/Culture

Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.

THE GREATEST INDIANS


The Hindu

Speaking to the singer Dilip Kumar Roy in February 1924, Mahatma Gandhi said that he was very fond of music although he ‘could not boast of the power of any expert or analytic appreciation’. He added that he could not ‘conceive of the evolution of the religious life of India without music’. Towards the end of [...]

GHATAK AND THE GOVERNMENT


The Telegraph

My interests, personal as well as professional, are in politics and society; in cultural terms I am more-or-less a philistine. I know a little about literature, a little less about music, and nothing at all about the greatest of modern art forms, the cinema. This column about a film director is being written by a man [...]

THE GENIUS AND THE ARTIST


The Telegraph

2005 has been the year when, by becoming the first man to reach 600 Test wickets, Shane Warne further consolidated his claims to being regarded as the greatest bowler in the history of the game. And October has been the month in which two other leg-spinners briefly shifted him from the headlines. First, an unknown sixteen-year-old [...]

THE BOMBAY-KARNATAK CONNECTION


The Hindu

The state of Karnataka is made up of three sections, each previously part of another political regime. There is ‘Old Mysore’, the districts in the south which once belonged to the princely state of that name. There is the ‘Hyderabad-Karnatak’, the collective name for the arid northern districts (Bijapur, Raichur, Gulbarga, etc.) that once formed part [...]

THE EDUCATION OF A PHILISTINE


The Hindu

A British band had come to town, and my eleven-year-old daughter wanted to go hear them sing. I was resistant to the idea. That should have been the end of the matter—it would have when I was growing up—but nowadays the rhetoric of rights has permeated even the process of child-rearing. So we argued, back and [...]

THE PROSE OF POETS


The Hindu

When Dom Moraes died earlier this year, most obituaries justly focused on the quality of his verse. With his fellow Mumbaikar Nissim Ezekiel, he made Indo-Anglian poetry respectable. He was a Goan Christian, Ezekiel a Bene Israel; both could only have been products of what—despite the endeavours of Bal Thackeray and his followers—remains a stubbornly cosmopolitan [...]

THE SPREAD OF THE SALWAR


The Hindu

Among the most curious of the ‘culture shocks’ I have received was while flipping through the pages of the Islamabad telephone directory. I was in the Pakistani capital for an academic seminar; but had arrived a day earlier than scheduled. This was back before the days of email, so I could not inform my host (the [...]

KEEPING THE WINDOWS OPEN


The Hindu

Writers in Kannada have won seven Jnanpith awards, a record equalled only by one other language, Hindi. But then there are many more speakers of Hindi. And of the seven Kannada awardees three did not even grow up speaking that language. Thus D. R. Bendre’s mother tongue was Marathi. Masti Venkateswara Iyengar’s first language was Tamil. [...]

AN ELEVEN OF THEIR OWN


The Telegraph

My favourite cricketing story, patriots will be pained to hear, has a Pakistani playing the lead role. Not against India, though, but against the West Indies. On a hot day in Bridgetown many years ago, Hanif Mohammad was battling to save a Test match. Among those watching him keep out the likes of Roy Gilchrist and [...]

COMPOSING A CULTURE


The Hindu

Writers in Kannada have won seven Jnanpith awards, a record equalled only by one other language, Hindi. But then there are many more speakers of Hindi. And of the seven Kannada awardees three did not even grow up speaking that language. Thus D. R. Bendre’s mother tongue was Marathi. Masti Venkateswara Iyengar’s first language was Tamil. [...]