 We're just back from a few days in Rome, staying in Trastevere - literally 'across the Tiber' - the once working class area of the inner city which is now immensely fashionable.  From our guest house window, we looked out on the flank wall of the 'Casa di Dante' - Dante's house. This is a bit of a mystery - it doesn't seem to be open to the public and the house itself dates from the mid-sixteenth century, so roughly 250 years after Dante's time. About a hundred years ago, it seems, the building was designated by an Italian minister as a study centre devoted to one of Italy's most renowned writers. Though what studying or similar goes on there, I really couldn't say.  I can't quite decide whether these architectural embellishments are charming or sinister - I think both! But they are small - and our room must be the only vantage point. Curious! 
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 What a wonderful cover design this is - the sort of artistic magic that a novel of this quality merits. It's the work of Cyril Satorsky for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's fourth novel The Householder published in 1960. And thanks to Cyril, here's the story behind the design: a compelling tale of three Indian women (and there was a fourth in Cyril's life, but that's not for telling here).  Cyril was born into a Jewish family in Whitechapel in the East End of London in 1927. He now lives in New Orleans and as his website testifies, he is still busy as an artist.  Posted with permission from https://cyrilsatorsky.com/ I bought a first edition of The Householder recently and dropped Cyril an email to say how much I liked his design - and that led to a couple of long phone conversations, the key points of which I record here with Cyril's blessing. As a young man in his early twenties, Cyril got to know - and like - an Indian writer, Indu Dutt, who introduced him to Tagore. 'I'm still enchanted by Tagore', he tells me. He helped with her book, A Tagore Testament - first published in 1953 - and designed the memorable cover.  He also met Indu's Dublin-educated daughter, Bulbul Dutt. 'I was knocked over by her beauty - she was stunning', Cyril recalls. She was married to a Calcutta-based businessman, Ian Arnold, and had a couple of children. She was a follower of Subud, a spiritual movement established in Indonesia, and in the mid-1960s wrote a book about its beliefs under the name Mariani Arnold. Both Bulbul and her husband returned to India - he kept in touch for a while but never met them again and understands that both are now dead.  Ian and Mariani Arnold and their daughter Onuradha at the Subud World Congress, Tokyo, 1967
Alongside this introduction to India and its culture, Cyril also attended dance performances in London of the Radha-Krishna story by Ram Gopal and his company - among whom the young Kumudini Lakhia was a luminous beauty and a great talent. He found the energy and elegance of the performance intoxicating. 'What was mind altering to me', he says, 'was seeing Indian dance.' Cyril recalls that he managed to get access to the dancers' dressing room and got to know Kumi; they became firm friends.
It was the publisher John Murray who approached Cyril to design the jacket for The Householder - an intimate, acutely observed novel about lower middle-class Delhi written by a woman who had married into the country. He read the book and loved it - and the figure of the mother-in-law reminded him of the matriarchs in Jewish families. So he turned to the design - and to a woman whose beauty lingered in his memory.
The young Indian woman on the cover is Bulbul - though she never knew she was the model. He had a passport photo to work off, 'but my memory of her was sharper than that photo - Bulbul came to me on that page'.  And the other figure? 'The man sitting at the table is me.' Of course. the character he represents is the 'householder' of the book's title, a young, recently married Indian school teacher. Being asked about the cover, and the network of Indian friendships it brings to mind, has given Cyril a wistful pleasure - a chance to reflect on people and moments which have meant a lot to him. 'I don't think I've ever talked about this before with anyone except my wife, Dale'. I asked if he had ever managed to make the journey to India. Yes - seventeen years ago, at Dale's urging. And as a result of a chance encounter at an Indian airport, Cyril and his wife spent a week as guests of Kumi and her family in Ahmedabad where she runs a renowned dance school. And so a friendship dormant for half-a-century was rather magically rekindled.
Cyril Satorsky says his connection with South Asia has greatly influenced his art. 'My paintings now are really abstract - but they have jumped out of India. Indian art is not abstract on the surface of things - but go beyond the surface and it is.' India has also shaped his approach to life. 'For one thing, it has changed my idea about women: women are cleverer than men - their perceptions are larger, deeper, wider.'  Time's up - my semester teaching at the Asian College of Journalism is over. But before I head back to cold, grey, Brexit-limbo London, here's a few warm memories of the last few days. Thanks guys! 
