He had been admitted to a private hospital for a procedure and later his Covid test report came positive.
Manabendra Bandyopadhyay / sourced by The Telegraph
Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, a former professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University, passed away on Tuesday. He was 82 and is survived by daughter Kaushalya.
Bandyopadhyay was among the five students of the first batch of the comparative literature department at JU, which was launched by poet Buddhadev Bose in 1956.
He had been admitted to a private hospital for a procedure, said a professor of the department. “The procedure went fine and he was supposed to go home. But he had some complications. His Covid test report came on Tuesday afternoon and it was positive,” the professor said.
Bandyopadhyay was widely known for translating Latin American literature into Bengali.
Ipshita Chanda, a JU teacher who did her PhD under him, said: “Death does not diminish professor Manabendra Bandyopadhyay’s presence as the scholar, translator and ‘rasika’ who introduced the Bengali reader to literatures of the ‘third world’ as well as to literatures in other Indian languages. Not only did he translate prolifically, he also, on principle, produced scholarly and creative work in Bangla, inspiring and encouraging his students to do the same. He was not only a PhD supervisor but a mentor, a guide and above all an understanding and humorous friend.”
Another teacher said he introduced Gabriel García Márquez in the syllabus of the department before the Latin American author won the Nobel prize.
“He was the one who translated Jules Verne in Bengali. Dev Sahitya Kutir would publish the abridged version initially. Later, as his expertise grew, he started coming up with unabridged versions,” said a teacher of the department.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Special Correspondent / August 05th, 2020
‘The Nightingale of Bengal’ died of tuberculosis on her 21st birthday.
Uma Bose with Dilip Kumar Roy | Overman Foundation
I heard about Uma Bose from my mother when I was a child. She spoke of her with unusual regard, and with sadness and wonder. Uma Bose was born to an eminent, well-to-do family in Calcutta on January 21, 1921, and she died on her 21st birthday of tuberculosis, in 1942. I was told her younger brother had already died of TB and that this had broken her heart.
The wonder and sadness in my mother’s references were mixed up with each other when she dwelled on the symmetry of the life and death, the cruelty that had cut off Uma Bose’s life as a singer and the abundance of fortune that had given her a singular timbre and astonishing mastery well before she died, when she was still half a child.
Uma Bose learned Hindustani classical music for a period from Vishmadev Chatterjee, but her métier became a new kind of modern song that was emerging in Bengal after Tagore, a rival to, and precursor of (in terms of musical and orchestral innovation), the revolution that would change film music in Bombay in the 1950s and ’60s.
To this kind of music she brought a classical proficiency, and a classicist sophistication and calm, whose character was absolutely modern, and I think unheard-of in the 1930s – prefiguring the contained virtuosity and the classicist poise that Lata Mangeshkar would bring to film-music singing in the 1950s.
Her reputation was built on being among the first interpreters of the songs of Himangshu Dutta, one of the great innovators of the popular song in the twentieth century (I’m not qualifying this with “in Bengal” or “in India” for good reason), and on her renditions of the songs in the demanding, eccentric repertoire created by the scholar-poet-singer-mystic Dilip Kumar Roy (1897-1980), son of the poet and songwriter Dwijendralal Ray (1863-1913).
The two songs I’ll first draw attention to here – their tunes are composed, and music arranged, by Himanshu Dutta – are Akasher Chaand (The moon in the sky) and Chaand Kahe Chameli Go (The Moon Says, O Chameli). The first is from 1940, when Uma Bose was 17 years old; the second from 1938, when she was just 17. These are part of a series of songs whose words Dutta got his lyricist friends to write, about the abortive love between the moon and the chameli flower.
Listen first to the curious but arresting mix of instruments – the electric slide guitar; a horn; the sitar; the mix of a three-note orchestral bass line and very light tabla in the 1940 song; the deliberate abstention from tabla in the 1938 arrangement, where rhythm is provided solely by bass lines on strings which don’t, however, interfere harmonically with the song’s ethos but add an unprecedented texture.
I can hear no Indian instrument in Chaand Kahe Chameli Go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi-4bi77NlU
Notice the tunes themselves. Akaasher Chaand sounds like it’s based on a raga, but it’s a mix of three – Kamod, Kedar, and Gaud Malhar – that all approximate the major scale and all use both the ma and tivra ma; that is, the natural and sharp fourth. These two notes are revisited to extraordinary effect midway through the song by both Dutta’s composition and by Uma Bose. It’s the kind of subtle but revolutionary modulation on compositional thinking made possible by Tagore, which Dutta extends also to his arrangements.
There is nothing comparable to this testing of demarcations in the Western popular music of the time. In Aakasher Chaand, Bose uses her classical training to play with complex melodic phrases from 1.16 to 1.20 minutes, but brings to the song a deep tonal tranquility and fullness that she takes from her training in, and deep feeling for, the khayal: there is nothing “light” about her approach.
In Chaand Kahe Chameli Go, the melody, which has no counterpart in a raga (the closest is Chhaya Nat), is transformed into an Indian song by the singer and the composer through the use of meend, or North Indian classical music’s glides between notes. You wouldn’t notice that the tune isn’t an actual raga, given the interpretation – but if you sing the opening notes without the meends, you’ll see the melody is very like a Western marching tune or drinking song.
These compositions and renditions aren’t attempts to mix things up; they are a new way of thinking about music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOzR0Wj2B5M
Uma Bose’s mentor was Dilip Kumar Roy, the son of a great poet and songwriter, a cosmopolitan who went to Cambridge to do his Tripos but turned more and more to music (he was a gifted and trained singer), experiments in musical composition, and mysticism. To understand figures like Roy – and others before him and contemporary to him – and their particular rebellion, you’d have to imagine what our present-day cultural landscape would be like if some our public intellectuals, social scientists, historians, and commentators began to compose songs, turned out to be deeply tuneful singers with classical training, artists attempting to create a secular vocabulary in poetry and music to express a kind of surrender.
