Celebrating Europe
An Asian Journey
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
Cover
Title Page, Copyright

Introduction: Europe
The world is in large part a European invention. Europe has created, named, and shaped every historical era, from the classical world and the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and their culmination in the modern age of the nation-state, and now to the postmodern lease of life promised by the supranationalism of the European Union.1 ...

1. Europe Abroad
Sheikh Abdullah was a prosperous landowner and trader in the Hooghly district of undivided Bengal. He was a devout Muslim. In the course of his business pursuits during the British Raj, he once had to meet an Englishman. What would happen if he had to shake the pork-eater’s hand, he wondered darkly. ...

2. Gentiles
The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem is purgatory. One goes there to pay for other people’s sins, but comes out purified all the same. One emerges a Jew. The photographic exhibits soon overwhelm the senses; one grows immune to the tragic residues of suffering because suffering is depicted on such an epic scale and, therefore, diffused. ...

3. The Berlin Wall
Jan Kott, the Polish theatre critic and theoretician who witnessed both Nazi terror and Stalinist repression, is remembered best for his daring book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.1 In his preface to the book, Peter Brook, the British director, describes how he first met Kott. ...

5. The Secular Soul
The Quai d’Orsay invited a dozen Asian journalists to savour the feel of France in the summer of 2004. On a free day during the trip, my tourist map of Paris led me to to the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Many religious observances, whatever the faith, are almost funereal in nature. ...

7. England
Presidency College shares a playing field with Hare School, my father’s school. Like the school, the establishment of the college in 1817 had opened an early chapter of the Bengal Renaissance. An extraordinary quickening of the senses accompanied every class or tutorial with our teachers at Presidency, most of whom had been students of the college themselves. ...

8. Champagne France
The programme for the trip to France in 2004 included an “optional” visit to the House of Moët & Chandon in the Champagne region. As the highway from Paris branched off into Epernay after two hours on the bus, rolling acres of vineyards and fairy-tale villages captured the view. ...

9. Two Benagli Greeks
Rajkumar’s and Rajkumari’s paths crossed when they entered Presidency College, Calcutta, Rajkumari to read History, and Rajkumar, Bengali. Rajkumar did not restrict his exertions to the classroom; in fact, he did some reading lying where Rajkumari could study him between her classes. ...
E-ISBN-13: 9789814311519
Print-ISBN-13: 9789814311502
Page Count: 175
Publication Year: 2012
Edition: 1
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