With backing from the Indian and West Bengal governments and funds from benefactors in India and Britain, a rescue operation costing close to $1 million got under way. Thirty conservators, restorers and other experts from 19 leading galleries in Europe and North America journeyed to Calcutta to set up two studios and school the Memorial's tiny group of conservators in the latest techniques of restoring paintings and their frames. They also set about helping to preserve the museum's valuable collection of horticultural and wildlife watercolors and drawings by largely Indian artists that are today known as company paintings.

The paintings are not at all imperial, heroic or triumphant. They are snapshots of India and Europe at ease with each other.

The irony is that the collection was put together by Lord Curzon, one of England's greatest imperialists, who was Viceroy from 1899 to 1905 in the twilight of the Victorian era. Curzon's agents scoured auction houses, securing choice paintings as other collections were dispersed. He persuaded princes and maharajahs who were descendants of the original subjects to hand over the paintings. He picked up two of the Victoria Memorial's prize pieces from Britain's National Portrait Gallery by bamboozling their owners with the argument that the pictures were too big to hang in London.

But it is the 44 landscape oil paintings of Thomas and William Daniell that form the bulk of the collection. Arriving from Macao and the China coast in 1786, the Daniells painted Calcutta scenes before setting off on an extensive journey through northern and southern India, areas where no European painter had been before. They paid their way by selling their paintings at auction in Calcutta and Madras.

When the British left the subcontinent in 1947, portraits of leaders of the anticolonialist struggle and the Indian Mutiny were hung in the Memorial's galleries while many of the 18th century masterpieces were relegated to the damp, insect-infested storerooms. During the 1970s and '80s, when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister, the government debated in private whether to sell the Victoria Memorial collection and almost every other remaining artistic and historic colonial relic and use the proceeds to buy back "Indian" art that had been taken abroad. "It was a ridiculous idea," says Pronoy Mahtab, a trustee of the Memorial. "These paintings are part of India's heritage."

It is unlikely Europe will ever see them. "The paintings will never be loaned for exhibition. They are too precious, they are too fragile and distances are too great," says Mahtab. "The collection at the Victoria Memorial is there for one purpose—it represents a part of India's history, and it will stay in India." Art lovers will have to come to Calcutta—just as the artists did two centuries ago.

Top of the page

---

In a Universe of Music, a World Tour of CD's 23 February 2001, New York Times, By Jon Pareles (excerpts)

THE grandly amorphous term "world music" is now applied comprehensively to field recordings and big-budget studio pop, to deep-rooted traditionalism and cross-cultural experiments, to gimmicky one-shots and venerable non-Western classical styles. Yet amid the confusion, world music has never been less foreign to American ears. What immigrants haven't taken with them, musicians have tracked down and imported.

This is the third annual survey in these pages of world- music albums released over the previous year: a guide to some of the most enjoyable releases in a realm of unfamiliar names and bewildering packages. Amid all the choices, musicians proceed by instinct, seeking pleasure without many preconceptions. That's how listeners should approach these albums, too. Electric or acoustic, raw or synthetic, in idioms that may be slightly familiar or intriguingly alien, the music offers not just vicarious travel, but also renewed reasons to appreciate all the ways humans have devised to communicate, with and without words.

Indian music encompasses the rigorous disciplines of classical raga improvisations, countless far-flung folk traditions and popular songs that are giddy combinations of music from inside and outside India. Lately Indian disc jockeys and expatriates have also created a dance-floor style that has changed its name from bhangra (after its original Punjabi influences) to the more open-ended Asian underground.

