From West Bengal (India) to a floor in north London

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KENWOOD IN NORTH London (next to Hampstead Heath) is a delightful place to visit at all times of the year. Amongst its attractions are a collection of fine paintings within Kenwood House; architectural features designed by Robert Adam; beautiful grounds with a lake; some modern sculptures; and a refreshment complex housed in the former servants’ quarters and stables. Close to the cafeteria, there are some toilets for use by visitors.

After visiting the ‘gents’ toilet, I looked down at the floor of the passageway leading to it, and saw a square, metal manhole cover. It had some lettering on it. Amongst the lettering, I noticed the following “KIC-INDIA”. Seeing this made me wonder if this manhole cover in north London had been made in India.

When I returned home, I looked at the Internet to see whether I could find out anything about the connection of this manhole cover with India. KIC-INDIA refers to an ironworks in India called KIC Metaliks Ltd (www.kicmetaliks.com), whose office is in Calcutta (Kolkata) in West Bengal. The company website revealed:

“K I C Metaliks Limited, founded in 1986 and headed by entrepreneur Radhey Shyam Jalan, is a leading pig iron manufacturer in West Bengal headquartered in Kolkata. Publicly listed on the BSE, the company has over 35 years of experience catering to hundreds of satisfied customers using cutting-edge technology. Its factory in Durgapur produces pig iron with a current capacity of 2,35,000 MTPA. The company takes a prudent yet ambitious approach to capacity expansion to become a dependable pig iron supplier.”

The company was formerly known as ‘Kajaria Iron Casting Limited’, and its plant is at Durgapur, 100 miles northwest of Calcutta. While searching the Internet, I came across other examples of KIC manhole covers in the British Isles, including at Bangor (County Down), South Shields (Tyne and Wear), and Plymouth (Devon).

Often when I am out walking, I look down at manhole covers. Sometimes they have interesting designs on them. When I spotted the KIC manhole cover at Kenwood today (6th of November 2024), it was the first time I had seen one made in India set into a floor in England.

A bridge across the river in Calcutta

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I HAVE BEEN to Calcutta (Kolkata) several times, and each visit I am impressed by the Howrah Bridge. It is a suspension type balanced cantilever bridge that carries pedestrians and road traffic across the Hooghly River, which is part of the mighty Ganges. This massive bridge contains 26,500 tons of steel riveted together – it contains no nuts and bolts. When it was opened for use in 1943, it was the world’s third largest cantilever bridge.

Before the present bridge was constructed, there was another bridge that crossed the Hooghly. Unlike the existing bridge, its roadway was close to the water. It was a pontoon bridge. Its roadway rested on floating pontoons. It had a section that could be opened to allow the passage of large vessels travelling along the Hooghly. The pontoon bridge was completed and ready for use in 1874. It served its purpose until the current bridge was opened in 1943.

The pontoon bridge

Recently, I obtained a book called “Wonderful India”. Inside its front cover, a former owner of the book had handwritten “LW Morris, Royal Air Force, Calcutta-July 1943”. The current bridge was opened in February 1943. The book does not contain a picture of that bridge, Instead, it contains a photograph of its predecessor, the pontoon bridge, with the caption:

“The famous pontoon bridge to Howrah, with the railway terminus in the background.”

I am guessing that had the new bridge been near completion when this book was compiled, it would have included this wonder of bridge engineering. As the book has no date of publication, the inclusion of the pontoon bridge rather than the suspension type cantilevered bridge, I feel that the book must have been compiled long before the new bridge was near completion, That the book includes a photograph of another bridge across the Hooghly: The Willingdon Bridge (also known as ‘Vivekananda Setu’). As this bridge (upstream from the Howrah Bridge) was completed in 1931, it would seem that “Wonderful India” was published sometime between 1931 and early 1943.

Crossing the Howrah Bridge as a pedestrian is a thrilling experience. One shares the footway with many other people. A large proportion of them are carrying loads on their heads, The water is far below one side of the footway, and the wide roadway is on the other. From the footway, one can see a huge flower market and several bathing ghats lining the riverbank. A steady stream of traffic flows across the bridge, including buses painted in many colours; ancient, yellow-painted Ambassador taxi cabs; hand-hauled carts; trucks; and other motor vehicles. And all of this crosses a stretch of the holy Ganges River. Although traversing the present Howrah Bridge is a memorably enjoyable event, which I am happy to repeat whenever I visit the city, crossing the former pontoon bridge must have been at least as exciting.

