Biography presents word-portraits of a range of fascinating or forgotten individuals in India and beyond.
In the days when V. S. Naipaul could still bring himself to praise somebody else, he wrote of C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary that it gave ‘a base and solidity to West Indian literary endeavour’. James’s opus, he remarked, was ‘one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West [...]
On this, the fifty-seventh anniversary of Indian independence, I wish to write about the Indian of my acquaintance who best combines past with present. He is in his early fifties, his name is Shekhar Pathak, and he lives somewhere in the Himalaya—somewhere, but we do not know exactly where. For he is a gumakkad, a traveller [...]
In the last weeks of 1999, I was the recipient of a phone call from a Delhi bibliophile I knew slightly. The Prime Minister’s family, he said, felt that the time had come to suitably commemorate, in cold print, the life and times of the great man. They had asked the bibliophile, as the best-read person [...]
The Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library house a vast number of manuscript collections relating to India. These include the records of the Secretary of State of India, the correspondence of Viceroys, and the papers of numerous officers of the Indian Civil Service. Other collections deal with the princely states, and with the [...]
In October 1896 Winston Churchill reached Bangalore, then not a bustling megapolis but a small, sleepy, cantonment town. He liked the climate: ‘the sun even at midday is temperate and the mornings and evenings are fresh and cool’. He liked the house alloted to him: ‘a magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of [...]
My wife and I were recently discussing people we admired. High on her list was the artist and writer Manjula Padmanabhan. She had just seen Manjula’s evocative graphic ‘Let it Grow’: and had previously read and liked her play Harvest, her illustrated children’s story City Market, and her very adult short story collection, Hot Death, Cold [...]
A hundred years this week, a new weekly made its appearance in Johannesburg. Its raison d’etre, as expressed in the inaugural issue, was that ‘the Indian community in South Africa is a recognized factor in the body politic, and a newspaper, voicing its feelings, and specially devoted to its cause, would hardly be considered out of [...]
In April 1996, I joined a group of Indian scholars for a meeting in the southern town of Manipal in memory of Mahatma Gandhi. The inaugural address was by Shivarama Karanth, who spoke of his debates with the Mahatma some sixty years previously, on such varied subjects as sex and spirituality. Among the other speakers were [...]
In April 1996, I joined a group of Indian scholars for a meeting in the southern town of Manipal in memory of Mahatma Gandhi. The inaugural address was by Shivarama Karanth, who spoke of his debates with the Mahatma some sixty years previously, on such varied subjects as sex and spirituality. Among the other speakers were [...]
On the 8th of September 1951, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published in London. When the book finally arrived in India, several weeks later, the author sent a copy to his literary mentor, Mohitlal Majumdar. Majumdar soon wrote back with his words of appreciation, but then asked: ‘What does Jawaharlal Nehru think of it?’ [...]