Jazz is America’s music, born of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between black and white; between the old Africa and the old Europe and between the country and the city. And as the great cities of America grew, it was jazz music that provided a vivid soundtrack to accompany their burgeoning…
US theatre is a reflection, of course, of this sad nation now. Duped and strong-armed by the Bush-led extreme right, the prostitute media, and lobbyists for the Enemies of Humanity, the theatre has become an evil-coloured puddle of imperialist commerce. The most expensive and well-financed is ‘The Great White Way’, world famous Broadway. Now reduced…
When a hedonist looks at you, you feel like a black forest cake in front of a chocoholic. You look down the throat of the monster. You know that by your very nature you will go there, even though it will be dangerous to do so. There is the risk of transformation beyond recognition. The…
As a capital and a city, Copenhagen is more central to Denmark than Delhi is to India or Washington is to the USA. This doesn’t appear to be the case at first sight. After all, Delhi is on the national mainland and so is Washington, while Copenhagen is on an island off Jutland, which forms…
The first time I went to Brick Lane it was market day. The thing that struck me most was that some of the stallholders had no stalls. They laid out their goods on rugs, cardboard or on the pavement. One man stood by a mound of rusting bolts, screws and nuts. An old woman squatted…
As early as June 1979, UNESCO issued an appeal to art lovers the world over to come up with ideas and funds to protect over a hundred artistically valuable heritage sites and monuments in the three cities of the Kathmandu valley. Seven of these monuments and groups of buildings in the valley are in the…
A man from the BBC asked me to show him my ‘favourite parts of Calcutta’; this was towards a year-end programme on cities of the world. The idea was to locate me in the whirl of the very street I was talking about, and catch the sounds on tape; the sort of verisimilitude that the…
In 1840 an unknown artist painted an exquisite series of watercolours depicting the riverfront view of Dhaka. The series shows a row of elegant houses and palatial mansions in the colonial style, belonging to wealthy merchants, indigo planters, zamindars (native and foreign) and British officials of the East India Company. Historical landmarks of medieval and…
To anyone interested in images of Dhaka’s past, Charles D’ Oyly’s Antiquities of Dhaka is a work worth examining. It consists of folio volumes of illustrations accompanied by a brief account of the city and ‘vignettes’ based on George Chinnery’s sketches of the city. I first came across copies of this rare book in the…
Abdur Razzaque, one of Bangladesh’s senior artists, is known for his work in several mediums. He was born in Shariatpur, Bangladesh and educated at the Dhaka Government College of Arts and Crafts and the State University of Iowa. He has travelled extensively, capturing the details of cityscapes worldwide. The colours and shades, moods and passions…
