Agha Shahid Ali diaries: on abstraction
Amitav GhoshMay 2001 Today I drove Shahid and Patricia into Manhattan for Shahid’s last class ]. He was very relieved that the course was coming to an end, even though he…
Thirteen Hong Street
Of late I'm often asked whether anything remains of the place that is referred to, in River of Smoke, as 'Fanqui-town' . This is of course the…
Book Tour Journals; Bengaluru (Bangalore); June 26-28
My visit to Bangalore began propitiously with an excellent dinner at the home of Shoba Narayan, whose books and articles I have been following for a long time:…
Letter from a historian
July 21 Dear Amitav, We met briefly when you were in Abu Dhabi for their book fair in 2009. At the time I was teaching at Zayed University there, but…
Modernism and the Museum
I cannot remember when I last came upon on a book as stimulating as Rupert Richard Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London…
Accounts of China in Gujarati
A reader writes: Dear Amitav It would have slipped your mind but we spoke briefly during your sumptuous book launch in Mumbai last month. I had promised to…
6 Tanyin Alley, Liu Zongren
Liu Zongren: 6 Tanyin Alley, China Books, San Francisco, 1989. A deeply affecting story about China's turbulent '50s and 60's, as seen through the eyes of the people who…
‘Life on a plantation’
This 19th century cartoon is from Edward Jenkin’s, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs, (New York, 1871, pp.12-13). This is Jenkin’s explanation of it: The picture…
ART IT
Today I received a link to a compelling letter by the Chinese artist, Hou Hanrou, writing in ART IT, a Japanese web journal. The same issue also contains…
Book Tour Journals: Chennai (Madras), June 29-30, 2011
Within minutes of arriving in Chennai, I set off to visit Gopalkrishna and Tara Gandhi, who live in a flat on the outskirts of the city, just off the…