One recalls Nietzsche’s loathing of Socrates for his habit of over-determined theorising, but his warming to the Athenian because the latter set aside philosophy as a condemned man and began to learn music shortly before his death. To understand the revolution that people like Roy (and before him his father Dwijendralal, and his father’s contemporary Tagore) undertook against the colonial self, which could be figured as a kind of Socrates, one must understand the release that the arts, especially modern music, constituted. This release made them extend themselves and their sphere in a way unknown to our intellectuals today. It’s in the midst of this revolution in the educated middle class that we should also place Uma Bose’s singing.
Here are two compositions of Dilip Kumar Roy’s, sung by Uma Bose, both combining devotional elements with Hindustani classical ones, their taans or complex melodic patterns containing echoes of operatic coloratura. They’re like idiosyncratic blueprints of projects that could only have been attempted by an inventor who had access to a multiplicity of cultural languages, techniques, and experiences. They are abstractions, really; it takes Uma Bose’s voice and abilities as an experimental singer, which is what she becomes in these songs, to breathe life into them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEsoAE1lsk
This is Rupe Barne Chhande, loosely based on Khamaj, and Jibane Marane Esho, an invocation of a devotional mood in raga Asavari.
I’m adding a third song here Ke Tomare Jante Pare, Dilip Roy’s father Dwijendralal’s peculiar but compelling riff on the kirtan form.
Uma Bose was conferred with the well-intentioned sobriquet “Nightingale of Bengal” by Gandhi in 1937. She’s little listened to today, in Bengal or outside it. Partly this may have to do with the unclassifiable character of Dilip Kumar Roy’s songs, which are also too difficult to hum to yourself. But mainly it owes to the dominance of an anodyne and sentimental version of the Tagore song that ruled over Bengal from the 1960s, and to a form of tremulous singing that Bengalis began to hold close to their hearts. (If you compare the 1966 version of Chaand Kahe Ghameli Go by Hemanta Mukherjee to Uma Bose’s, you’ll have an idea of this pervasive tremulousness.)
Outside Bengal, our understanding of the history of the popular song in India has been both enriched and curtailed by Hindi film music. It provides a definition that’s full of excitement and variety; but it is, itself, by no means definitive. Uma Bose, like the experimenters whose work she was integral to, was a pioneer. Her emphasis on purity of tone, and a technical accomplishment that goes well beyond precociousness, presaged a new era for vocal music.
Amit Chaudhuri is a writer, a Hindustani classical vocalist, and a composer of crossover music. Listen to his music here.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Acts of Retrieval / by Amit Chaudhuri / June 23rd, 2020
These men from Kolkata sport only HMT watches and boast an impressive collection of the brand.
Madan Mohan Chakraborty begins by making an irrefutable statement: that a watch is a watch; whether it costs a hundred rupees or a million, it shows you the same time.
He should know better. His fascination for watches dates back to his childhood. “A watch is a consummate combination of art and science,” says Mr. Chakraborty, CEO and managing director of a European technology MNC. “I was always attracted by design, art, engineering, accuracy and precision, and in a watch, you get it all.”
But what sets him apart is that a large chunk of his collection consists of HMT watches. Even though he owns many expensive brands as well, it is always an HMT that adorns his wrist. “Here, look at this,” he shows off an HMT Surabhi, “this is better than most Omegas. And this is HMT Priya, look how gorgeous it is!”
HMT — set up as Hindustan Machine Tools in 1953 — began making watches in 1961 and the first batch of its hand-wound watches was released by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. For decades, HMT remained synonymous with a wrist watch before, towards the end of the century, Titan took its place, a process that was soon followed by the easy availability of internationally reputed brands in the market.
As an icing on the cake for Mr. Chakraborty, his best friend, Debasish Singh Roy, also happens to be an HMT collector. “I collect coins, cameras, currency notes, but watches are something that I collect as well as use. HMT has been a part of my life, right from the thread ceremony to marriage. I feel good when I think that my watches will go to my daughters and the generation after. Spending time with my collection was one of the most interesting things I did during the lockdown,” said Mr. Singh Roy, a businessman and a sports enthusiast.
Why this fascination for HMT?
Mr. Chakraborty replied on behalf of both: “HMT carries the ability of India. It demonstrates the capability of India, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after days and generations after generations. We feel extremely proud when we walk in the by-lanes of Switzerland with an HMT Janata or a Pilot on our wrists. People who understand watches can tell whether a watch is mechanical or battery-operated.”
Mr. Singh Roy said: “Many are not even aware that HMT watches are still available on their official site. Many are also not even aware that most HMT factories have closed down and the last one may close down soon. The irony is that HMT was not making money when the watches were available within Rs. 1000. Now when you have to pay between Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 12,000 to get an HMT, there is a queue. HMT failed as there was no effort in its branding. When the world is talking about going green, it’s time for us to stop using battery-operated or even smart watches.”
Mr. Chakraborty, as he fished out more sturdy-looking HMTs from his collection, added: “There are many reasons that HMT should be revived. If properly promoted, the entire globe is your market. You don’t need exclusive showrooms to sell watches. HMT-lovers groups active online will promote the brand. Atmanirbharta [or self-reliance, readvocated recently by Prime Minister Narendra Modi] must be an action, not just an empty slogan.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kolkata / by Bishwanath Ghosh / Kolkata – July 09th, 2020
‘Self-respect often stands in the way of seeking help’
Somnath Roy, 49, is possibly the only Bengali to play the ghatam, an instrument synonymous with the Carnatic tradition. But then, his life has been about making unusual choices. Mr. Roy was a full-fledged sportsperson until the age of 19 — first as a gymnast and then as a coach for West Bengal’s sub-junior kho-kho team — when he discovered his love for classical music. Today, as an established cine musician who designs rhythm for movies, he is helping raise funds for classical musicians who have been without an income due to the prolonged coronavirus-enforced lockdown .
