Tag Archives: Art & Culture

The Bengali intellectual displays this immense appetite for knowledge, and it does not matter where it came from. Whether it is Badal Sircar or Kunal Basu or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, they are not afraid of looking far and wide to grasp, and even grab, ways of seeing and ways of writing. But this is overlaid on a deep Bengaliness. And that saves them in many instances from being blown off their feet.

The genesis of the book lies in Subramaniam’s stint as a teacher at CalArts, during which he felt the need for a ‘handy guide of music theory’ potentially useful to ‘a practical musician and a composer’ (p. 1). This led to the authors collaborating on a work initially titled Euphony, of which the book being reviewed here is an extensively revised edition. The authors’ backgrounds attest to their formidable grasp over three distinct forms of music, namely the Hindustani, Carnatic, and Western classical systems.

In the chapter ‘The Cry of the Oppressed’, the author recreates and reconstructs the scenes, the milieu and the ethos of Benegal’s films with great precision and felicity. The reader feels like watching a movie of the quintessential director, who indisputably occupies a unique position in the film industry of the country.

I dipped into the book with some hesitation, not because the book—designed also by Chaudhuri—is in any way intimidating or uninviting, but because its Foreword is written by her husband, Sanjeeb Chaudhuri—a choice that seems oddly hagiographic. Sanjeeb Chaudhuri is the chairman of IDFC First Bank and while banking, investment and art are bedfellows, especially in the first world, the reader must decide why his voice here is important.

From a diminutive rock smeared with vermillion, to logic-defying edifices cut out of sheer rock, to large complexes spread over hundreds of acres with the most spectacular architecture humans could ever envision, the Hindu temple can indeed be a bewildering space for the uninitiated and un-socialized.

The professional Carnatic musician’s path is highly templatized; countless have been through the grind. Start young, attend junior competitions, perform at AIR, and ensure that you make your way to the Music Academy performance slot. Subrahmanyan too traversed this well-trodden path, and spectacularly well at that, to join only a select few to receive the prestigious Sangeeta Kalanidhi (Oscar of Carnatic classical music) in 2015 when he was just 47 years!

India’s secret recipe for red blown glass, much sought after by medieval courts in Europe, is no longer known, and our current method of producing coloured glass was learnt from European manufacturers! In Firozabad, famed for its beautiful glassware in Akbar’s day, and still a major glass centre today, folklore has it that the famed Murano glass makers in Italy originally learnt their skills from Indian craftspeople, especially the art of mosaic and millefiori glass. Whether this is truth or legend, I don’t know.

Sometimes the amalgam worked well, as in the architecture of Lutyens Delhi; most times it was terrible! Luckily rural India and our temples and mosques remained more or less immune from this scourge.

As a dancer, I found the chapter on ‘The Commune and the Community’ most interesting. It served to make for an understanding of the various offerings that every Theyyam makes. Some start by sowing seeds, worshipping the Goddess, worshipping nature, ancestors, warriors, heroes, animals, snakes, etc. All the three stratospheres are included. Multifariousness is its hallmark. People of all faiths are devotees. It is a suspense of logic or scientific thought. It also goes beyond dogma and prescribed faith. The Devi can be ruthless in blaming the people for their misdoings. But is also a forgiving and prophetic Mother.

Mukherjee was nearing fifty when she cast the 12-ft high Ashoka at Kalinga. Sculpted in twenty-six parts, Mukherjee’s greatest worry at the time was to find a place to cast the complex work. Two-and-a-half decades later, she began work on another monumental sculpture, this time of the Buddha himself in whose teachings Ashoka had found his meaning of life. Having begun it in December 1996, the 14-ft high Buddha was conceived in sixty-six pieces, and she had cast most of it before she passed away in January 1998 of cardiac arrest.

Nor was it only the royal men who commissioned gardens—Shah Jahan’s daughter Roshanara had an elaborate space named after her, quite near what was to be known as the Grand Trunk Road. Throughout the book, the Liddles provide us with interesting nuggets of information on Mughal history. Roshanara was close to her brother Aurangzeb, supporting him when he usurped the throne from their father. She was rewarded with the then enormous sum of five lakh rupees and made the head of the palace.

The next paper by Sazi Dlamini also discusses the ngoma not just as music but as organized sounds because ritual and ceremonial use of ngoma involves dance, possession by spirit, healing practices and initiation rites. The performance with the ngoma lungundi drum is central to the identity of the Venda ancestry and this memory also speaks of resilience in the face of conquest and migration

In addition to lying on the Uttarapatha, Nalanda, says the author, is, ‘Geographically… a part of the Indo-Gangetic trough but some of its parts were connected with the Siwalik ranges in the northern part of Champaran district and partial fringes of the peninsular block in the south. Nalanda lies in the Magadha-Anga plain in the south Ganga region.’ It was also close to the ports of Champa and Pataliputra.

This secular and positive portrayal of Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s was largely due to the significant involvement of Muslims in the filmmaking industry during this period. While these portrayals often relied on certain stereotypes—such as the use of poetic Urdu, Lucknowi aristocracy, and elaborate costumes—the author argues that by the 1970s, the social genre introduced Muslim characters, especially women

Promil Pande’s lovely book, Floor Coverings of Kashmir, comparatively slim considering its impressive content, and beautifully illustrated, brought back nostalgic memories of Kashmir

The 1980s is a decade of contradictions in Hindi cinema. Theatres grew in numbers over the decade while the size of the theatre audience fell.

In the post-Satyajit phase of Indian cinema, Rituparno Ghosh (1961-2013) was a force to reckon with. He enriched Indian cinema, mostly through the Bengali, having won umpteen national and international awards, mesmerizing the urban audience through some of his celebrated works.

South Asia has arguably been the cradle of the visual from times immemorial. Story telling in picture form from fables to epics has a place in the history of the subcontinent. Painting, sculpture, printing, weaving, sketching are practices that the people have used continuously.

A full page, at the very beginning, carries an arresting photograph of Sayed Haider Raza. We see a young Raza, somewhere in the early 1950s, sitting with his hands clasped around his raised left knee, apparently photographed in that reflective moment, with a painted canvas on the easel.

The term ‘biography’ can mislead at times. A person can be written about in so many different ways—popular forms include scholarly studies, trade bios and dictated memoirs—and ‘biography’ encompasses them all.