  It's an unlikely spot for a statue - tucked away under Chennai's first flyover, in the middle of one of the city's busiest junctions, and all but inaccessible to pedestrians.  But here it is - C.N. Annadurai, the key figure in Dravidian (to put it at its simplest, Tamil pride) politics, sitting lotus style reading a book. Above him the traffic rumbles along the city's principal artery. This was once Mount Road - it now takes Annadurai's name and is known as Anna Salai. Annadurai was the last chief minister of Madras state and the first of the new state of Tamil Nadu, created in 1969. Less than a month after the renaming of the state, Annadurai died of cancer. He was 59. Ever since his landmark election victory in 1967, Tamil politics in south India has been dominated by two parties - the DMK and the AIADMK - which both regard Annadurai as their mentor. Krishna Prasad, a friend and renowned journalist, pointed out this hidden away statue to me, and I captured him on video talking about the man and the memorial to him - If you are curious, the statue is close to the US Consulate, where Cathedral Road goes under Anna Salai - and when I say it's right in the middle of one of Chennai's busiest traffic intersections, I mean it. Good luck!
 The place I stay in Chennai is just a few yards from Murrays Gate Road. Needless to say, there is no gate on Murrays Gate Road. But there is an old gatepost. It's often obscured by the stand of a press wallah (no, not a journalist - a guy who does ironing on the street). But there's still a single, solitary hinge. And if there was a gate attached to the post, it wouldn't be across one of the entrances to the smart houses and blocks of flats along here, but would restrict access to one of the roads on what's now known as Venus Colony. So was this once 'Murray's Gate'? Well, there's is no conclusive proof - but this may be the last remnant of one of Madras's grander colonial-era houses, the home of a leading British barrister who supported Indian nationalism. More particularly this was where one of the leading poets of the turn of the century - nineteenth-into-twentieth that is - took her own life: Laurence Hope aka Violet Nicolson aka Adela Florence Cory, about whom I have blogged before. And in a later incarnation this was the home of the Venus film studios, which played a crucial role in the development of Tamil cinema.
So, let's start at the beginning - unconventional as that may now be. According to S. Muthiah's compendious and authoritative Madras Rediscovered, Murrays Gate Road led from Mowbrays (now TTK) Road to Dunmore House. This was where Leveson Keith Murray lived when he was Collector of Madras between 1822 and 1831.. He was born in Dunmor in Scotland; his father was the Earl of Dunmore and his brother succeeded to the title. Whether Murray had the house built or acquired it, we don't know. No trace of the house - and, it seems, no picture or drawing of it - survives ... apart, perhaps, for this solitary gatepost. It's not unreasonable to assume that this once marked the entrance to Murray's home, Dunmore House - but it's not proveable beyond reasonable doubt.  Eardley Norton: Wikipedia By the end of the century, this was the home of Eardley Norton. He was born in India in 1852, educated at Oxford and returned to Madras to practise law in the High Court. Norton was not a conventional servant of Empire. He was a friend of the family which ran the Hindu and for a while wrote a column in the paper under a pseudonym. He was also aligned with the Indian National Congress and was reputed to have solicited the support for the Congress of the radical, atheist and republican MP for Northampton, Charles Bradlaugh. Eardley rose to the position of Advocate-General of Madras - but his membership of the Imperial Legislative Council was short-lived ... he was obliged to step down after allegations of adultery. A two-volume biography of Norton has recently been published which will no doubt offer chapter and verse. It seems that Eardley Norton was back in England on a visit when the poet Violet Nicolson - who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope - stayed here in 1904. Her husband, a retired general, required a routine prostate operation. He died. She was left bereft.  A new book about Hope - or rather the search for her elusive trail - tells us a little more about her stay in Madras. It's called Rapture's Roadway and the author is an Australian writer, Virginia Jealous. She records that Norton noted how the servants were alarmed by the manner in which Hope - after her husband's death - wandered around the grounds at night. 'In the garden, on the bark of many trees, she had written mysterious initials, and the end was terribly painful.' A few weeks after her husband's death, Laurence Hope died by drinking corrosive poison. It was suicide. Her young son - then in England being cared for by relatives - was left an orphan. I don't believe in ghosts or anything of that sort, but I am tempted to wonder whether on any of my night-time walks around this part of Chennai I have communed with her restless spirit.  The Nicolsons, husband and wife, are buried in the large and haunting overspill cemetery of St Mary's Anglican church on Island, not far from Chennai's Central Station. I visited the grave a year ago, When I went back recently it was once more completely shrouded by grass and shrubs which I had to kick away before taking these photos.  Hope is best known for her beguilingly erotic, orientalist poetry - much of it about suffering, harm and loss. The best known is 'Kashmiri Song' - "pale hands I loved, beside the Shalimar". It was set to music and while now it seems incredibly dated, a century ago this was one of the most popular songs of the era. She was in many ways a transgressive figure - a woman who loved India, its culture and customs, and initially published as a man presenting her writings as translations from poems written (by others) in Pashto and Persian. Hope's renown as a poet increased in the years after her death - she was one of the best-selling poets of the Edwardian era, and although she was not well regarded by the literary elite, Thomas Hardy was among those who admired her work.