Looking for more
“Classical musicians are in the field out of passion and not because of money because there is hardly any money. With the [enforcing of the] lockdown, whatever income they made from concerts dried up. We — a group of established artistes — have managed to help about half-a-dozen musicians so far. We are looking for more people who need help,” Mr. Roy, a resident of Howrah, told The Hindu.
“The problem is identifying such people, because self-respect often stands in their way of seeking help. It wasn’t easy finding out musicians who were really hard up — they included people whose kitchens had almost stopped functioning. Now we have come to know of a young tabla player from Asansol who is in need of money,” he said.
“Cine musicians like me are part of an association — there will be some kind of help if a musician is in need. But classical musicians belong to the unorganised sector, they are pretty much left to fend for themselves,” he said.
Online classes
With recording studios shut for the past nearly three months, Mr. Roy himself has been making a living from online classes he gives students, teaching them the concept of tala — or beats. Mr. Roy, however, did not begin his musical journey as a percussionist. After he quit sports at the age of 19, he was learning to play the flute from the flute-maker and -player Nepal Sarkar, who discovered that the pupil had a gift for rhythm and sent him to Bablu Biswas, a classical percussionist. Subsequently, he learned Western drums from Amal Roy and began playing for films.
“In 1996-end, I happened to watch a show of Zakir Hussain’s Shakti group, and was mesmerised when I saw Vikku Vinayakram play the ghatam. I approached [the respected Kolkata-based mridangam player] Pandit S. Sekhar, who taught me the mridangam for a while and then referred me to Suresh Vaidyanathan, a well-known ghatam player living in Chennai. I lived in Chennai — in Mandaveli — for over two years, learning from Mr. Suresh,” said Mr. Roy.
“I continue to learn from Mr. Sekhar and Mr. Suresh even today. You can say I have introduced the ghatam as a Hindustani percussion instrument to audiences here. I have accompanied many artistes — Amjad Ali Khan, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ajoy Chakrabarty. I am absolutely fascinated by the ghatam,” he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Cities> Kolkata / by Bishwanath Ghosh / Kolkata – June 16th, 2020
There is a house that oftentimes appears in my dreams. And no, it is not called Manderley. In fact, it is not a house at all, but an apartment building of the old fashioned sort. And most likely it never had a name.
On the banks of the Hooghly river, in the small town of Sahaganj, a subsidiary of the British tyre company of Dunlop had set up workshop in the early 20th century. The residential colony that overlooked the river was referred to as the “Compound” by locals. It had been built in the mid 1800s for the officers of the American Jute Mill. After the mill shut down, Dunlop acquired a large expanse of land in Sahaganj and set up a factory there and what was known as the “Estate” — a gaggle of red brick apartment blocks, a hospital, schools, a club, a swimming pool, a co-operative, a hostel for trainees referred to as the bower, playgrounds and everything possible that the employees and their families might need. It also acquired the Compound and its surrounding land.
The first time I stood before the green gates to the Compound I was no more than five. I remember looking up at the enormous gates with the spikes on top and the pink and purple bougainvilleas wrapped around them and thinking it would hurt real bad if I tried to pluck a flower and somehow landed atop one of those pointy things.
Upon entering the Compound, the first building to the left was the house that now lives in my dreams. We used to call it the Green Flat.
Like I said, it was an old fashioned apartment building. Three apartments on either side. The front of the building had two or three concrete stairs with a stump for a stairhead on either side. Those stairs led to a winding wooden staircase. A red mat affixed with brass clamps covered the wooden stairs. And whenever anyone climbed them, they heaved like a heavy heart.
One evening, before we actually moved into the Green Flat, we went by to see the place. A group of children were just wrapping the evening’s play. They crowded around to inspect me, the new addition. “Which house,” one asked. “Which school,” asked someone else. One boy, who was a head taller than the rest, said out loud to no one in particular, “That house is haunted. Those dark patches on the cement stairs outside, those are ancient blood stains.”
So many years later, there are nights when I am back at that very spot, just under the gulmohar tree, looking up at the faded green house in the purple dusk, and the house staring back at me.
It is never the same dream, though it is the same house. Sometimes I am outside, sometimes I am on the stairs, my hand on the smooth dark wood of the bannister. At other times I am running down the never-ending sun verandah of the second-floor apartment that was our home for 11 months. There have also been times when I have dreamt that I am inside the building next to it, a more modern structure referred to as the “Highrise”. Our apartment in the Highrise was at a level higher than the Green Flat, and in my dream I am looking down at the other house and I can feel it glowering back at me.
Everyone who ever lived in the Green Flat had a story, even some of the grown-ups. The smell of coffee brewing at odd hours. Voices. The bars of an invisible piano. Only one person I knew claimed to have seen something, and though she was one of the adults no one believed her. I remember her telling some of us how she had folded her hands and prayed to the white blur to leave her alone, progress to another world.
I myself don’t remember seeing or hearing anything, but there is a memory of an evening that comes alive in my dreams. It must have been just a couple of weeks since we had moved in. I was in my room playing or reading. When I was done doing whatever it was, I realised I was home alone. The next couple of minutes I moved swiftly from room to room. To this day I remember my mounting anxiety, the sound of my own beating heart and the drone of the cicadas. For some reason that day I couldn’t run out of the house but remained confined to the verandah, pasted to the net of the window, howling for my mother in some unknown fear.
