Born into a family of academics – his grandfather was Master of Balliol and his father Provost of Queen's College, Oxford – Thomas graduated from Balliol in 1932. Deciding against an academic career he applied for the colonial service but instead of Palestine, his preference, was offered a post in the Gold Coast. Later an esteemed historian of Africa, Hodgkin opted to travel to Palestine as an unpaid assistant on an archaeological project at Jericho. His period as an archaeology student between January 1932 and July 1933 was unsuccessful career-wise, but he used it to travel around Palestine and parts of Syria and Transjordan. In May 1934 he was back as a cadet in the Palestine civil service. Hodgkin's political views were formed out of the maelstrom of events in the 1930s. Siding with the Left and opposed to imperialism he soon found it unconscionable to be involved in the British suppression of the Palestinian Arab revolt, which began in 1936 and which he supported. He resigned leaving Palestine in the summer of 1936. Edited by his brother E.C. Hodgkin, Letters from Palestine 1932–36 was published only in 1986. Unlike Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt or Bell's Persian Letters, Hodgkin's letters were not intended for publication and so remain unpolished.

From:

Letters from Palestine 1932–36 (1986)

Rather like the young Disraeli's Home Letters (Lothair and Tancred were actually fresh in Thomas' mind when he wrote them) these letters display qualities of vivid immediacy and youthful effervescence.

A familiar sight in the area I live in, Central Calcutta, are Bohra families dressed in their distinctive robes, keeping very much to themselves as they carry on with their busy lives. Despite the fact that some of the biggest shops and showrooms of the area are owned by them, their lives and thoughts have always stayed an enigma to me. When I decided to research on this intriguing subject, I immediately faced a block. There is very little secondary material in the libraries on the Bohra community per se and the few books that are available are on the community in Gujarat and Rajasthan. There is none on the Calcutta Bohras. This is because none of the leading Bohras of Calcutta have left any account of their migration to the city or on their work here. I began by conducting interviews with some of the leading members of their society to understand the basic features of the community and their beliefs. They candidly admit that there is very little written documentation on the Bohras of Calcutta in English and whatever there is, is in Gujarati or in Lisaan-ud-Dawat which is their religious language – Deen-i-Zabaan. Thereafter I concentrated on circulating questionnaires within the community to get a broader view. My aim in this chapter is to bring into focus the distinctiveness of the culture and also show that there is no dichotomy within them between their ‘modernity’, a term by which they mean ‘use of advanced technology’, and their deep religiosity.

The DNB tells us that although he was of French Huguenot descent ‘and brought up in France and Germany, Chirol was a staunch English patriot, proud of his Anglo-Saxon Ashburnham [his mother's family] blood.’ It was not until the Franco-Prussian War broke out that he and his mother resettled in England. Though trained as a barrister the young Chirol spent four years in the Foreign Office before turning to travel: he visited Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and in 1880 Istanbul where he took up journalism. In 1882 he reported Wolseley's campaign against Urabi in Egypt for the London Standard, went to India and Persia (1884), and reported the events of 1885 in Sudan. Through his good connections he joined the newly opened Times foreign news department in 1891. After a spell as Berlin correspondent during which he became disillusioned with German politics, he returned to his desk at the Times where he was appointed foreign editor in 1899. It was while in this highly influential post that Chirol wrote The Middle East Question. Together with David Fraser, another journalist who worked under him at the Times, he helped promote what would now be considered a ‘realist’ line in which Britain's foreign policy interests were held to override the aspirations of Eastern nationalisms such as those of Persia and Turkey (Nash 2005: Ch 4).

Historical Background

Mainly a desert terrain, in 1800 the Arabian Peninsula had a population of perhaps no more than 1 million, a large part of which – excluding those living in the mountainous areas of Oman and Yemen where agriculture was practised – was pastoral, herding sheep, goats, or horses. Apart from the oases towns the major centres of population were on the coasts (Yapp 1987: 173). At the close of the eighteenth century most of the Arabs in the peninsula were independent of – and some actively hostile to – Ottoman rule. Wahhabis in Central Arabia, and in the South East Ibadis in Oman and Zaydis in Yemen, each functioned beyond Ottoman authority. In the Hijaz the Sherifs of Mecca ruled the holy cities but there was an Ottoman governor at Jeddah (Hourani 1991: 251, 253). In this period Arabia was therefore isolated but subject to expansive forces from within. The Wahhabis, whose power emanated from an alliance between the puritanical doctrine of the religious reformer Abdul Wahhab (1703–92) and the political leadership of the al-Saud clan, were the dominant political force in the subcontinent before Muhammad Ali's campaigns against them (1811–8). By 1840 the Egyptians had withdrawn leaving Central Arabia under Wahhabi control; an Ottoman return in Arabia was slow in coming and only took off after 1880 (Yapp: 174–5).