Finding a box of photographs and rediscovering a forgotten artist

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UNTIL ABOUT 1991, my widowed father resided in my childhood home in northwest London. For as long as I can remember, there was a collection of black and white photographs in a cardboard Kodak photographic paper box. The photographs contained images of sculptures, which my mother Helen Yamey (1920-1980) had created at St Martins School of Art in London during the later 1950s and first half of the following decade. In 1991, my father married again, and moved from our childhood home to another address. Every now and then, after my father moved, I used to ask him what had happened to the photographs. He used to reply that he did not know where they were. Maybe, he suggested, they were stored somewhere in the garage of his new home. He died in 2020. After that, I thought that it was extremely unlikely that I would ever set eyes on the photographs again.

A year or two after my father’s demise, his widow, my stepmother, arranged to meet me at a café. When she arrived, she was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which she handed to me. To my great delight, I found that it contained the Kodak box filled with photographs of my mother’s sculptures. I posted a few of these images on the Internet. Some months after that, my friend Edesio mentioned that he was impressed by the images of my mother’s sculptures, and suggested to me that I should write something about my mother and her art. This I have done.

When I began writing my mother’s biography, our daughter Mala, who is an art historian and a curator, sent me a pdf file containing the contents of a catalogue of an exhibition held at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in the 1960s. It contained mention of some of my mother’s work that appeared in the exhibition. Mala did a little more research and discovered the existence of catalogues of other exhibitions in which my mother’s sculpture was included. I investigated these catalogues and came across a few more, I was surprised by what I discovered.

During the first half of the 1960s, my mother’s sculptures were selected to appear in exhibitions alongside artworks created by artists, many of whom are now quite famous. These include, to mention but a few, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Kim Lim, and LS Lowry. These exhibitions were held when I was between 8 and 13 years old. In those days, I was not particularly interested in my mother’s artistic activities and was too young for the names of these artists to mean anything to me. In addition, I do not recall even having been told that my mother was participating in exhibitions, let alone showing her work alongside that of these now famous creators.  So, until I studied these catalogues more than 40 years after my mother died, I had no idea that for a while she was in the vanguard of 20th century British sculpture. Had I not been stimulated into beginning to write about her, I would not have known that my mother, who never boasted about her achievements, had been an artist of such a high calibre.

I have written my memories of my mother in a book called “Remembering Helen: My Mother the Artist” (available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DKCZ7J7X/) . In it I have tried to describe her upbringing; what she was like as a mother; and her achievements in the world of sculpture. I have included many of the images I found in the box of photographs, and our daughter has written some insightful notes on her grandmother’s sculptural styles and the techniques. I hope that my book will help bring my mother’s artistic  achievements out of obscurity. Modest as she was, I feel that it would be good if she were to get at least a little of the fame she deserved.

Off with his head in the centre of Norwich

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THE CHURCH OF St Peter Mancroft stands above the marketplace in the centre of Norwich. Built between 1430 and 1455, it is an elegant example of the Perpendicular style. It was constructed to show off the wealth of the 15th century citizens of Norwich. It is filled with interesting features. I will discuss two of them.

The church contains a Resurrection tapestry, which is in fine condition. It was woven by Flemish weavers in 1573, and might have once been used as an Easter Day covering for the front of the high altar. The tapestry depicts the Easter story in three episodes. The central panel shows Christ emerging from his tomb. In another panel of the tapestry, Jesus is depicted as a gardener, which is how he appeared to Mary after he had left his tomb (John, chapter 20).

The tapestry is kept at the west end of the church close to the font. The other feature that I will describe is in the chancel in the eastern half of the church. It is a memorial to the polymath and writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), who was a parishioner of St Peter Mancroft. He was buried in the church and lay undisturbed until 1840, when workmen accidentally broke open his coffin. Then, his skull was removed from the rest of his skeleton for phrenologists to study it. It was only in 1922 when the detached skull was reburied in St Peter Mancroft, but not in the same place as the rest of Browne’s body. The burial register for 1922 recorded the skull as being aged 317 years,

Browne, who was interested in everything in a scholarly way, would most likely have approved of having his skull investigated by phrenologists.