Today, I don’t remember anymore how that evening resolved itself. No big deal I assume or else the parents would have told me. But in my dreams now, revisiting that moment I am sure of a presence dark and sad. An undiscerning presence that wanted to be friends with a scared little girl.
In our 11 years in the Compound we changed houses four times. All the other houses also appear in my dreams. And not just the houses, sometimes I dream of the Club House. The inside of the club, where we watched movies on Sunday afternoons on a TV with shutters and a VCR — Mr India, Moses, Ben-Hur — as we munched on jam sandwiches. This was also where a lot of the parties were hosted throughout the year; there was much dancing and one time Lanadi fell and chipped her tooth. Then there was the billiards-cum-library room. Every Christmas, this is where we put up chartpapers with cottonwool tufts to mimic the North Pole. On the lawn overlooking the club we acted out the nativity play, had fancy dress parades and quiz contests, while the grown-ups used it for lawn bowling and skittles over Abdulda’s freshly baked mince pies and trayloads of Bloody Marys.
I dream of these spaces but the tether always is the Green Flat. In my dreams sometimes I am on a rickshaw winding down the road before the Club. There are chairs and tables on the lawn, but there is not a soul in sight. I look to my right and I cannot see Nirmalda, the bearer, on the club verandah, and the doors are shuttered fast. Only behind me there is something, and I know it is that thing from the Green Flat. And it wants to get into the rickshaw with me.
In every dream I am egged on by the thing into areas of the Compound I never realised I had paid any attention to. Sometimes I am inside the Highrise lift — the one with the green doors. Sometimes I am amidst overgrown grass and I am thinking where is Maalibhai, the same who had a pock-marked face, called a bouquet, “booket” and wore a sky blue fatua and dhoti. Often I am walking down the road that connected the Highrise with the bungalows. The morum tennis court is to my right. The two copper sulphate benches are to my left. And I want to feel happy, because I am finally home. I know the road will rise at an angle soon and the bottlebrush tree will loom into view and if I walk on for another minute or so I will get to smell the magnolia outside Bungalow No. 4. But I can never get to the magnolia tree, and behind me I can feel the thing from the Green Flat, closing in, closing in, closing in.
In other dreams I will be approaching the bungalows from the club side. The narrow road that wound past the vegetable and flower patches. When I get to Bungalow 1, our last address there, I want to just burst in through the netted back door into the pantry and past the broom cupboard and up the stairs into what used to be our room.
One dream, surprise, surprise, I manage to get in. And even in my dream I am thinking, I am finally home, well, almost.
The door swings open but inside there are no lights. I walk into the dining room and I find the table laid out. I peep into the small drawing room and it is empty. I see the telephone table with the stolid black telephone — 3025 is our number. The facing window still has that lace curtain, I note with relief. The door to the other drawing room is half open and I can spy the blue carpet as I start to take the stairs. Even in the dark, even in my hurry I notice the three framed birds on the landing, and then I reach the top. But it is all dark.
On a whim I make a dash for the parents’ room. But where are they? The fans are turning, the ACs are on, the giant bed is made. There is the dresser with the oval mirror and the half mirrors on either side like angel’s wings and a heavy bottle of Oil of Olay. By the time I walk into the dressing room with the full length mirror, I am frantic. I stare into the mirror but I cannot see my reflection. It is so dark I cannot see my hands. And I am thinking I have to turn the latch, if I cannot find my hands how will I turn the latch? And I know the thing from the Green Flat is in there watching me fumble and panic. Waiting to pounce.
***
Last to last winter the Sahai siblings were in town after many years. They wanted to see Sahaganj and the Compound and, thereafter, some of us. “For closure,” all three of them chimed. It is from them that I learnt that the place is in ruins. “It was a dreary sight,” said Shippradi. “So many trees and bushes all growing wild. The club, the pool, I could see nothing. The Green Flat was a khandahar,” she added.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Culture> Heritage / by Upala Sen / February 22nd, 2020
Academics specialising in Indo-Bangladesh relations consider the close ties between the border towns quite natural given their shared ethnic identity and Durga Puja’s importance in the Bengali community. SHREYA DUTTA
Taki in West Bengal is a town of green paddies and greener ponds on the banks of the Ichamati river separating India and Bangladesh. Like the rest of the state, it sees enthusiastic Durga Puja celebrations every year. The streets are lit up in canopies of fairy lights, Bengali songs and Bollywood hits blare from loudspeakers, and pandals, or marquees, compete for who carries the tallest, glossiest pratimas—idols—of the goddess Durga.
But what distinguishes Taki from other border towns is a particular tradition on the final day of the Puja. As its residents gear up for the immersion of idols, so do its counterparts in Satkhira, a district across the border in Bangladesh. The inhabitants of both towns place the pratimas in their respective boats and sail up to border security boats floating in middle of the river, along the international boundary. With a dozen metres between them, the two groups of neighbours wave at each other, exchange greetings and—with deafening shouts of “Aschche bochor abar hobe!”–Until next year!–immerse the idols together. For a day, citizens of the two countries, divided by geopolitics, come together to celebrate a shared heritage.
The practice of joint celebrations goes back several decades, Sridip Roy Choudhary, a local Communist Party of India (Marxist) worker, told me over tea and rasgullas when we met in late September 2017. Until the early 2000s, residents of both countries would cross the riverine boundary and dock in the neighbouring country to shop and socialise on the eve of visarjan—the day of immersion. “There would be a little mela on both sides,” Choudhary said. “We’d buy coconuts and sugarcane from there, they’d buy oil, soap and Boroline (antiseptic cream) from here.” Some people would even find a wedding match for their sons or daughters. His friend Subhas Pal, a 48-year-old LIC agent, recalled it as a time of fluid movement across the border. “I made a lot of friends in these visits across the border. Hindus or Muslims, they always treated me with the best of hospitality,” he said. “We’d fish in the ponds and have a feast after.” While those from Bangladesh made use of the medical facilities available in India, Indian visitors were keen on the cheap, “king-size” cigarettes of Bangladesh. And Pal added, these would not be bought, only bartered.
