Tag: Indian classics
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Translations: Pyre, by Perumal Murugan
“The mob was frantic with delays and would hear to nothing but burning at the stake.” In 1899, newspapers in Florida reported the lynching of Sam Holt, a black man who was tortured, mutilated and burned in front of 2,000 people. In 1997, almost exactly a century later, 58 Dalits were massacred in the village…
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In translation: Bhisham Sahni’s truths
Only four episodes of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas had been shown on Doordarshan when Ramesh Dalal petitioned the courts in the 1980s, asking them to stop the telecast. He felt that Tamas could disrupt public order, promote feelings of enmity and argued that “truth in its naked form may not always be desirable to be told…
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Speaking Volumes: Reclaiming the past
(Published by the Business Standard, May 19, 2014) When I saw that the Murty Classical Library had released its first five titles, it jogged my memory about my MRI-inspired reading project. There are few art materials as beautiful and as disturbing as MRI scans of the human brain. Angela Palmer’s art uses engraved details from…
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Speaking Volumes: The messy bits
(Published in the Business Standard, May 5, 2014) At the Chor Bazaar in Old Delhi, you used to be able to find Hindi film posters, record album art and what I classified as Readymade Families: discarded photographs gathered in shoeboxes and cardboard boxes. In a faded pink cardboard box the colour and size of a…
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Speaking Volumes: Romila Thapar-the memory keeper
(Published in the Business Standard, April 15, 2014) In 2003, a study asked 569 college students what their memories of 9/11 were. 73 per cent “remembered” seeing television footage the first plane crash into the north tower of the World Trade Center; so did the neuroscientist Karim Nader, who was in New York at…
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The BS column: The missing Indian canon
(Published in the Business Standard, April 19, 2010) In the library sales from the crumbling houses of Calcutta, or Delhi, or the hillstation homes, the keen-eyed book buyer would often come across sets of bound classics. These were usually in the printer’s binding—vellum, blue leather and gold—or occasionally bound in red with the owner’s initials…
nilanjana s roy 