Among recent classical releases, "Lady Astride the Tiger" (Water Lily Acoustics) is an album of gorgeously recorded raga duets by Ronu Majumdar on the bansuri (bamboo flute) with the drummers Abhijit Banerjee on tabla or Pavalu Srinivasan on mrdangam. Mr. Majumdar draws deep, melting tones from the bansuri in the meditative preludes to the ragas, as if dreaming the melodies, and when the tempo picks up and the drums join in, his phrases still hover with an otherworldly tenderness. Gopal Shankar Misra's "Out of Stillness" (Real World) is a rare recording featuring the vichitra veena, a stringed instrument that predates the sitar and has a deep, regal tone. The vichitra veena was primarily used for accompaniment, and isn't as nimble as the sitar, but in fast passages it has an endearing, pungent attack.

Unlike their Western counterparts, leading Indian classical musicians are willing to collaborate in pop projects. One that fits no category is Tabla Beat Science's "Tala Matrix" (Axiom/Palm Pictures), a project by the producer Bill Laswell that places the unstoppable tabla drumming of Zakir Hussain, and sometimes the drone of a tamboura or the voice of Ustad Sultan Khan or a dub- reggae bass line from Mr. Laswell, in an electronic wilderness of assertive riffs, surreal echoes and cross-timed rhythm salvos. The music is too aggressive to be ambient and too abstract for the dance floor; it's a genuine fusion that pours energy into the air, pauses to meditate and then rushes foward again.

"The Rough Guide to Bhangra" (World Music Network) is a cram course in bhangra, which took a forceful Punjabi folk style, carried it to England and merged it first with reggae and later with every electronic beat that club disc jockeys could come up with. "Bhangra Beatz" (Naxos World) is a more utilitarian compilation of 1990's bhangra, aimed at the dance floor. Current Asian underground music, like State of Bengal's vertiginous "Visual Audio" (Six Degrees), gleefully tears apart songs in search of momentum.

Top of the page

---

SECTS WILL TEST BOUNDS OF FAITH INITIATIVE
20 February 2001, New York Times, By Laurie Goodstein (excerpts)

PHILADELPHIA -- For almost 20 years, Hare Krishna devotees in Philadelphia have received millions of dollars in government contracts to run a network of services, including a shelter for homeless veterans, transitional homes for recovering addicts and a halfway house for parolees.

The unusual collaboration between government agencies and a religious group that depicts God as a boy with blue skin offers a glimpse of the challenges ahead for President Bush's initiative to expand government support for religious social service programs. Bush's new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives officially opens for business Tuesday. The president has said religious programs will not be judged on their beliefs, but on the results of their work.

Bush signed the executive orders launching his initiative flanked by a score of Christian ministers, two Jewish leaders and a Muslim imam, and hailed the event as a "picture of the strength and diversity" of the country. But if the religious portrait of the nation is a great stained-glass window, those leaders represent only a few large pieces of glass.

Krishna leaders, who have centers in 40 American cities, have been phoning David D. Dobson, executive director of the Philadelphia programs for the Hare Krishnas - a Hindu sect often stigmatized in this country but well-established in India - to discuss how to follow his example and become government contractors.

Top of the page

---

The word on EU streets is English
20 February 2001, UK TELEGRAPH , By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Brussels - ENGLISH is fast becoming the lingua franca of the European Union, sweeping aside French as the preferred foreign language taught in schools and the workplace. A third of EU citizens speak English as their best foreign language, compared to 9.5 per cent for French, according to a poll of 16,000 EU residents released by the European Commission yesterday. German is a distant fourth, preferred by only 4.2 per cent.

The British are revealed as Europe's worst linguists, 65.9 per cent confessing that they cannot speak any other language. At the other extreme, 97.8 per cent of Luxembourgeois speak other languages, typically French, German or English, as well as their native dialect Letzebuergesch. Four fifths of Dutch, Danes and Swedes speak English, learning it intensively at school. The overwhelming majority agree that everybody in the EU should have a working knowledge of English. Even the French, the fiercest defenders of linguistic tradition, accept by a margin of two to one that English is now de rigeur.

The results suggest that English has already won the battle to become the administrative and business language, unifying Europe's professional classes along the lines of India.

Top of the page