At 6 pm, the border guards would announce the end of the meeting-time. The residents would get into their respective boats and trawlers and return to their countries across the river. There were no passport-checks or entry pass for visitors. At its heart lay an implicit trust, according to Taki residents. The practice of an open-border tradition seems extraordinary now, with security concerns about cross-border terrorism, illegal immigration and cattle trade dominating the mainstream discourse. But academics specialising in Indo-Bangladesh relations consider the close ties between the border towns quite natural given their shared ethnic identity, the mutual practice of soft diplomacy and Durga Puja’s importance in the Bengali community.
“The Puja festivities have always been more social than religious affairs,” Somdatta Chakraborty, a research associate at Calcutta Research Group, told me over the phone. “Not only do Muslims participate in large numbers in the celebrations, most pandal-makers belong to the community.” Many villages along the border lie within shouting distance of each other, sometimes separated by a narrow mud path or shallow streams. Given their shared linguistic identity, it was not easy for many residents living in the border-towns to come to terms with the creation of East Pakistan in 1947 and, later, Bangladesh in 1971. Many had friends and relatives across the border—at times, in their backyards—and restrictions on free movement were often too much to bear.
According to Chakraborty, the Ray Chaudharys, an influential zamindar family, first began communal Durga Puja celebrations in Taki in the 1970s. As it grew in scale, visitors came from across the border for visarjan. “After the economic liberalisation of 1991 in India, people started coming in from Bangladesh for work,” she said. “Then in 1992, the Babri masjid demolition happened. In Kolkata, it prompted communal disturbances for the first time after 1947. This began to dilute the homogeneous Bengali identity.”
Beginning in 1989, the Indian side decided to fence its 4,098-kilometre border with Bangladesh. Thirty years later, the work remains half-finished. A 10-foot fence with concertina wires, and two-foot rock stumps for border-pillars, are visible along the border. The Border Security Forces, or BSF, did not fence the perimeter of the Ichamati river, since local livelihoods depended on it, but ramped up security and surveillance. They also erected watchtowers along the riverfront and floating outposts in the river. By the early 2000s, a day-long free pass across the border on visarjan had all but stopped.
In May 2011, the All India Trinamool Congress, led by the now-chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, swept the state assembly elections. The party, known for promoting better relations with Bangladesh, reportedly organised a Milan Mela—a festival to celebrate the immersion—in Taki, and it allowed for the relaxation of border norms on the day of visarjan. According to eyewitnesses and media reports, thousands allegedly trooped into India under the garb of festivities and boarded buses and trains to bigger cities in search of employment. There was a near-complete shutdown of immersion festivities for the next three years.
The BSF South Bengal Frontier, in charge of the security at the Taki border, refused to either confirm or deny that there had been any security lapses in 2011. Instead, a representative speaking for the BSF chief PSR Anjaneyulu told me, “Such an incident hasn’t happened in the past three to four years. Now it is very organised.” His reluctance to speak about the incident had a familiar ring to it: in a report published on Rediff.com in 2014, a security personnel in Taki told a journalist, “It’s an unpleasant memory that is buried. Let’s talk about today and tomorrow.”
When I attended the Taki visarjan in 2017, the diplomatic relations between the countries were at their least combative. Over the previous four years, India had resolved the administrative anomalies of its border enclaves and started a public border-retreat ceremony at the Petrapole-Benapole checkpoint, the highlight of which was the security personnel shaking hands before calling it a day, every day.
At Taki, the border forces of India and Bangladesh were alert but not intrusive, as they patrolled on steamers with guns, cameras and life-jackets. Thousands had turned up to witness the unique Puja celebrations along the leafy riverfront. Nearly a hundred boats chugged along the length of the Ichamati promenade, carrying revellers from both countries who clicked photos, soaked in the September drizzle and waved at their neighbours across the border. At 6 pm, the security forces announced that the celebrations should wind up. Over the next hour, their loudspeakers and flashlights led the boats back to the coast.
Pal was also among the revellers that day. “My only regret is that the next generation will never know of the joy we had experienced,” he said. “For us, visarjan was not about taking the pratima and throwing it into river. It was about making the journey to the other end, of interacting with people. The charm has now diminished. It now seems like a formality.”
I asked him what he missed the most about the border-crossing tradition. With a laugh, he said, “The free cigarettes, of course.”
The print version of this article mistakenly stated that India and Bangladesh had signed a pact for sharing the waters of the Teesta River. The Caravan regrets the error.
OMKAR KHANDEKAR is a journalist from Mumbai, and an alumnus of Cardiff University. His reporting from India, the Maldives and the United Kingdom has appeared in numerous publications, including The Caravan, Open and Scroll.
source: http://www.caravanmagazine.com / The Caravan / Home> The Lede – Community / by OmKar Khandekar / March 01st, 2018
The Nizam’s Roll is one of India’s great dishes but it never gets the recognition it deserves
Kebabs rolled in paratha with onions is a fantastic dish that needs to be popularised and preserved (Shutterstock)
Over the last two decades, more and more restaurants have switched to wraps over sandwiches. You would think that Indians, with our tradition of rotis, would be perfect for this trend. But it is Central America that has taken the lead. The pattern for most wraps closely follows the Mexican taco in terms of style and construction.
I find this odd. Why shouldn’t India, land of the flatbread, have a place in this wrap boom? A few months ago, Gaggan Anand opened Ms. Maria & Mr. Singh, a Mexican-Indian restaurant in Bangkok. Gaggan recognised the similarity between Mexican tortillas and our breads. So his food plays on the similarities, especially in the wraps he serves.
