An illustration from ‘Jungle Nama’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Ecological concerns echo from ‘Jungle Nama’, Amitav Ghosh’s verse adaptation of the medieval Bengali tale about the forest goddess, Bon Bibi
While researching for his 2016 book,
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh paid close attention to the way premodern texts are written and designed, specifically how they engage with the natural world. Among other things, the book elaborates upon two points: medieval texts across language and region have a wide-ranging engagement with nature, and a great many of them have a strong visual component to them. The illustrations aren’t static accessories; they are essential to the ‘grammar’ of these texts.
Swearing like sailors: What the profanities of lascars can teach today’s divided world
The creole language they created shows how finding a way to share experiences can help transcend seemingly insurmountable chasms. Feb 07, 2021 · 11:30 am Lascar crew on the P&O liner Viceroy of India. | National Maritime Museum from Greenwich, United Kingdom, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
How do people from diverse lands share experiences and emotions as they work together in the tight confines of a ship vessel? Sometimes, they create new languages to bridge the divisions. That’s what the lascars did – with a salty, colourful vocabulary.
A group of sailors and militiamen who served on European ships from the 16th century to the 20th century, lascars were drawn from several colonised lands – Chinese, East Africans, Arabs, Malays, Bengalis, Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. The word by which they were known was derived from the Persian word “lashkar”