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'Contemporary India: a national quarterly' UPDATED

29/9/2018

For three years in the mid-1930s, B.P.L. Bedi and his English wife, Freda Bedi, published in Lahore a really excellent leftist and nationalist quarterly. It was called Contemporary India and ran for ten issues, the last a double issue - there's a complete set at the British Library (though the catalogue entry is none too great - it's at P.P.3779hc) and an almost complete run at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

It was a substantial publication - each issue ran to 160 or more pages. 'Netaji' Subhas Chandra Bose was among the contributors. The articles were mainly about Indian politics and economic themes but also extended to Indian folk song and theatre, the caste system, issues relating to gender and such topics as Hitler's rise in Germany, Stalin's grip on the Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Africa, the Bahai religion and much more. It was nationalist - and internationalist. And it is virtually unknown.

At the end of this blog I've posted all the journal's covers to give an idea of the range of content, and also the complete text of Bose's article, which was entitled 'India Abroad'.

Sombart c1933

B.P.L. Bedi said that the idea for the quarterly came from Werner Sombart, his doctoral supervisor in Berlin and one of Germany's leading social scientists. Sombart lamented that India had no quarterly magazine of intellectual calibre. 'That very day I came back home', B.P.L. recalled, 'discussed the situation with Freda and decided that we must have a quarterly magazine immediately on our return'.

Contemporary India published an extract from Sombart's deeply controversial 1934 volume, Deutscher Sozialismus, which some regarded as advocating a form of German 'national' socialism which offered some intellectual solace to the Nazis.

The intellectual partnership between B.P.L. and Freda had begun earlier, when they were fellow students at Oxford University. They fell in love, and a fruit of their personal and political alliance was a series of three volumes they edited for Gollancz with the title India Analysed.

They became engaged early in 1933 - below is their formal engagement photograph - and married at Oxford Registry Office a few months later, as soon as they had finished their final degree exams. Freda Houlston was from a middle -class family in the English Midlands. She lived a remarkable life, was jailed in Lahore by the British during the Second World War for opposing the war effort, and later became a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I'm writing her biography - it will be published soon .

The Bedis - after a sojourn in Berlin interrupted by the menace surrounding Hitler's increasing political authority - arrived in Lahore in the autumn of 1934. Contemporary India started publication within a matter of months. B.P.L. was listed as the editor and Freda as the managing editor, and they assembled an impressive list of Indian academics as contributing editors.

In politics, the quarterly both championed Bose and the radical wing of Congress, and promoted the interests of the Congress Socialist Party, in which both communists (the CPI was banned at this time) and Congress leftists gathered.

Contemporary India also published some poetry - including this piece by a youthful Balraj Sahni, later a key figure in Indian cinema:

And the journal also published a folk song translated by Nora Richards, the founder of Andretta and a champion of traditional Punjabi theatre and performance:

Freda Bedi told a friend at the close of 1936 that the quarterly was 'self-supporting. and growing every day'. But that was putting a very positive gloss on a precarious situation. The journal was short of revenue and also had to deal with official obstruction and disapproval. And the Bedis' attention moved to another venture, a much more populist political Lahore-based weekly Monday Morning, which achieved both sales and impact but has disappeared completely beneath the waves (if anyone has a copy of knows where there are any, please let me know).

A double issue published towards the close of 1937 was, it seems, Contemporary India's last. This was the only issue to contain plates - to accompany an article by Tandra Devi (aka Mrs Maud Foulds aka the violinist Maud MacCarthy) on puppet and traditional theatre.

The quarterly was a brave and important initiative and deserves the attention of historians of Indian nationalism and leftism.

UPDATED in October 2018 with the discovery in the British Library of the tenth and apparently final issue of Contemporary India.

Contemporary India: covers of all ten issues

Subhas Chandra Bose, 'India Abroad'

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Hornsey: the town hall without a Borough

22/9/2018

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Some buildings are nothing special from the outside but nothing less than magnificent within. Hornsey Town Hall, for instance ... which isn't in Hornsey but Crouch End, and has only been a town hall for thirty of its 80+ years.

From Crouch End Broadway, it looks a touch drab - more like a power station than a hive of municipal activity. And that's in spite of the ample open space which it overlooks - a really fantastic amenity which is only occasionally made the most of.

Hornsey became a municipal borough in 1903. It was another thirty years before the borough took on the task of building a town hall. But when Hornsey did commission a municipal HQ, it did so in style.

Reginald Uren designed what is sometimes described as the first modernist public building in the country - the opening ceremony was on 4th November 1935. Today, as part of Open House, I had a chance to see inside - not the council chamber, which is not currently accessible, but the main hall, and the long gallery which looks out onto the Broadway.

