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METROSCAPE
Art Of Writing
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| BOOK MARK: Khakhar with drawings from his
book |
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Sixty-eight might
be a late age at which to lose your literary virginity but then for aficionados
of artist Bhupen Khakhar it was well worth the wait. The Baroda-based
painter, famed for his narrative paintings that combine daring sexual
imagery with sharp humour (best represented by a 1995 watercolour of a
man with five ungainly penises and a running nose), now extends this narration
to 10 Gujarati short stories in a book called Maganbhai No Gundar (Maganbhai's
Glue) The stories, with animated illustrations
by Khakhar himself, take a peek into the bland lives of the middle class,
exploring themes of desire, fantasy and hypocrisy, like a craving to embrace
the neighbour's wife or fixation with foreign goodies. "Unlike the
rich, ordinary people are not self-conscious about how they behave,"
said Khakhar at the release of his book at Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre last
week. "They do not have to impress anyone."
Meanwhile, the release of a novelette and another
collection of stories by year-end has also been announced. The incentive
for non-gujarati-reading followers: the illustrations.
—Himanshi Dhawan
A Trunk Of Tales
During his 41 years,
James Prinsep (1799-1840), a British scholar, architect and writer, made
an indelible mark on India's historiography. His most renowned feat, deciphering
the Asokan script, took place after the 10 years he spent in Benaras (1820-30)
where he was the first to prepare the city's census, draw up its map,
and mastermind the construction of its still-functional underground drainage
system.
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| FAMILY ALBUM: Kejariwal with the Prinsep papers |
Now Prinsep's life and times can be revisited
via a trunk of scrapbooks, letters, press clippings and memoirs handed
over by his London-based descendant Ivan Prinsep to Delhi's Nehru Memorial
Museum Library. Many of the 201 documents are priceless historical revisitations-letters
to his mother, obituaries of his death and De Principe, his family history.
These crumbling, faded ink pages are supplemented by 1,200 photographs
that include a large leather-bound photo album of XI King Edward's Own
Lancers, a cavalry led by Ivan's father, Evelyn, before it was handed
over to Pakistan in 1947. Four generations and 17 Prinseps served in India
over 175 years and few left without making their mark.
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| James Prinsep |
But for O.P. Kejariwal, director, Nehru Memorial
Library and author of a forthcoming biography of James Prinsep, "If
you draw a graph of human genius, James would head the list along with
Leonardo da Vinci". This month, the library acquired 20 sets of private
papers of, among others, Vinoba Bhave and Dr Rajendra Prasad, and letters
from Oxford historian Judith Brown, written by and to Gandhi, adding to
its 900 sets of papers. The Prinsep collection, however, is the first
acquired from abroad and the richness of its content, what Kejariwal describes
as a "once in a lifetime windfall", holds the promise and the
key to more.
—Sonia Faleiro
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