As for Dunmore House, Eardley Norton sold it in 1933 to the Maharajah of Pithapuram. Within another decade, and following another tragic death at this address, he had sold it on; the house was pulled down and much of the site developed with part of it becoming Venus film studios - as S. Muthiah has recorded. By the early 1990s, the studios had closed and that site too was developed. The area remains known as Venus Colony, and 'Venus' still survives in the names of streets and blocks of flats. 
 Now most of the first generation of post-Dunmore House properties have themselves given way to newer, bigger buildings.
And as for that gatepost, it's about the last remnant - if remnant it is - of one of colonial Madras's great houses ... and more particularly of a tragic death of a poet who deserves to be remembered.  It was a century ago to the day that Gandhi embraced the idea of a non-violent non-cooperation movement to achieve India's freedom - and he did so at a house just a five minutes stroll from where I am staying in Chennai. India hasn't woken up to this anniversary, and I wouldn't have either but for a friend and fellow journalist Krishna Prasad, whose blog about the anniversary I would encourage you to read. The Rowlatt Act which prompted Gandhi's call to action was one of the most repressive measures introduced by the British - and set the scene for the egregious massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The leading historian of the city, S, Muthiah, describes Gandhi's decision taken exactly a hundred years ago to launch a non-violent protest movement as 'virtually the start of the freedom struggle'. Gandhi had used a similar strategy in South Africa - in India, it developed to be the hallmark of his style of leadership, moral and political.  On March 18th 1919, M.K. Gandhi visited a house on Cathedral Road owned by Kasturi Rangan Iyengar, the proprietor and editor of the Hindu - and indeed the founder of the paper in its modern guise as a leading liberal, nationalist daily. There Gandhi met C. Rajagopalachari, 'Rajaji' - a key figure in the nationalist movement. Their discussions left his head spinning - and he went to sleep in the house that night pondering the political way ahead. “I was still in that twilight condition between sleep and consciousness when suddenly the idea broke upon me that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal", he later wrote. 'Hartal' is one of those words that defies simple translation - it implies strike, mass protest and civil disobedience, an all-encompassing act of defiance .
Tilak Bhavan, the site of this meeting and moment of political enlightenment, was demolished decades ago. An anonymous-looking hotel stands on the site - when I asked the receptionist last week whether she knew this key centenary was imminent, she didn't ... though she said, not entirely convincingly, that she would see if some manner of marking the anniversary could be arranged. There is however a rather splendid plaque in English and Tamil, erected fifty years ago, which marks the spot and tells the story,
Sadly, Cathedral Road is one of those soulless arteries which hardly anyone traverses on foot - and if you are dropped off by car at the hotel you will never see this roadside plaque. So while it is well kept, it's also little read. I can't find any photo of Tilak Bhavan online. I looked around for any buildings which could have borne silent testimony to Gandhi's visit a century ago. There's just one, across the road, that might just have been standing back in March 1919 - though my guess is it came up a few years later.  And sadly, the bold assertion of this memorial - 'THE NATION REMEMBERS' - is no longer true.
