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
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
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
TRIBUTE / What is it to be a Professor?
In memory of the late Mike Franklin, 1949-2024
8 July 2024, 16:30 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
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
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
Riverine Reflections
By the time James Rennell in the 1770’s, working out of Dhaka, finished surveying all the many rivers of Bengal, most of them had changed course, thus showing as much indifference to cartography as to any other form of human presumption.
31 May 2019, 18:00 PM
Did Shakespeare Know He Was “Shakespeare”?
Did Shakespeare know he was “Shakespeare”? That is, even in his own day, did he know he was a cut above the ordinary when it came to writing dramatic poetry, that his language was, as a miner’s son would later put it, “so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar”?
26 April 2019, 18:10 PM
Cricket and Visions
On March 18th, a poet named John was hit in the eye and knocked out by a ball while playing an informal game of cricket. Perhaps
29 March 2019, 18:00 PM
T.S.Eliot's Cat
It is a wonderful irony that T.S. Eliot, the publication of whose long poem The Waste Land a century ago is taken by the intelligentsia to
8 February 2019, 18:00 PM
The Curious Case of a Master-Spy: The Fictional Kim
What's in a name? Suppose you are given the name of a well-known character in fiction, could this determine the sort of person you
4 January 2019, 18:00 PM
Tagore and China: A Cambridge Perspective
Unnoticed I am going away/ Just as nobody saw me come./I clasp my hands and bow my head/As clouds puff up in the west…
16 November 2018, 18:00 PM
In Search of My Nanna's Bungalow
Last weekend I went in search of my Nanna's bungalow. Seventy years ago, during World War II and in the years just after it, my mother and I had stayed with her mother in her bungalow in Erith, a small Thameside port, now part of Greater London.
12 October 2018, 18:00 PM
A Daughter of India vs. a Son of England
“Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and a son of England awaken India to its continued state of subjugation and England to the iniquities of its proceedings?” - Bina Das (1932).
27 July 2018, 18:00 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