Reflection / A Bengali Buddha in Blighty
Pride of place above the fireplace in the sitting room of our little house in distant Blighty is a painting from North Bengal.
2 May 2025, 18:06 PM
2 May 2025, 18:06 PM
REFLECTIONS / The Doppelgänger
It was actually a bit of a relief to sit on the terrace of the Gezira Pension and have a quiet breakfast before plunging back once more into the traffic of Cairo in search of a carriage to the museum.
17 January 2025, 18:00 PM
17 January 2025, 18:00 PM
REFLECTIONS / Utpal Dutt and the new dawn
The audience for the jatra was all any Marxist theatre director in Kolkata could have wished for.
14 October 2024, 13:44 PM
14 October 2024, 13:44 PM
TRIBUTE / What is it to be a Professor?
In memory of the late Mike Franklin, 1949-2024
8 July 2024, 16:30 PM
8 July 2024, 16:30 PM
POETRY / No door
His five sons/ Were killed and the books...
12 January 2024, 18:00 PM
12 January 2024, 18:00 PM
REFLECTIONS / How to write a love song
500 years ago, Edmund Spenser wrote a poem to celebrate a wedding taking place beside the River Thames. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”.
10 November 2023, 18:00 PM
10 November 2023, 18:00 PM
Book Review: Nonfiction / Eyeball to eyeball at Lords: A Bangladeshi occasion in a very English setting
35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.
7 October 2023, 13:55 PM
7 October 2023, 13:55 PM
Essay / In some corner of a foreign field: Rahmat Ali & the once and future Cambridge Majlis
The map is part of an exhibition arranged to mark the revival of the Cambridge Majlis, a society (dating from 1891) designed for students from all over the Subcontinent to meet socially to enjoy their commonalities and discuss and debate in a civil way their political differences.
15 August 2023, 13:59 PM
15 August 2023, 13:59 PM
THE MAN WITH THREE NATIONALITIES
“This house,” said Mr Ranodhir Palchaudhuri, the owner of the colonnaded 19th century Neel Kuthi at Maheshgunj, “was built by a
22 June 2018, 18:00 PM
The Philosopher & the Poet
These stories were told to John Drew by the Hungarian poets Ádám Nádasdy, translator of Shakespeare and Dante, and Győző Ferencz, Keeper of the Radnóti Archive.
1 June 2018, 18:00 PM
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: KUTCH
Imagine Bengal like this: all the rivers have dried up. Periodically, there are earthquakes. For mile after mile there is only desert scrub:
6 April 2018, 18:00 PM
BANERJEE VS. CHATTERJEE 1945
I know of Capt. Banerjee, Military Observer, only because he wrote feature articles for the Times of Saigon, edited by my father,
2 March 2018, 18:00 PM
Musings on a Poet, a City and a Football Team
Alone upon the housetops, to the North
26 January 2018, 18:00 PM
THE ENGLISHING OF 'OMAR KHAYYÁM
Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
8 December 2017, 18:00 PM
A Welsh Poet Foresees His Death: Rakhine Province, 1944.
As many hundreds of thousands of refugees stream out of Rakhine, leaving behind family killed and homes reduced to ashes, it may seem, and maybe is, peculiarly insensitive, untimely and Eurocentric to refer to the death of one Welsh poet in their homeland nearly 75 years ago.
17 November 2017, 18:00 PM
ARCADIA ON THE JALANGI
It was not all utopian: Jones expected his researches, like his law codes, to have practical benefits. While enjoying his Arcadia, he was
31 March 2017, 18:00 PM
ARCADIA ON THE JALANGI
The Jalangiriver snakes across Bengal, as changeable as it is beautiful and impervious to the political divisions that would separate the eastern arm of its mother river Ganga from the western.
24 March 2017, 18:00 PM
Into the Heart of Bengal
If literary delights are more to the taste than culinary, George Thompson englishes the improvised songs of the palky-bearers taking
4 November 2016, 18:00 PM
Into the Heart of Bengal
“Most men carry weapons of defence with them. I carry none. A revolver was offered me before I started but I declined it. My
28 October 2016, 18:00 PM