India

Wednesday

William Dalrymple

The forgotten masterpieces of Indian art

As late as the end of the 18th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever seen the legendary Mughal capital of Delhi, which, within living memory, had been the largest, richest and most spectacularly beautiful city on earth, twice the size of London and Paris combined. But after a century of anarchy, Delhi was not what it once was. By 1805, it lay half-ruined and sparsely populated, ruled by a blind Emperor from a crumbling palace. Delhi’s ruins bewitched the young artist James Baillie Fraser when he arrived in the 1810s from Calcutta. Fraser was already planning two series of aquatints, one on Calcutta, the other of the Himalayas.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Smoking opium with Mr Nazim – and a gecko

‘I used to go to India for a few months every year. A couple of times we even drove there. You could in those days. One year I went to Benares. I rented a place for next to nothing and stayed about three months. Back then there were a lot of hippies in India. They’d run out of money and you’d see them begging. In Benares the hippies all hung out in the same places but I was staying in another part of the city. I think I paid something like three quid a month for my place, which I shared with two other Indian guys.’ I’d brought a bottle

Sunday

Chris Daw KC

The terror of the witches of modern India

When I landed in Delhi at the height of the monsoon, the excitement in the city was palpable. The Indian Space Research Organisation was planning the launch of Vikram, the country’s first rocket mission to the Moon. Media coverage was ubiquitous and each report was imbued with a gushing sense of national pride. This great nation was about to take another giant leap into the future. But in modern India, there is also a great paradox. My trip was not about rockets but the much older human activity of dispensing justice to wrongdoers. Having travelled around Britain earlier this year for a BBC series on our criminal justice system, I wanted to

Thursday

William Dalrymple

Algeria reminds us that the current of colonisation doesn’t always run just one way

As you glide in to land at the airport outside Algiers, the landscape resembles that of Tuscany: a coastal plain laced with vineyards giving way to low hills filled with chequerboards of olive groves and slopes of newly harvested wheat fields. Beyond rise blue mountains with windbreaks of holm oaks where storks glide into land on their nests atop the minarets of the village mosques. It was while walking in these hills, a week into our Algerian holiday, that we came across a most unexpected discovery. On the lee of a slope overlooking the old Roman town of Tiddis, we found a large round burial monument that looked a little

Monday

Damian Thompson

Why liberals turn a blind eye to the global persecution of Christians

The new episode of Holy Smoke is about the persecution of Christians. That’s a familiar concept, even if we don’t read much about it in the media. But here’s what it means in 2019: The rape, murder and dismemberment of pregnant Christian women in Nigeria by Islamist thugs. The use of face-recognition technology by the Chinese government to monitor, control and, where it deems necessary, eradicate Christian worship by demolishing thousands of churches The evisceration of ancient Christian communities in the lands of the Bible. The relentless torture of Christians in North Korea. The burning of Christian villages by Hindu nationalists in India, and vicious attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka

Thursday

Richard Francis

A single man of no fortune must be in want of a job: younger sons in Jane Austen’s England

Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure a husband who can enable them to keep or even improve their social and economic status. But what about their opposite numbers? How did the younger sons of gentlemen face up to the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood? Primogeniture meant that even those from a wealthy background often had to earn their living. While for girls marriage and career tended to be synonymous, for many of their brothers a profession came first, and then with luck a marriage would follow, since ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune

Tuesday

Sumantra Maitra

Don’t blame Britain for Modi’s plan for a ‘new India’

History has a sarcastic sense of humour, just ask Francis Fukuyama. Or eminent historians and literary ornaments of India like Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Shashi Tharoor, who are now mourning the loss of a secular liberal India under a Hindu majoritarian quasi-imperial centre. These four and their fellow academics are the first ones to blame India’s turn for the worse on the British empire, and all that it ‘made, shaped and quickened‘. This is somewhat ironic, given that Modi’s march to Kashmir is as rebellious and subaltern as it gets. Yet India’s post-colonial moral guardians are worried. ‘The passing of the act (which allowed Narendra Modi to overturn 70 years of status

Thursday

Peter Oborne

India’s land grab

Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator until cruelly sacked to make way for Boris Johnson, never wasted ideas. He liked to reuse them. Often. Every summer he would write the same column attacking the silly season. August, Mr Johnson maintained, was not silly at all. The first world war started in August. The Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in August. Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in August. Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait also in the horror month of August. Once again August has vindicated Mr Johnson — and not only because of Brexit. Darkness has descended on the former princely state of (British-controlled) Kashmir. Meanwhile freedom is dying in the

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Why is no one boycotting India?

Try as I might, I just can’t seem to get anyone interested in discriminating against Indians. No one is tearing open packets of imported turmeric and cardamom and dumping their contents on supermarket floors. British academics aren’t severing ties with professors from Delhi University. If pension funds are divesting from Tata Motors and ICICI Bank, the FT is still to pick up on it.  This is strange because on Monday Narendra Modi’s right-wing government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, site of a long-running territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. Both sides claim the entirety of the state, which has been under Indian administration since Partition, and which

Thursday

Deborah Ross

No snapshot

Ritesh Batra had a smash hit with his gentle romance The Lunchbox (2013) and then made a couple of less impactful English language films, The Sense of an Ending and Our Souls At Night. But now he has returned to India with Photograph, which is another romance and it is slow, slow, so very slooooooow. I am a fan of non-action films, as we know, but here the longueurs have longueurs which, in turn, have longueurs, plus the characters are so internalised they are essentially inscrutable. I wanted to shake them all and implore: ‘For God’s sake, just say or do something!’ It is set in a gorgeously filmed Mumbai

