequivocally and without any exceptions, to being a community on a nosedive into slumlife. Worse too that the slum-dwellers, with by far more time on their hands, haunt most Asian website message boards, spewing obscenities and vitiating any sympathy people might have towards them.

UK Fast Becoming Racially Segregated Nation

- Vijay Dutt. London, September 19, 2005

Warning has been issued that Britain is in danger of developing into a "ghetto" state, a racially segregated nation with ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims and Blacks, living in ghettos cut off from the rest of the society.

Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, believes that a New Orleans like enclaves, " literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and nobody escapes undamaged" are inevitable. He says Muslim and Black ghettos are splitting cities.

He criticises the Government's Race Relations policy for promoting the acceptance of difference rather than upholding British values. " We are sleepwalking our way to segregation" and becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned from the mainstream, Phillips says.

A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research revealed that with 1,147,905 new arrivals between 1991 and 2001 immigrants now make up 7.5 per cent of the population-one in 13 living here. A CRE research shows that most white people do not have a non-white friend while young Asian or Black have almost all Asian or Black friends.

The number of people of Pakistani heritage in ghettos, defined as areas with more than two-thirds of any one ethnic group, trebled between 1991 and 2001

Harriet Harman, the Constitutional Affairs minister, reflecting Phillips views also warned that some of Britain's black and poor communities were sinking into the same underclass exposed in the United States by Hurricane Katrina.

the Argumentative Indian

Argumentative Amartya

Early this August, Amartya Sen gave a talk in which he set out the positions he’s taken in his new book, The Argumentative Indian, one of the most profound and wide-ranging inquiries into the idea of India written in recent times.

Indians like to argue, he said, pointing to what he calls the “argumentative tradition”, an acceptance of plurality as the natural state of affairs, a long and robust tradition of heterodoxy, dissent, inquiry and analysis.

I had the good fortune of once interviewing professor Sen, this was before he won the Nobel Prize for Economics (the wide-ranging variety of my career often surprises even me, since I tend to forget past successes in light of present struggles). And I was struck by his modesty and accessibility to a relatively unknown rookie TV reporter. He chose to give me an interview rather than hold court at doddering old IIC. My employer had sneered at my ability at securing interviews with prominent people but thanks to Professor Sen, I was able to prove him wrong.

His latest book continues his tradition of revelation. I'll leave the objections to the argumentative pundits of India's many universities and diaspora. To me, it was an affirmation of what I thought about our great scholarly traditions, his fine logic gave these thoughts structure. His book reminded me of the many reasons I was once proud of Hindu tradition and thought:

- Aryabhatt: the ancient Indian mathematician of 476BC who postulated the Earth was round, calculated the value of Pi (to greater accuracy than Ptolemy), worked out the duration of the day at the poles and the heliocentric theory of Gravitation, among others. His work Aryabhattiya was translated into Latin in the 13th century.
- Gargi: a woman philosopher of ancient India (Vedic period 800BC) whose theories challenged the learned men of her day.
- Kashyapa or Kanada: propounded the Vaisheshika-Sutra (Peculiarity Aphorisms) the atomic theory of matter.

"In India I found a race of mortals
living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it.
Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them,
possessing everything but possessed by nothing".

- Apollonius Tyanaeus
(Greek Thinker and Traveller 1st Century AD)

To sum our past achievements up in one word (plurality) - and shroud it in dense terminology that is hard to debate - is the legacy of Academicians who fear the original Argumentative Indian. The Man (or Woman) on the street.

Sen also talks about the parable of the Kupamandaka (a favourite one of my grandfather too, incidentally, Bengali academicians being predictable in ttheir tastes). Kupamandaka (Sanskrit for Frog in the Well) who knows nothing about the outside world and this lack of knowledge is why he perishes.

Hmmmm, perhaps there are some Kupamandakas around here...

Of things Intangible but Precious and Quintessentially of this City

List continued!
What's Not To Like-II

8. Christopher Marlowe. Teeth bared in a smile, secretly a snarl, his true nature hidden behind a serene facade, this darling of the theatre was least what you'd expect of the author of a canonical work. For me, his writing made studying English Literature an adventure. Oh yes, I do declare I was in love with thee, Christopher Marlowe. Read his works here: Electronic Texts of Marlowe's Ouevre.
A man whose life was stranger than his fiction. Writer, Adventurer, Scholar, Spy. It brightens my day to see his lines quoted inside Tube trains (Faustus' soliloquy to Helen of Troy).
Was Marlowe Shakespeare? Read all about it in this somewhat scholarly rebuttal of the arguments of ye-of-little-faith.
Personally, he would still be a God to me had he written only Dr.Faustus.

The Djinns of Charivari

The first edition of Punch was published on July 17, 1841. Its founders, wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew, got the idea for the magazine from a satirical French paper, Charivari (indeed, the first issue was subtitled, "The London Charivari").

The Closure of Punch magazine in 2002 led to a brief spite of soul-searching amongst britain's literates. The keyword being brief. People were briefly panicked that the magazine so redolent of Englishness, of English wit and humour and independent thinking was now dead from neglect.


That was before Chavs with plastic bracelets and velour tracksuits overran the country. There is no more soul-searching. Now all that you find at the newsagents are "What Camera", "Which Cistern" and "Bratty Kids" type of magazines for a nation suffering from attention deficit disorder. The clever writing and edgy editorials are left to the minority of leading Newspapers and their supplements. Which is what makes the arm-spraining Sunday newspapers worth the weight-lifting trouble.

I'm no Amerophile but I'd rather read American Vogue than the brainless British version (90% fashion and shopping as if culture and lifestyle were no longer a modish concern), or The Washingtonian rather than London magazine (which is 90% real estate and 10% faff with no thought-provoking articles).

Charivari implies discord, a cacophonous mockery. I used to be enamoured of this word back when I wrote poetry by the reams and I wrote one called the Djinns of Charivari. Little did I know how prophetic that was. We are living at their mercy today. They have ripped intelligent thought and culture to shreds. Imagination really is dead, and so is curiosity. You see the results of this on the buses-- the empty-eyed, embittered and uninterested. No one ever directed their attention to what the world has to offer, or taught them how to live or to know good from bad. They trudge from chav homes to chav locals and back, pausing to urinate on the local heritage.