India
Peter Culshaw
Welcome to one of Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio shows, hosted by Music Box. Today’s guest is the celebrated essayist, novelist, music composer and singer Amit Chaudhuri.TO HEAR THE SHOW CLICK THIS LINKChaudhuri became known for some strange juxtapositions of western pop or jazz classics and Indian ragas – a version of "Layla " or a Doors number can collide with Indian music to spectacular and usually charming effect. His first album had the intriguing title This Is Not Fusion while his new album is called Across the Universe, the title track a warped and beautiful version of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's takes a confident comic performing only her second show in English – her second language – to joke near the top of the hour: “I didn't know I wasn't as funny in English.” Urooj Ashfaq also told us she would get upset if the audience didn't like her – but she shouldn't worry. Her confidence proved to be justified.Ashfaq performed her enjoyable UK debut Oh No! in London as a preview for her first run at the Edinburgh Fringe this month. It's an hour of storytelling about her life, family, dating and the things she likes. And some of the things she dislikes.This sort of material could Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Music from the Temple of Light has for its cover image a minimalist 17th century representation of Tantra. In this instance, a deep blue field bordering on black, scored by a golden yellow square, an arrow hanging down from the square’s centre, and a break in that arrow opening up near its tip.It’s an absorbent and contemplative representation of forces rarely seen and beyond our control, and there’s a strong golden thread of the contemplative and of forces from beyond embedded in the album’s music, and its sacred edge.Peter Culshaw is one of the founders of this website, and a veteran and Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are scores of films set in and around circuses. Aravindan Govindan’s bewitching Thamp̄ (The Circus Tent) isn’t like any of them, though I was fleetingly reminded of Jacques Tati’s largely plotless Jour de fête – which also opens and closes with a big top being assembled then dismantled in a small rural community.Thamp̄ isn’t a comedy. Categorising the film is difficult. It looks like a documentary shot on the hoof, and Govindan is credited as screenwriter, but in a later interview he claimed that “we didn’t have a script and we shot the incidents as they happened.” So, Thamp̄ begins Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This extraordinarily moving film made history when it became the first documentary to win the top non-fiction awards at both Sundance and Cannes. All that Breathes is the second film directed by Shaunak Sen, shot in Delhi in 2019/2020 during the violence that followed the Citizenship Amendment Act that discriminated against Muslim migrants.Sen’s cameras follow two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud who have devoted their lives to saving the city’s sick and injured black kites. Scavenger raptors, the birds circle the noxious, darkened sky. They live off urban scraps and Read more ...
Jasdeep Singh Degun and Laurence Cummings
We believe that with Orpheus, we are creating something which will invite audiences to rethink what opera can and should be. Inspired by Monteverdi’s 1607 work L’Orfeo, it grew out of Opera North’s long-standing relationship with South Asian Arts-uk, a Leeds-based centre of excellence for South Asian music and dance.Sung in Italian and Urdu with excerpts in Malayalam, Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi and Tamil, it brings together European baroque and Indian classical music in a way which has never been heard before.We are only too aware that we are working with two massive musical traditions, but the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Partition equals trauma. It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that the British Empire’s solution to intractable problems in three of its most important colonies and mandates – namely Ireland, India and Palestine – was the divisive device of drawing boundaries which created local catastrophes.Seventy-five years ago, the Indian Partition – which has already been explored in plays such as Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line – resulted in millions being uprooted, terrible violence and unimaginable suffering. Now four British playwrights have adapted Kavita Puri’s book Partition Voices: Untold Read more ...
aleks.sierz
While Britain is experiencing a "summer of discontent", with inflation, strikes and other conflicts, it is odd that so few plays are as overtly political, and as overtly resonant as Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares, which won the activist Theatre Uncut’s Political Playwriting Award, and is now on the main stage at the Young Vic.Although the play is set in Kolkata in the 2000s, it makes connections with Britain today, and includes a passionate argument in praise of the power of theatre to change people’s attitudes. The story focuses on Prab, a machine operator in a West Bengali factory who Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This one sounded implausible. Frida Kahlo, the great (and fashionable – collected by the likes of Madonna) Mexican painter interpreted by Indian classical music at the Elgar Room in the Royal Albert Hall. It was, however, entrancing, made a curious sense, and was a different way of immersing yourself both in the music and paintings.Presented by the enterprising Saudha Society of Poetry and Indian Music, the director TM Ahmed Kaysher, a Leeds-based poet was perched stage left and briefly described his own relation with Kahlo at a time in his life when he was suffering from depression Read more ...
Heather Neill
The young Indian man stepping towards us on the vast Olivier stage is unremarkable enough, slight and boyish in manner. When he speaks he is direct, even cheeky: he wants us to like him. But this is Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's blood-stained murderer. He surely has a tough task ahead if he is going to persuade his listeners that he had the least justification for brutally killing the father of his nation (Bapu to his followers), the universal byword for peaceful protest.Chennai-based playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar is accustomed to tackling challenging subjects. She has previously collaborated Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new love into a dazzling idiosyncratic narrative about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives 227 days at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.Millions of people have now been swept up in his Booker-winning magical realist odyssey. Director Ang Lee has captured it – not entirely successfully according to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anuvab Pal may be a new name to some UK audiences (although many will know him from the global satirical podcast The Bugle), but he is well known in his native India. And it is with a wry look at Indian history – and the British role within it – that he begins his show Democracy and Disco Dancing, a version of which he previously brought to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019.Pal introduces himself, saying he looks like “I work for HSBC in risk management” but in reality he's has some thought-provoking and funny gags about the India-Great Britain relationship. He takes us through Partition (“the Read more ...