 At the weekend, I went on a heritage walk around Triplicane, an inner-city area of Chennai. It was organised by Madras Inherited, an impressively energetic group engaged in heritage education and management. Our guide was Roshini Ganesh, an architect. The focus was on the few remaining agraharams - a south Indian custom of homes linked to, and often owned by, a Hindu mandir - in the area around the Parthasarathy temple.   The buildings are often managed by a temple trust and were built for religious purposes to house brahmins, the caste from which priests traditionally came. There are some common aspects of design - often a raised seating platform area by the door and a small central courtyard. Agraharams don't have to be single storey but in this area of Triplicane, those that survive are mainly from the late nineteenth century and are very simple in design. Indeed, they are often poorly maintained and distinctly modest compared to the buildings that have been replacing them - and they are disappearing fast
We had the privilege of being invited into one agraharam and up on to the roof space, looking down on a courtyard which would once have served several of these small homes. 
 As always with heritage walks here, we set off early - really early! By 8:30 our two-hour stroll was over. One of the delights of walking around at such an early hour is seeing women decorating their doorsteps and approaches with kolam - an abstract design believed to bring good fortune. 
  Shankar is the watchman at one of the most remarkable and forlorn of the colonial piles that are dotted around Chennai (once Madras). This is his territory. More prosaically, this is the Victoria Hostel - on the very appropriately named Victoria Hostel Road. It's a wonderfully imposing set of buildings, built from 1880 - though the opening ceremony was some twenty years later - to provide accommodation for students at the college of engineering.    The hostel was built by Thaticonda Namberumal Chetty, who was responsible for several of the city's more imposing buildings of the late nineteenth century. This was once part of the expansive gardens of the Nawab of Arcot - the current-day prince lives nearby in Amir Mahal. In 1920, the engineering college moved from inner-city Triplicane and the hostel was handed over to Presidency College. The buildings have a distinguished history and have been listed as a heritage site, but their current condition is pitiable. A recent news report has suggested that the hostel is to be repaired and a new wing built - and there were signs, though not very encouraging signs, of building activity. But there's a long, long way to go!
A shout-out for Madras Inherited, an impressive group of architects and historians who organised the walk round Triplicane today (more in a later post from that early morning stroll) which introduced me to the Victoria Hostel. One day, maybe, it will bear more than a shadow of its original grandeur. For the time being, it remains Shankar's castle.   I went back today to the political wall painting I saw a couple of weeks back in the throes of composition. It show M.K. Stalin - leader of a key local party, the DMK - and his late father and party patriarch, M. Karunanidhi.  One of the photos I took of the artist at work was - to my intense surprise (and joy) - published by the Guardian. That's a first for me! Perhaps a last as well - but who knows ... I wanted to see who else and what else had been included in the mural which, as you can see, is a fair old size. There are no more portraits. And the slogans? Well apart from the large script which could be translated as 'Hero Stalin', there aren't any. The text of the painting consists almost entirely a list of the ward office bearers of the party - a roll-call of the local activists, who wish to bask in the reflected glory of their party leader. One curious aspect of political protocol here - rival parties put up posters around the edges of the wall painting, but were careful not to obscure it. There's a strong informal code here - you don't deface your rivals murals but that could well lead to quite a dust-up.
Both India's main national parties - the Congress and the BJP - have a foothold in this corner of south India. But the main parties are regional - and indeed Dravidian ... an expression of southern pride, a championing of the Tamil language and culture and (by and large) anti-Brahmin with an emphasis, notionally at least, on caste equality. So as well as Stalin's DMK and the late Jayalalithaa's AIADMK (the governing party in the state) there's the DK, the AMMK, the MDMK, the PMK ... you get the picture. And the DMK has just agreed a seat-sharing agreement for the imminent elections with, among others, the Congress and India's two main Communist Parties ... which have been described as, yes, tinged with Stalinism!   It's taken four years of work - but at last my biography of Freda Bedi is out. The Lives of Freda: the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi was launched at the Oxford Bookstore in Calcutta over the weekend. Jawhar Sarcar, a former head of India's public broadcasting corporation, presided - and Ami Bedi, Freda's granddaughter, also spoke..
Who was Freda Bedi? An English woman who made her life in India - the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student, that was in 1933, and who was jailed in Lahore during the Second World War for championing India's national cause over that of her mother country. She later was an active Kashmiri nationalist, a Tibetan Buddhist - and towards the end of her life she became a Buddhist nun. You can find out more about Freda Bedi and my biography here and I've posted below a reading from the introduction to the book - There are lots of ways to get the book - which is also available on kindle ... and if you order direct from the publishers, Speaking Tiger, then if you are in India you get a discount and there's no delivery charge. What about that!
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