The building is a little decayed, but the detail is all there - magnificently so . Take a look -

Hornsey became part of the London Borough of Haringey in 1965. The town hall was downgraded to municipal offices. The building has been seeking a purpose to match its size and ambition ever since. And broadly, without success. It was for a while on the 'at risk' register.

So Hornsey is - along with similar marvellous buildings in Hampstead, Finsbury, Holborn and elsewhere - a town hall without a Borough.

The hall was once widely used - and indeed Ray Davies has declared that the Kinks played their first gig here, though the Clissold Arms also lays claim to that honour.

Labour-controlled Haringey council has now done a deal with a Hong Kong-based property consortium to develop the town hall into an arts and performance hub, along with the building of a hotel and a hundred or more apartments immediately behind. The plan hasn't gone down all that well with local civic groups.

The town hall should be back in action, reborn, in 2020 (at least that's what they say)!

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The books of New York City

9/9/2018

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I'm just back from a few days in New York - an end-of-summer break which included (the first time I've ever managed this) visits to two very contrasting second-hand book dealers. Strand Books, on Broadway and 12th near Union Square, boasts eighteen miles of books, and on the top floor has a very welcoming rare book room. I picked up there this signed copy of a title by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in my view the doyen of the Beat poets and the founder of the City Lights bookshop and imprint in San Francisco. He turns 100 next March.

Ferlinghetti has signed an awful lot of books over the years and this wasn't a first edition or anything like that - that was reflected in the modest price. I'm so pleased to have a signed Ferlinghetti.

And there was other choice material ... This first-hand account of the early stages of the Spanish Civil War was published by Lawrence and Wishart, the British Communist imprint, in October 1936. Frank Pitcairn was the pseudonym of Claud Cockburn, who reported from Spain for the Daily Worker.

Again this was reasonably priced for a very clean first edition in a slightly chipped dust jacket ... and again this was made more intriguing by an inscription.

Jose Alemany was a Catalan-American photographer with close links to the Spanish leftists; Ray Valinsky was a Pittsburgh-based Communist who gets passing mention in the minutes of the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities.

I asked in the rare book room if they had anything in the way of political pamphlets - nothing, it seemed. But a trawl round the shelves proved them wrong. I came across these really nice anarchist propaganda pieces from a century and more ago:

And top marks for the Strand's very apposite selection of badges - I love them almost as much as old pamphlets:

The following day I came across a very different type of book store - the by-appointment-only Jumel Terrace Books near Sugar Hill in Harlem, approximately 150 blocks north of Strand Books, It's run by an exceptionally knowledgeable bibliophile and librarian, Kurt Thometz, whose passion is for West African pamphlets, often libidinous in nature, and also extends to African and African-American literature and politics.

He's also an enthusiast for the American radical Aaron Burr, vice-president during Thomas Jefferson's first term and now destined forever to be remembered as the man who shot dead Hamilton, the guy the musical is about, in a duel. Burr once lived in a very stylish mansion just across the road from Kurt's place.

A real treat to meet Kurt, see some of his library and his wonderful brown stone house - and yes, I did buy a few items. Take a look ...

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On the Bayou

7/9/2018

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It's a wonderfully ethereal landscape - the Bayou, the lattice of brackish, slow-moving waterways in the Mississippi delta. We went on a 'swamp tour' just outside New Orleans, a tourist venture, raucous at times, but a memorable glimpse of this curiously bewitching place.

The light coloured, feathery, ectoplasm-like foliage is Japanese moss, a fungus which thrives on the Bayou.

The big attraction of the Bayou is its alligators - lots of them. The Cajun guides on the boats feed them marsh mallows, clearly a much valued reptilian treat. Some of these alligators swim towards the boats in anticipation of the titbits on offer. They are accustomed to the tourist boats, but there is still a menacing majesty to these beasts.

This was a highlight of ten days in the US - which took me and my son to Miami and New York as well as New Orleans. To quote Hank Williams:

Jambalaya, crawfish pie and fillet gumbo
For tonight, I'm-a gonna see my ma cher a mi-o
Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou

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Andrew Whitehead's
Blog

'Contemporary India: a national quarterly' UPDATED

Contemporary India: covers of all ten issues

Subhas Chandra Bose, 'India Abroad'

Hornsey: the town hall without a Borough

The books of New York City

On the Bayou

Andrew Whitehead's blog

Archives

Categories

​Andrew Whitehead'sBlog

'Contemporary India: a national quarterly' UPDATED

Contemporary India: covers of all ten issues

​Subhas Chandra Bose, 'India Abroad'

Hornsey: the town hall without a Borough

The books of New York City

On the Bayou

Andrew Whitehead's blog

Archives

Categories

Andrew Whitehead's
Blog

Subhas Chandra Bose, 'India Abroad'