Thursday

James Walton

Just another Sunday soap

ITV’s new drama Beecham House is set in late 18th-century India where the British and French were still battling it out for supremacy. Its opening credits feature the east at its most exotic, with a montage of ceremonial elephants parading, sari-clad women gliding and lotus flowers opening. The hero is John Beecham (Tom Bateman), a hunky Englishman who proves honourable to the point of mild priggishness as he navigates his way through a world of dusky beauties, inscrutable orientals and treacherous Frenchies. If there were any Indians around at the time who weren’t gorgeously attired rich people, violent bandits or servants who took real pride in their work, we’ve yet

Thursday

Cressida Bonas

Actress’s Notebook

Our upstairs neighbours are not the sort of people you want to have run-ins with. They have regular moped deliveries and I see packages exchanged through blacked-out BMW windows. I once knocked on their door to ask if I could borrow a potato masher. They looked at me as if I were mad. They seem to sleep all day and do all sorts at night. I usually go to bed to the sound of floor-board drilling. I wonder what they are hiding: are they supplying illegal stuff for the next generation of Tory leaders? The other night, at about 5 a.m., I heard a banging noise, followed by shouting at

Peter Oborne

It’s not just cricket

There are plenty of much-anticipated contests in the 2019 Cricket World Cup. But nothing to compare with this Sunday’s match at Old Trafford, where India are billed to play Pakistan in the latest epic in a rivalry that dates back to Partition in 1947. It’s a rivalry that is regularly punctuated by war. No cricket was played between the two countries from 1961 until 1978. The 1965 conflict, caused by Pakistani aggression, severed relations. By the time a ceasefire was declared, Indian tanks were on the outskirts of Lahore, where a 12-year-old Imran Khan was distraught not to be allowed to join a local militia. The two countries fought again

Friday

Ned Donovan

Narendra Modi is the powerful leader India craves

Looking back on Narendra Modi’s first five years in office as India’s Prime Minister, it’s hard to find good news. Record-high joblessness, a stagnating economy, and continued widespread government corruption. With any other person, this would spell electoral defeat, but not for Modi. This week, the 68 year-old leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power for a second term, outperforming his results in 2014 that led him to power and picking up more than 300 seats in the Indian Parliament. His first victory had been a complete shock. For an almost uninterrupted 60 years, the Congress Party had controlled India and its parliament with a

Tuesday

Hardeep Singh

The problem with apologising for the Amritsar Massacre

Growing up I remember my late grandfather, a former commissioned officer in the British Indian Army, being fixated by re-runs of Richard Attenborough’s award-winning film Gandhi. One scene stood out. In the film Attenborough immortalised an event that Churchill referred to as ‘monstrous’, and David Cameron ‘a deeply shameful event in British history’ – the Jallianwala Bagh. On 13 April 1919 15-20,000 civilians (including some peaceful protestors) in a walled garden (or bagh) in Amritsar marking the festival of Vaisakhi, were mercilessly gunned down without warning by British troops. According to official figures, 379 men, women and children were killed and over a thousand injured, with 1,650 rounds of ammunition

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

Delhi Notebook

India is not preparing for war, but picking up the newspapers in Delhi you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For weeks, the papers have been blowing the horns of retribution against Islamabad after a convoy of police officers was rammed by a suicide bomber in Kashmir. Since both sides acquired nuclear weapons, neither had sent a warplane to bomb the other — until last week. Friends in Europe send me anxious messages: isn’t it time to leave Delhi while I still can? The Americans I meet are all a bit jumpy. A couple I chat with at the Khan Market doubt the US Embassy can rescue them if all

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Modi’s operandi

 Islamabad Six months into Imran Khan’s premiership and the new Pakistan prime minister has been plunged into his first major foreign crisis. Last week, a suicide bomber attacked Indian soldiers in Kashmir, killing more than 40 paramilitary troops. Simultaneously, another suicide attack massacred 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard near the Pakistani border of Iran’s troubled Sistan and Baluchestan Province. Khan has spent the early months of his premiership attempting to strengthen links with neighbours. He stretched out the hand of friendship to India. He opened the Kartarpur corridor to allow the visa-free passage of Sikh pilgrims. He has warmed up Pakistan’s old alliance with Iran, while working hard to

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Miracle of Mumbai

It’s a 31ºC Mumbai morning, and on Marine Drive the Russian winter is closing in. The Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) is rehearsing Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony ahead of its first ever UK tour, and even on the campus of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) — a palm-shaded tropical Barbican next to the Arabian Sea — this is still music to raise a shiver. Strings sigh; horns call across frozen steppes. Then the guest conductor Martyn Brabbins gives the signal for a break and players spill into the foyer, chatting and gulping tea. If the sky were more grey and the tea less sweet, it could be a

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Leading ladies

I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of Hannah’s attempts on The Archers to embody the 2018 version of an empowered, liberated woman? Does Obama secretly listen in to Ambridge each night? Has she been impressed by the soap’s attempt, via Hannah, to address the #MeToo movement? Does that explain why she blessed Radio 4 (rather than an online audio provider) with the great coup of reading herself from her new autobiography, Becoming? But first (for those unfamiliar with Hannah’s antics) let’s go back to Ambridge. She arrived on the scene as the new pig woman; Jazzer’s antithesis

Thursday

Dominic Green

The scourge of the Raj

‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, wrote in 1933. Gandhi would have been 150 years old in 2019, had he taken better care of himself. He remains the most irritating and admired politician of the 20th century: a perfect subverter of power and political logic, but a nuisance to everyone, allies included. Only Hitler, the other anti-capitalist spiritual politician who broke the British Empire, fascinates to the same degree. The first volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography, Gandhi Before India (2013), carried the young Gandhi across the British Empire from Kathiawar to London to Cape Town. In