Town Hall Europeans in Calcutta. This one topic has generated so many books, essays, articles, photographs, and other documents that one could probably fill half a library with them. Ironically, a lot of this documentation has been produced by Indians, who have failed to do the
At about this time last year, there was fear. That there wouldn’t be enough visitors, that the beautiful properties would go vacant, that the crippling blow that Covid had dealt the travel and tourism sector would prove impossible to recover from. This year, the West
With Durga Puja imminent, and the music of the dhaak beginning to play in our hearts, most of us think that this is the only time of year when we get to hear these incredibly evocative beats. But is it really? Is the dhaak finally
Representative Image Whatever else it might have been in the 18th century, Calcutta sounds like an interesting city to have lived in. And by all accounts, the rowdiest part of town was the one now responsible for maintaining its law and order, aka Lalbazar. How’s that
Actor-producer Rituparna Sengupta, curator Myna Mukherjee, artist Harshit Agarwal, and filmmaker Ranjan Ghosh at the inauguration The man vs machine debate is now more than a generation old. So we’re not going there. However, walking through Harshit Agarwal’s fascinating art exhibition titled ‘EXO-Stential – AI Musings
Asked about the first published novel in Bengali, most of us would probably say ‘Alaler Gharer Dulal’ (1857-58), written by Peary Chand Mitra under the pseudonym Tekchand Thakur. And we would be wrong. While a pioneering novel in many ways, this wasn’t the first published
On the night of December 30, 1936, a terrified guard in a three-storeyed building off Dalhousie Square (renamed BBD Bag after Independence) fell down a flight of steps as he tried to run away from an old man with ‘eyes like someone rising from the
A collection of intriguing pictographs on seals, on shards of pottery, on tablets, on ivory rods. Clearly indicating a pattern, but tantalisingly out of reach when it comes to decoding what they meant. For decades, this has been the status of the inscriptions found on
Buddhadeb Guha - it still seems too early to call him the ‘late’ Buddhadeb Guha - inherited his love for nature and wildlife, as well as life in general, from his father Sachin Guha. The latter, a large, loud, prosperous, extremely generous man, would organise
‘The Legacy of Loss: Perspectives on the Partition of Bengal’. The title is fairly self-explanatory, but to make it clearer still, it describes an art exhibition on the Bengal Partition of 1947, on view until August 29 at Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) in Anandapur,