This is great but it still intrigues me that our rotis have been excluded from this boom. I can think of only one exception: the kathi kebab roll.
I had never heard of the dish, till I moved to Calcutta in 1986. Nobody called it a kathi kebab in Calcutta. Instead, it was called the Nizam’s Roll. I stayed at the Oberoi Grand when I first arrived and I found a place called New Nizam’s, opposite the hotel, that served rolls.
I was alone in Calcutta, so there were many evenings when I would stroll across and watch them make the rolls. From what I remember, the cook heated a massive tawa and then put a half-ready paratha on it. As the paratha heated up, he broke an egg on the paratha and cooked it on both sides. Then he took ready-made kebabs, heated them on an empty portion of the tawa before placing them in the centre of a paratha. He added onions, which had been sliced long, and a little chutney, before rolling up the paratha so that it became a cylinder. He wrapped the cylinder in paper and gave it to you to take away.
Mexico-style wraps are super popular in Central America ( Shutterstock )
I was so hooked on the rolls that I began ordering them for lunch in my office. Except that the ‘bearer’ (the Calcutta term for what we used to call a peon in Mumbai in that era) said he had never heard of New Nizam’s. He insisted on going to what he said was the only real Nizam’s. The rolls were great so I didn’t really care where he got them from.
But I was intrigued enough to go to what was called “the real Nizam’s”. The first thing I saw was a sign that read “We have no branches”. So okay, “New Nizam’s” may have had nothing to do with the original.
The ‘real Nizam’s’ guy told me that they had invented the dish and that their version was special because a) it used charcoal-grilled kebabs, which others did not and b) it was made on an ancient tawa. (I was never able to establish how old the tawa actually was.)
I did some digging. As far as anyone in Calcutta could tell, the dish had really been invented at Nizam’s. That’s why it was called a Nizam’s Roll. Most non-Bengali meat dishes in Calcutta are always attributed to Wajid Ali Shah (the man who put the potato in biryani if Bengalis are to be believed) but this one, everyone agreed, had been created by Nizam’s around 50 years ago. (That would have made it the 1930s or so.)
As time went on and the dish began to spread out of Calcutta, I discovered that it was called a Kathi Kebab Roll. Ah, I said to myself, the fact that it has a name means that it exists elsewhere in India. But nobody would claim ownership of the KathiKebab Roll. No Delhi chef. No Lucknow chef. No Hyderabad chef.
But kathi kebab? Where did that name come from? The guys at Nizam’s had an explanation. They said that kathi referred to the sticks on which they would skewer the kebabs before cooking. Jealous people who did not want to give Nizam’s the credit, they said darkly, called Nizam’s Rolls, Kathi Kebab Rolls.
Indian sandwiches only became popular in the 1960s and 1970s ( Shutterstock )
I have no idea if the kathi-wallahs had such evil motives but it is true that fewer and fewer people call them Nizam’s Rolls now – even in Calcutta. I was there a few months ago and everyone just called them ‘rolls’ and directed me to various newer restaurants and outlets.
At the same time, there are restaurants that serve rolls and call themselves ‘Nizam’s’ all over India. Are they related to the Calcutta original or are they, like “New Nizam’s”, not quite the real thing? I have no idea.
But in my view, and I said so in one of the very first Rude Food columns I ever wrote, the roll is the great Calcutta dish. The puchka comes close (but there are other contenders in Lucknow, Mumbai and Benaras). Otherwise, if you want to search for Calcutta’s unique contribution to Indian cuisine, you’ll be reduced to discussing rasgullas and ras malai.
When I first wrote about the roll, I complained that it was not widely available outside of Calcutta. In the 15 years or so since that article appeared, that has changed. You get rolls everywhere from Delhi to Dubai to Nagpur to New York. The roll has finally been given its rightful status as a great Indian dish.
Gaggan Anand serves wraps at his Mexican-Indian restaurant in Bangkok
But the questions that started me off on this chain of thought remain. Why is the roll the one famous Indian wrap? Why don’t we have more wraps in any of our cuisines? We have all the ingredients – from the breads (rotis, parathas, makki rotis etc.) and delicious fillings. And yet, even as the world has embraced wraps, India never gets a look in.
I asked chef Manjit Gill, my guru in matters relating to the history of Indian food, if he could think of any other Indian wraps. He couldn’t. I asked then if he had heard of kathi kebabs outside of Calcutta. Manjit said he hadn’t. As far as he knew the kathi kebab was a Calcutta dish.
I then asked Manjit the big question. Why doesn’t Indian cuisine have more wraps?
I liked Manjit’s answer. Wraps are meant to be eaten on the go. In India, we rarely ever eat standing up, let alone on the go. We are not a fast food culture. We like to sit down and eat our meals. Many of us would prefer to eat the kebabs and the parathas separately, rather than combine them and wrap them in paper. For most of our existence, we have been the ultimate slow food nation.
Pav-bhaji was invented in the 1960s for traders at the old Cotton Exchange ( Shutterstock )
I reckon that till the 20th century, India was a country where nothing in the kitchen was done fast; all food was slow food. Even chaat, which is eaten standing, is serious food. You can’t really walk around while eating a golgappa as you can while eating a sandwich or a wrap.
The Nizam’s Roll is usually dated to the mid-1930s, which, I suspect, is when things began to change.
Pav–bhaji was invented in the 1960s for traders at the old Cotton Exchange who would stay up till early in the morning to see the New York cotton prices. It is not a cold dish. It has to be cooked on the spot. But they did eat it standing up and for many of the Gujarati bania traders, it was the only time they ate bread.
Indian sandwiches only became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The Bombay sandwich (freshly made but cold), which you could eat on the run is really a ’70s phenomenon.
