Pride of place above the fireplace in the sitting room of our little house in distant Blighty is a painting from North Bengal.
It was actually a bit of a relief to sit on the terrace of the Gezira Pension and have a quiet breakfast before plunging back once more into the traffic of Cairo in search of a carriage to the museum.
The audience for the jatra was all any Marxist theatre director in Kolkata could have wished for.
500 years ago, Edmund Spenser wrote a poem to celebrate a wedding taking place beside the River Thames. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”.
35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.
The map is part of an exhibition arranged to mark the revival of the Cambridge Majlis, a society (dating from 1891) designed for students from all over the Subcontinent to meet socially to enjoy their commonalities and discuss and debate in a civil way their political differences.
Imagine Bengal like this: all the rivers have dried up. Periodically, there are earthquakes. For mile after mile there is only desert scrub:
I know of Capt. Banerjee, Military Observer, only because he wrote feature articles for the Times of Saigon, edited by my father,
Alone upon the housetops, to the North
Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
As many hundreds of thousands of refugees stream out of Rakhine, leaving behind family killed and homes reduced to ashes, it may seem, and maybe is, peculiarly insensitive, untimely and Eurocentric to refer to the death of one Welsh poet in their homeland nearly 75 years ago.
It was not all utopian: Jones expected his researches, like his law codes, to have practical benefits. While enjoying his Arcadia, he was
The Jalangiriver snakes across Bengal, as changeable as it is beautiful and impervious to the political divisions that would separate the eastern arm of its mother river Ganga from the western.
If literary delights are more to the taste than culinary, George Thompson englishes the improvised songs of the palky-bearers taking
“Most men carry weapons of defence with them. I carry none. A revolver was offered me before I started but I declined it. My