Although visiting the Anglican cathedral is one of the highlights of a trip to Norwich, St Peter Mancroft should not be missed.

Souvenirs of imperialism at the British Museum

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THE BRITISH MUSEUM contains many objects that were obtained when much of the world was part of the British Empire. Over the past couple of years, the artist Hew Locke (born 1959) has been selecting items in the museum’s collections and putting them together in a special exhibition called “What have we here?”. The exhibition will continue until the 9th of February 2025.

The items he has chosen are exhibited alongside sculptures and other artworks he has created in recent years. Each of the museum objects that Locke has chosen is accompanied by a short text that places the exhibit in the context of British imperialist exploits and exploitation. This has been done sensitively and gives the viewer an idea of what the objects meant to their original owners and why British collectors deemed them worthy of bringing home to England as ‘souvenirs’ of their activities in far off lands.

Interspersed amongst the exhibits chosen from the British Museum’s collection there are artworks by Hew Locke. Each of these beautiful things has been created to illustrate aspects of colonialism. For example, the model boats he has made symbolise exploration, trade, and the transport of goods and people (often against their will). There are also several historic companies share certificates on which Locke has added paintings. The shares were issued by companies that used slave labour. Perched above the display cabinets are a series of well-crafted but grotesque models of people, often dressed in clothes made from fragments of company documents. They represent the people who were downtrodden by their imperialist rulers.

In this exhibition, Locke neither seeks revenge nor condemns the activities of the colonialists. Instead, he tries to improve our understanding of what happened, hoping that history will not repeat itself. As with many other of Locke’s creations, this exhibition at the British Museum is both imaginative and eye-catching. It is well worth a visit.

Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Stalin: was the pen mightier than the sword?

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LIFE IN STALIN’S Russia was extremely precarious for writers. One small mistake could lead to imprisonment and/or assassination. This was also the case in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, as the country’s famous author Ismail Kadare (1936-2024) knew only too well.

In 1934, the author Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) is widely believed to have received an unexpected telephone call from no lesser person than Russia’s dictator Joseph Stalin. What Stalin said to Pasternak and how Pasternak replied is the subject of a novel, “A Dictator Calls”, published in 2022 and written by Ismail Kadare. The author convincingly demonstrates that nobody can recall what was said during this brief but significant telephone conversation that occurred in 1934. Kadare provides 13 versions of what might have happened during this three-minute telephone call. At one point, he questions whether the call ever happened, but I felt after reading the book that it was likely to have happened.

A common theme amongst the 13 recollections of this telephone call is that Stalin was calling to find out Pasternak’s views on the poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938).  At the time of the call, Mandelstam, who had recently written a poem critical of Stalin, was in prison. It seems from what Kadare has written in his novel, which is based on facts (such as they are), that Stalin might have been hoping the Pasternak would say something that might help save his fellow author, the poet Mandelstam. In this fascinating novel, I felt that Kadare was questioning whether omnipotent dictators like Stalin and Hoxha feared, possibly secretly, the power of critics such as the poet Mandelstam, or in the case of Albania, Kadare. As with so many of Kadare’s novels, this relatively new one gives the reader some insight into the nature of secrecy, the contortion of truth, and uncertainty, which prevailed in regimes such as Stalin’s Russia and Hoxha’s Albania. Although difficult to understand in places, “A Dictator Calls” is a fascinating novel, which kept me intrigued all the way through it.

Kadare’s novel has been translated from Albanian into English by John Hodgson. I feel that a good translation should read in such a way that one cannot realise that it is a translation. It should read as if it were originally written in the language into which it was translated. Hodgson has achieved this very successfully.

From India’s Punjab to London’s Primrose Hill

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WHEN THE PUNJAB WAS divided (by the British) between Pakistan and India in 1947, its former capital, Lahore, became a Pakistani city and the Indian part of the region was left without a capital. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, decided that instead of assigning an existing city to become the capital of India’s Punjab a new city should be created. It was to symbolise the birth of modern India. A team of architects led by the Swiss born Le Corbusier began designing the new city, Chandigarh, in the early 1950s. In late 1953, it became the capital of India’s Punjab, which was later further divided into Punjab and Haryana states.