The vada-pav is essentially a Maharashtrian hamburger ( Shutterstock )
So is vada-pav. Both seized upon the industrialisation of baking and the availability of cheap (and fairly disgusting) bread to create new dishes. Both have Western antecedents. The sandwich is not Indian, by definition, and the vada-pav is essentially a Maharashtrian hamburger.
So, what happens in the 21st century? Now that we have lost out in the global wrap movement, will India just follow the rest of the world and make fast food based on hamburgers, pizzas and sandwiches (all suitably Indianised)?
Sadly, I think that we are headed in that direction. So, value the roll. It is a great dish.
And one that’s truly Indian.
From HT Brunch, July 12, 2020
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source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> Brunch / by Vir Sanghvi , Hindustan Times / July 12th, 2020
“He wanted to provide the best quality food at the cheapest price,” said daughter Sohini Basu
Arnab Basu, the man who created Mio Amore / sourced by the Telegraph
Arnab Basu, the owner of popular confectionery brands Mio Amore and Winkies, died on July 2 at a city hospital. According to family sources, he was battling liver cancer.
A resident of The Residency in City Centre, Basu was 65 and is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
Basu, who started as a bank employee and then ran a bakery in Saudi Arabia with a friend, founded Switz Foods in 1989. Two years later, he would open his factory in Kasba Industrial Estate.
He arranged with a Mumbai company to bring the brand Monginis to eastern India, taking it in a new direction. The chain, that started with a shop in Dhakuria in 1992, expanded to over 300 outlets in Bengal and Odisha, including 220 in Calcutta.
In 2010, he entered a joint venture with Bauli of Italy to start production of croissants. He launched the brand Winkies to enter the packaged confectionery business in 2012. Soon after, he decided to set up his own brand and thus was born Mio Amore in 2015. Within two years, turnover soared over Rs 500 crore.
“He wanted to provide the best quality food at the cheapest price,” said daughter Sohini Basu, who owns the popular cafe and cake shop Mrs Magpie. “My father was happy that one of his children got into cakes,” she added. Basu’s son is a London-based banker.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by The Telegraph, Special Correspondent / July 10th, 2020
A border demarcates. It also seams two Indian WIP projects – Dostojee and The Borderlands – presented as part of ‘Goes to Cannes’ at the prestigious film festival.
A still from the film ‘Dostojee’
The Bengali landscape is resplendent in the trailer of Prasun Chatterjee’s debut feature Dostojee (Two Friends), and its cinematography “sumptuous”, as the American magazine Variety noted. Vast, rainwashed stretches of paddy fields along river Padma and the glint in the eyes of the two young protagonists, reminiscent of another Bengali village boy, Apu, from Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). First-time cinematographer Tuhin Biswas, a still photographer and primary-school teacher in West Bengal’s Nadia district, was unsure about the video format, until Chatterjee told him, “This is photography too, just think of these as 24 stills per second.”
The location is the remote, no-man’s-land near Domkal (in Murshidabad) — the last subdivision on the Indian side. The Padma river separates it from Bangladesh’s Rajshahi. The backdrop is an early-’90s Bengal, touched by the communal violence that followed the Babri Masjid demolition and the ’92 Bombay blasts, but Dostojee speaks of the friendship between two boys from different faiths, living in a border village. In one scene, as their torn kite flies into Bangladesh, and as Palash says he will move with his fearful mother to the Hindu-majority Nadia when he grows up, one wonders if, when the time comes, Safikul will recall his words to his dostojee (best friend): “bhoy ki, aami toh aachhi (have no fears, I’m here with you)”. “I wanted to show anger and love through the eyes of children. What they witness is my subject of inquiry, too,” says Chatterjee, 34, who grew up in Kolkata’s Dum Dum and dropped out of Physics (Hons) at Calcutta University to make films.
For over two years, hestayed with and trained 150 locals as his cast and crew. One afternoon, when he was packing to return to Kolkata, an angry nine-year-old came banging on his door. The boy, Arif Sheikh, whose friend Asik Sheikh was cast as Palash, said, “Ekhane cinema’r jonno baccha leya hoye? Boite lyen amake, Deb er moto koyee debo (Are children being cast in films? Take me, I’ll act like the Bengali hero Deb),” guffaws Chatterjee who, bowled over by his confidence, cast Arif as the other lead, Safikul. Another time, the crew landed up to find one of them with a Neymar hairdo (the 2018 FIFA football world cup was on) and had to wait for “his hair to grow back” to start the shoot.
Prasun Chatterjee
For Chatterjee, who traces his roots to Bangladesh, the pull of these border people has always been great – more than even cinema which he calls “tucchho (trivial)” in front of their lives. “Your work should make the provincial man – the labourer, the farmer –win at the end, or even if he dies, show that there is a flicker of hope for their lot,” says the filmmaker, who is inspired by Ritwik Ghatak’s ideology and Ray’s craft.
From paper to screen, it’s been a seven-year journey since 2013. The film’s working title Dharmik, used while crowdfunding,was changed for a film by that name already existed.Co-producers Prosenjit Ranjan Nath and Soumya Mukhopadhyay came on board in 2017, and Taiwan’s Ivy Yu-Hua Shen after NFDC Film Bazaar selected Dostojee in November in its Recommends section. NFDC sent it, among five films, to ‘Goes to Cannes’: 20 work-in-progress (WIP) films from across the world, whose pitches were made to global buyers and distributors at the Marché du Film from June 22-26 – the only segment of the Cannes Film Festival that took place online this year.
There, Asia’s leading film project market Hong Kong – Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) picked up the Bengali feature Dostojee (feature) and two Indian documentaries, including Samarth Mahajan’s The Borderlands – the only three from South Asia – among its 22 shortlisted projects for its WIP programme in August. HAF presented The Borderlands – the only Indian documentary in ‘Goes to Cannes’ official selection – at Marché du Film.
