India
Mark Sheerin
“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician... When it’s convenient, the music industry warps things to make them fit, but otherwise all the pigeonholing and the taxonomies are really unhelpful to a lot of artists out there.”Datta plays the sarod. This 19-string instrument has a tremendous range and provides enough complex rhythms and glissando Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For its first ever performance in this country, the Symphony Orchestra of India - formed in only 2006 - kicked off its UK tour in spectacular style at Symphony Hall, Birmingham yesterday evening. Based at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Mumbai, the SOI is India’s first and only professional symphony orchestra. Founded by NCPA chairman Khushroo Suntook and Khazak violinist Marat Bisengaliev - who’ll join the orchestra as a soloist for some of the tour’s later dates - this is a group that’s achieved a remarkable amount in its 13 years of existence. They’ve worked with a host of world- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he looked at the genre from the 1940s to the 1960s, from the USA to the UK, as well as voyaging to India and China and dropping in a salut to France.These two decades are labelled the “Second Golden Age”. We bounced straight in with images of New York accompanied by Leonard Bernstein’s euphoric post-war “New York New York”, emblematic of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical analyses.”The central plank of Maçães’s argument is that China and Russia will in the near future be recognised as playing pivotal roles in the way “people, goods, energy, money and knowledge” flow. These flows cross a space he terms “Eurasia” characterised less as a geographic entity than a conceptual space governed by political, economic, and to a far Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are two elephants in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. One appears literally at the film’s climax, emblazoned with graffiti. More significant, and troubling, is the metaphorical elephant in the room: that we’re invited to laugh at a white comedian in brownface.Namely Peter Sellers, impersonating an Indian actor who unwittingly wrecks an upmarket Hollywood shindig. His Hrundi V Bakshi is almost a retread of the character he played opposite Sophia Loren in 1960’s The Millionairess. Still, according to a talking head interviewed in one of the bonus features, the film “was very popular Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a rare combination of the sacred and the secular in Shubhashish Bhutiani’s debut feature Hotel Salvation (Mukti Bhawan). The young Indian director developed the film through a Venice festival production support programme awarded on the strength of his short film Kush, a prize-winner in 2013, and the combination of different worlds and talents that development process must have involved has worked very well indeed. There’s a rich and moving sense of atmosphere to Bhutiani’s tale of life and death – or, more exactly, the moment when life comes to an end, and a different dimension opens Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as in the United States, the quest among Indian authors in English to deliver the single, knock-out novel that would capture their country’s infinite variety has long been the stuff of parody. More than two decades ago, the writer-politician Shashi Tharoor published The Great Indian Novel. Both a smart historical satire, and a pastiche of the ancient epics, his witty effort mocked all claims to final authority in fiction – even as it coyly tried them on for size. Two decades after her debut enchanted the reading world, Arundhati Roy now stands in the intimidating shade of “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are great sportsmen, and on top of those there’s a handful of phenomena. Sachin Tendulkar is one of the latter, a cricketer of seemingly limitless gifts who’s ranked among such deities as Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Or even Don Bradman, who pops up in an archive clip in this weighty biopic saying that this bloke Tendulkar bats like he used to.Cricket followers everywhere regard Tendulkar as somewhat miraculous, but in India, he has ascended to an astral plane of adulation. He retired from the game in 2013, having amassed the kind of stats that it will probably be impossible for anybody Read more ...