this land

This article by Arundhati Roy was published in Outlook magazine a couple of week back. It is compelling and insightful reading.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262519

netaji bhavan market

I am smitten by flowers. The colours, the perfume, the arrangement of them is a visual feast.

What is most compelling though is the garlanding ... the hand in the making. I could stand and watch for hours. Each individual flower threaded on to string or cotton, or woven with a twisting, tying and turning technique. Marigolds are sturdy, the red hibiscus for Kali are more fragile. The jasmine can be intricate. Some are threaded vertically so that they form a long line of thin white blooms, some spiral around and around, are thick and heavy.

This week I bought yellow chrysanthemums.

baul music

Bauls are musicians from rural Bengal, both Hindu and Muslim. Their songs are devotional and mesmeric. Their tradition is an oral one, and according to Wikipedia, they 'themselves attribute the lack of historical records of themselves to their reluctance of leaving a trace behind.'

These performers were part of an awareness day for Climate Change held at Dakshinepan Mall.

khoj kolkata

Here are the Khoj Kolkata folk.

Chhatrapati Dutta, Paula Sengupta, Abhijit Gupta, Tamal Mitra, Saikat Surai, Kaushik Chakraborty (l-r).

(Pooja Sood, on far left was visiting from Khoj in Delhi)

drawing (iii)

Here is another thought in red velvet.

dakineshwar

The Ramakrishna temple for the goddess Kali at Dakineshwar is north of Kolkata on the river. Ruma Dasgupta took me there last weekend. It was built in 1847 by Rani Rashmoni, who was a devotee of Ramakrishna. The temple is a beautiful structure and am important pilgrimage site.

Kali is an awesome figure, the goddess of time and change, destruction and birth. She holds a severed head, stands on top of her consort, Shiva and wears a garland of skulls. She has particular significance in Kolkata as there is a connection with the name 'Kalikata', one of the three villages that formed the city of 'Calcutta'.

The red hibiscus is associated with Kali and on the river in front of the temple at the ghat, I saw red flower islands float past.

P. Thankappan Nair

A visit to the National Library courtesy of Amitava Mukhopadhyay has given me another avenue to explore for traces of my great-great grandfather, Edward Alkin. After a tour of the Rare Books section (where I saw a copy of Hicky's Bengal Gazette or Calcutta General Advertiser, 1780; William Carey's 1806 Grammar of Sungskrit Languages; Edward Fry's 1799 Pantographia 'containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets of the world' (and a dedication to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society) and a Tibetan manuscript written in 1670 and gifted to the Library by his Holiness the Dalai Lama), I was slightly stunned to meet P. Thankappan Nair. Mr Nair is an esteemed historian whose area of expertise is Calcutta. He has published 48 books and I had just come across some references to his writings at the Asiatic Society last week.

His work includes four volumes of the history of Calcutta, one volume per century from 16th to 19th; a history of the Calcutta Police; a history of the street names of Calcutta and a history of the actual name of the city. Unfortunately, most of his books are out of print and I plan to go to Bow Bazaar and College Street to scour some of the secondhand bookstores.

P.T. Nair was sitting at a desk preparing a lecture he is giving on 23rd November to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Ashutosh Mukhopadyay collection being donated to the Library ... some 87,500 books. That is another story!

We talked for a while about Calcutta, Australia, cricket, James Prinsep and air-conditioning. He advised Amitava to take me to the Calcutta Port Trust which has a good archive, and a copy of something he had written on the Hugli Shipping Pilots. And also to try the Officers Club as they also hold some documents and archives.

P.T. Nair said that he is at the library most mornings if I had any other questions. He tapped his chest and said that the room gets too cold to stay all day. He was wearing a woollen jumper underneath his shirt.