The sense of invisibility runs deep in villages and towns along the borders. Mahajan, 29, recounts how, when in 2015 his town Dinanagar, 10 miles from the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, faced a terrorist attack, his mother sounded excited over the phone — Dinanagar had made national news and relatives had woken up to her existence.
Samarth Mahajan
“Most of the stories that we hear about border areas create a specific image of army men and terrorists but no common people. I come from a border area and have lived through experiences which don’t fit these general perceptions of borders,” says Mahajan, who while growing up would often see people visiting Dera Baba Nanak, near his town, to see – through binoculars – Pakistan’s Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib.
The graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, gave up his cushy FMCG job in Kolkata to make documentaries. He moved to Mumbai in 2015, where he met his IIT-K batchmate Ashay Gangwar and began collaborating. Gangwar was the cinematographer for Mahajan’s first documentary on fireflies of Maharashtra’s Purushwadi, Kazwa — A Million Lanterns (2016), his company Camera and Shorts produced Mahajan’s The Unreserved (2017), on the India seen on the General coaches of trains, which won the National Award for ‘Best On Location Sound Recordist’, and, with the media company All Things Small, co-produced the crowdfunded Borderlands.
A still from the documentary, ‘The Borderlands’
For his latest, Mahajan, along with cinematographer Omkar Divekar and associate director Nupur Agrawal, took a four-part journey to different borders: Pakistan, Bangladesh, China -Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan. He learnt that borders have their own ecosystem. How civilians cooperate with the Nepalese army to nab human traffickers. What happens when a tiger, from Arunachal Pradesh’s Dibang Valley wildlife sanctuary, crosses over into China? “The mountainous China-India border, the LAC, doesn’t have border pillars. A shaman told us that if a tiger gets killed (by neighbouring tribes or Tibetans living across the border), his tribe observes penitence for five days: no alcohol, no sex, etc. They mourn the environment,” says Mahajan. How a Pakistani Hindu refugee in Rajasthan “studying to be a doctor, has to unlearn the Arab script and learn Devanagari. Her dream got complicated because of crossing the border.”
His film will explore these, along with heartwarming tales of common people along the borders. How the Bengalis on either side dry their clothes on the fence, and exchange gifts on Bengali New Year. “There are two Indias. One is upper-class privileged and the other we have stopped engaging with. At this point in India’s history, we need to hear stories of people from the grassroots. To explore life beyond the domain of violence and politics. For military valour stories, there are already films like Border (1997), LOC: Kargil (2003), Lakshya (2004),” he says.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Eye / by Tanushree Ghosh / New Delhi / June 28th, 2020
Mayura Misra, who had books delivered even during lockdown, says booksellers are the ones with a heart and soul
Back in the early 1990s, when the term ‘online’ still belonged to the future, renowned Kolkata cardiologist Professor Sital Ghosh was sitting with a patient at the Kothari Heart Research Centre. The doctor was pretty much sure that the patient needed a surgery, but he wanted to reconfirm his diagnosis and for that he needed the latest issue of the British Medical Journal.
So while the patient waited, the doctor too impatiently waited, for his copy, which had just arrived from London and was now on its way, being carried to him by the subscription agent. The agent — a young woman barely into her twenties — was still catching her breath when the doctor grabbed the copy from her, went through the relevant portion, and ordered the patient to be wheeled into the operation theatre.
“Now when I recall the incident, it feels straight out of a movie,” says Mayura Misra, now 50, who is today better known as the owner of a standalone bookstore called Storyteller, located on the city’s EM Bypass. It’s possibly the only old-fashioned standalone bookstore in Kolkata, certainly one that doesn’t also sell toys and games, and certainly one that’s run by a proprietor who’s passionate about the printed word.
Another age
Ms. Mishra grew up in the tea gardens of north Bengal; her father was employed there and she went to school in Kurseong. Her mother, she says, was one of the few to be hand-picked by Jawaharlal Nehru himself as air-hostesses for Air India. After school, Ms. Mishra joined college in what was then Calcutta, where she settled once she got married.
“My father-in-law didn’t want me to sit at home. My uncle, at the time, ran the Oxford Subscription Agency on Park Street. So I joined his firm on a salary of ₹3,000 and took over his Calcutta operations,” she says.
About a year later, having learnt the ropes, she became an independent subscription agent, renting a godown on Theatre Road to stock new arrivals. Back then, when the concepts of online subscription and online edition were still in the realm of imagination, one had to rely solely on subscription agents to import and hand-deliver journals published abroad. Ms. Mishra would personally carry copies — of The British Medical Journal, The Journal of American Medical Association, Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Golf Digest, Architectural Digest, National Geographic, among others — to institutions and individuals.
Soon she was reaching out to libraries of schools, importing books for children. “No one was specialising in children’s books at the time. Kids had to wait for an aunt to come from the U.K. or the U.S. to bring them books,” she says. By now she had purchased a dupleix apartment on Theatre Road, and a portion of the house served as the godown.
Working in lockdown
Today, she lives on EM Bypass, and the ground floor of her house serves as Storyteller, the bookshop she opened in 2012. “During the lockdown, we did a lot of online sessions with authors, especially children’s authors. We also started delivering across Kolkata in April — we were probably the first to resume delivery of books in India. Our staff stayed in the store — we provided them boarding and lodging — and the books were sanitised before they were dispatched through Swiggy. Now we are open for browsing,” says Ms. Mishra.
She sums up: “The temptation has always been there to stock toys and games, but if I do that I won’t be able to concentrate on good books. Mine is not a profession you can take lightly. A lot of hard work goes in selling printed matter in this digital world. Booksellers are the ones with a heart and soul.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kolkata / by Bishwanath Ghosh / Kolkata – June 24th, 2020
