Documenting heritage

“Celebrating Delhi” is an engaging study of the city and its past

One doesn't see Upinder Singh, a noted historian, anxiously describing a book, nor does one find Khushwant Singh reminiscing about the past so often, but with the launch of the book “Celebrating Delhi” edited by Mala Dayal, all this and much more came to the fore at the main auditorium of the India International Centre. The book of essays is based on the series of 12 lectures organised by the Attic in 2006. Organised in collaboration with the Attic and INTACH which explores the city's living syncretic heritage illuminating unknown and fascinating aspects of its history, it boasts contributors like Upinder Singh, Pradip Krishen, William Dalrymple, Duno Roy and Ravi Dayal.

Upinder Singh, giving a brief introduction of the book also showed a few pictures of the famous Iron Pillar, Purana Quila, etc and also of lesser-known treasures in and around Delhi. The audience which included Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's wife Gursharan Kaur was familiarised with the stone tools that were discovered on the campuses of Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University through more visual support. “Most dilli-wallahs visualize their city extending from somewhere near the Qutub Minar to somewhere beyond the Red Fort and recollect a vague connection between ancient Indraprastha and the Purana Quila. But Delhi from the Stone Age to the times of the Rajputs stretches much further than one can imagine”.

Pradip Krishen entered the discussion by shedding some light on the city's interesting native trees. He, then, invited Rakhshanda Jalil for ‘Dehli ki Aakhri Shama', a poetic re-enactment of the ‘Last mush'aira of Delhi'. In her chaste Urdu, Jalil spoke about Farhatullah Beg's novel “Dilli Ki Aakhri Shama” on which the dramatic re-enactment was based upon.

Full report here

An old friend appears again

There appeared on my desk the other day a slim book with the information that it was a new paperback from Penguin. It was titled Refuge and its author was Gopal Gandhi. The arrival of the book was like catching up with an old friend again.

The first time I had seen the book was in 1987 when it was titled Saranam and published by Affiliated East-West Press, Madras, one of its first fiction titles, if not the first. Then, in 1989, it came out as a hardback with the Ravi Dayal imprint and a new name, Refuge.

Ravi Dayal, when he published it, encouraged revision of the content, so it came out as ?a revised edition?. After Ravi Dayal, once head of Oxford University Press, India, and perhaps its finest Editor before striking out on his own, passed away, the few titles he had published. and he was truly choosy about what he published. were taken over by Penguin India, and, so, the Ravi Dayal version of Refuge has now come out as the paperback which arrived at my desk.

Full review here Hindu

Pride without prejudice

The Final Question (Ravi Dayal and Penguin, Rs 350) by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay is a translation of the Bengali classic, Shesh Prashna (1931), by members of the department of English, Jadavpur University.

Set in a middle-class Bengali milieu in Agra in the early decades of the 20th century, this late novel reinforces Saratchandra’s enduring relevance. The story revolves around Kamal, the love-child of an English tea planter and a Bengali widow. Like Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, Kamal embodies the spirit of contrariness.

Driven by reason rather than idle romanticism, she hits out at the comfortable numbness of Bengali domesticity, upsetting closely held beliefs and biases. She is perceived as brazen by women, and adored by men, secretly or otherwise. From a writer who led a nomadic existence, got to know a bizarre assembly of characters, and admired Herbert Spencer, Charles Dickens, Balzac and Bernard Shaw, this is a tale that shimmers with ideas but never fails to entertain. The full complexity of Kamal’s life and times comes alive in the brilliant introduction by Supriya Chaudhuri. Arup Rudra and Sukanta Chaudhuri provide valuable editorial notes, while Amitava Das adds a useful preface.

Full report here Telegraph

For fine reading

Here's a book you can safely judge by its cover. Wolpert's biography of Nehru, Guha's India after Gandhi, Linda Goodman and Shakespeare all share shelf space on the cover, and the eclecticism of the collection is a good enough indicator of what lies in store inside Written For Ever: The Best of Civil Lines.

The pieces are all taken from the five volumes of Civil Lines that were published between 1994 and 2001, at terribly irregular intervals — whenever the editors had put enough writing of a certain quality together, that had something to do with India, and that had never been published before.

Rukun Advani, editor of the collection, has a tongue-in-cheek introduction. Advani takes a pot-shot at a former employer. The publishing house he worked at (Oxford University Press) “booted (him) out”, he says, as it was taken over by “jumped-up salesmen”. He also heaps scorn on the bloggers and the “attention-deficit plebs”— you and me and the whole wide world could go into that description — who would never be allowed a space in Civil Lines..

Full review here Hindu