Amongst those who were on the team designing Chandigarh was Le Corbusier’s cousin, the architect Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967). He designed much of the furniture installed in the buildings created in Chandigarh. According to one source (www.worldofinteriors.com/story/pierre-jeanneret-and-le-corbusier-chandigarh-furniture):

“Pierre Jeanneret, was strongly influenced by local materials and craftsmanship, with a Modernist twist. Due to the vast scale of what needed to be created for an uninhabited city – from Palace of Assembly chairs to university cafeteria tables and and linen baskets – Jeanneret experimented with what was on hand. Iron Sikh Sarbloh bowls became lampshades; mango tree trunks became tables. Readily available materials such as bamboo, teak, rope and wicker were woven into the designs.”

Recently, I saw a couple of examples of this furniture on display at a special exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Today, the 29th of October 2024, we visited an exhibition, “Syncretic Voices:Art & Design in the South Asian Diaspora”, in a private house near London’s Primrose Hill. What made it special for me is that there were many examples of Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture on display. The exhibition ends on the 1st of November 2024.

The house near Primrose Hill is owned by Rajan Bijlani, whose parents came from India to the UK in 1975. Rajan has been collecting Jeanneret’s Indian furniture for some time, and he showed it to us. Of particular interest was a table with a zinc table-top, which was once used in the Punjab University cafeteria in Chandigarh. Many of the other pieces on display were chairs and stools. There was also a shelving unit designed to hold files. Most of the furniture came from various government buildings in Chandigarh. Some of the pieces still have their original inventory numbers painted on them.

The furniture is in several rooms of the house. The walls of these rooms are decorated with attractive  modern artworks by several artists of Indian origin including Vipeksha Gupta, Rana Begum, Soumya Netrabile, Tanya Ling, Harminder Judge, and Lubna Chowdhary. Rajan told us that they were all for sale and he was holding them as consignments from various galleries. He is also selling some of his Jeanneret furniture. Rajan showed us around and was a perfect guide. It was a great pleasure and privilege to have been able to see his beautifully designed home and the fascinating furniture and other artworks displayed within it. If you wish to see this exhibition before it closes, visit: https://www.rajanbijlani.com/about

Wonderful India (as it was) in English, Bengali, and Urdu

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IN A SECONDHAND BOOKSHOP in Thame (Oxfordshire) I purchased a book called “Wonderful India”. It must have been published by 1943 because inside its front cover there is the name of its first owner, LW Morris, and next to that he added “Royal Air Force, Calcutta, July 1943”. The book is trilingual. Its text is written in Bengali (Bangla), English, and Urdu. It was published by The Statesman and Times of India Book Department. The Statesman is a newspaper that was founded in 1818, and published simultaneously in Calcutta, New Delhi, Siliguri and Bhubaneswar. The Times of India was founded 20 years later. The gloriously illustrated book, which covers pre-Partition India, as well as Sri Lanka, Burma, and Nepal, contains no text in Hindi. In British India, the official languages were English and Standard Urdu, and later Standard Hindi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_legal_status_in_India#History). Oddly, for many years Bengalis were opposed to using their language as an officially recognised one, for a long time preferring to use Persian for formal (especially commercial) use (https://thespace.ink/bengali-and-persian-in-british-raj/). Yet despite this, the book I found favours Bengali and omits Hindi. I suspect that  because the book might well have been published in Bengal, the Bengali script has been included. Hindi written in the Devanagari script only became the official language of India in September 1949, several years after “Wonderful India” was published.

Dhaka (now in Bangladesh)

The book covers all the regions of pre-Independence India as well as some of its neighbours. It is rich in black and white photographs, many of which are superb examples of photographic technique. Each picture is captioned in Bengali, English, and Urdu. The only pieces of prose are the general introduction (which includes a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi) and introductory paragraphs at the beginning of each section. The Urdu introduction is at the rear of the book, and is next to a picture of Jawaharlal Nehru. There is no picture of any member of the British Indian hierarchy.  

Bangalore, a place which I have visited often, is given only one sentence at the beginning of the section on Mysore and Coorg:

“The British retain some territory at Bangalore, which is the administrative headquarters of the state, while Mysore is the capital.”

There are three photographs of the city, Sadly, not the most interesting in the book.  To compensate for this, the book is filled with pictures of touristic sights and daily life of India as it was before WW2 had ended. The book provides a fascinating window on a part of the world that has in many aspects changed beyond recognition.