How to write a love song
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”.
5m ago
Eyeball to eyeball at Lords: A Bangladeshi occasion in a very English setting
35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.
6m ago
In some corner of a foreign field: Rahmat Ali & the once and future Cambridge Majlis
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.
8m ago
‘Plants of the Quran’ explores flora dating back 1400 years
Dr Shahina Ghazanfar, the author of a series of books on the flora of the Middle East who compiled this compendium, explains: “This is not a religious book but about history and culture. It promotes the pleasure of research and learning, I hope as much for my readers as for myself”.
9m ago
The once and future bedes & ‘Gypsies?
Szilvia Reif, a student of mine from the (indicatively named) Gandhi School in Pècs, Hungary, wrote a poem that tells what it feels like to be a ‘Gypsy (properly Roma).
10m ago
In Ireland once: A story of ghosts
Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.
1y ago
The Christmas the Kolis took to cricket
The year is 1721. There are Indians, many no doubt Bengali, visible on the streets of London, some settled down there, others at a loss, mostly sea-farers off the East India Company ships bringing the Indian fabrics that have become all the fashion, silks worn by the rich, cottons by the poor.
2y ago
January 2, 2021
Neither Tranquil Mandarins nor Yellow Devils
Many centuries ago, Chinese pilgrims came up the Bay of Bengal on their way to Buddhist sites in the Subcontinent. We have no record of their conversations with the people of Bengal but it was the accurate accounts of early Chinese travellers that enabled archaeologists in the 19th century to rediscover the lost Buddhist sites like that inside a hill at Paharpur.
November 7, 2020
Sourav’s Song
No need to wonder what you are: Bengal’s brightest, closest star in the night sky - though on the Earth none noticed your auspicious birth.
July 11, 2020
FORGET-ME-NOTS
Splashes of blue in the springtime green,
June 6, 2020
Forest Teaching
[for Samuel on his 15th birthday]
December 7, 2019
Poetry
Furniture dies. Empty now,
November 9, 2019
Shakespearewallah: From Bengal to Belfast
Here we are on the Irish border for Hallowe’en, originally a Celtic festival designed to propitiate the ghosts of the dead.
June 1, 2019
Riverine Reflections
By the time James Rennell in the 1770’s, working out of Dhaka, finished surveying all the many rivers of Bengal, most of them had changed course, thus showing as much indifference to cartography as to any other form of human presumption.
April 27, 2019
Did Shakespeare Know He Was “Shakespeare”?
Did Shakespeare know he was “Shakespeare”? That is, even in his own day, did he know he was a cut above the ordinary when it came to writing dramatic poetry, that his language was, as a miner’s son would later put it, “so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar”?
March 30, 2019
Cricket and Visions
On March 18th, a poet named John was hit in the eye and knocked out by a ball while playing an informal game of cricket. Perhaps
February 9, 2019
T.S.Eliot's Cat
It is a wonderful irony that T.S. Eliot, the publication of whose long poem The Waste Land a century ago is taken by the intelligentsia to
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