In my earlier monograph, Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel (2000), I had argued that English novels by Indians had a more complex genealogy than was normally supposed. That they were the inheritors of two different literary traditions, English and Indian, and also of two linguistic ones as Meenakshi Mukherjee suggested by dubbing them ‘twice born’ is by now well-recognized. But what was not equally clear was how we might understand and evaluate their larger civilizational burden. For this, one needed to connect them not only with other fictional works in many Indian languages or with those forms of narrative, such as vernacular prose chronicles or romances, which came before them, but also to the classical literary traditions, particularly the great epics of India. If we did so, we would not only be closer to defining their identity but also to evaluating them.

My earlier project, which tried to do this, was thus an endeavour to ‘define both the commonness and the uniqueness’ of the Indian English [IE] novel (12) and to see ‘how this genre has evolved and developed in the last 150 years’ so as to delineate the ‘tradition of the IE, to identify its main types, and to spell out its relation to the broader cultural formations of our country’ (12–13). I argued that the age-old framework of the purusharthas, enunciated not only in the Manu Smriti or the Mahabharata, but also in Bharata's Natyasastra, could come in handy.

Happiness in Russian Culture: Introductory Remarks The specificity of the concept of happiness in Soviet culture is best understood against the background of how this concept was traditionally interpreted in Russian culture. Vladimir Dahl's authoritative dictionary of the Russian language, first published in 1863, accorded two meanings to the word. The primary meaning is given as ‘success, lucky chance, something unforeseen but desirable’. The secondary meaning refers to ‘happiness’ in the sense that this word would be used in English—‘bliss and the complete fulfilment of one's wishes’. While a number of articles published recently have dealt with the place of schast'e in the Russian linguistic world-picture in terms of its ‘semantic universals’, so to speak, these seem to have left out something of fundamental importance to the understanding of the word: what one might term the ‘metaphysics of happiness’ in Russian tradition.

As has often been noted, both nexuses of meaning are derived from concepts of fortune and fate, one's ‘portion’. The basic morphological and semantic component of the word schast'e is easy to identify—chast' (a piece or portion of something, cf. uchast', ‘fate’). The prefix s' (c ъ) with reduced vowel has been identified as originally meaning ‘good, kind’, which means that the whole word can be interpreted as meaning ‘kind fate’, ‘good fortune’.

With Lady Anne Blunt and Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark completes the triumvirate of renowned British women travellers to Arabia. Like Doughty, her motivation to travel may have been to escape an unhappy background as well as to find freedom in unfamiliar and exotic places. Brought up in Asolo in northern Italy – where she lived with her mother and sister – at the age of 12 Freya was injured in an accident in the basket factory her mother had set up for her Italian lover. Educated at Bedford College, London, she spent the early years of the Great War as a nurse, only starting to travel in the Middle East relatively late when in her early thirties, having studied briefly at the London School of Oriental Studies in 1927. She then lived for periods in Damascus and Baghdad, her first piece of writing, Baghdad Sketches, appearing in 1933 and Letters from Syria in 1942. Two books on her travels in southern Arabia are: The Southern Gates of Arabia and Winter in Arabia (1940). While frequently celebrated for her romantic view of Eastern lands and closeness to the peoples amongst whom she travelled, and for her spirit of independence that resulted in run-ins with British colonial officials (‘she was denounced for having challenged authority and forsaken her European character’ (En-Nehas, LTE: 1136)) it is sometimes overlooked that during her earlier Middle East travels, Stark was actually working for the British government.

Born Jean Louis Burckhardt into a wealthy Swiss manufacturing and trading family, Burckhardt was forced to leave Switzerland as a result of his father's falling out with the new order thrown up by the French Revolution. After studying at Leipzig and Göttingen universities he moved to England (1806) where he gained employment with the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (1808). He studied Arabic at Cambridge University before travelling to Syria staying in Aleppo for two years (1809–11) where he acquired a scholarly knowledge of Arabic and the Qur'an. He also travelled in Lebanon and Palestine before reaching Cairo in September 1812. Burckhardt's identity therefore twice shifted: the new ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, believed the Swiss to be an English spy, even though he had adopted the persona of Sheykh Ibrahim, a poor Muslim scholar of Aleppo. Journeys in Upper Egypt and Nubia followed, before Burckhardt determined to put his Arab identity to the ultimate test by going to Mecca and Medina where he eventually stayed for two years (1814–15). Travelling in reduced circumstances and plagued by ill health, a combination of his remarkable knowledge of written and spoken Arabic and the ambiguous protection of Muhammad Ali ensured that he succeeded in taking sufficient notes to be able later to write his seminal Travels in Arabia (1829) This and two other works, Travels in Nubia (1819) and Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (1822), were published posthumously under the auspices of the Africa Association, Burckhardt having died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817.

Described by Harry St. John Philby as ‘probably the greatest of all explorers’ Thesiger lived to see the traditional ways and the last unfilled spaces of the Middle East disappear. Born and until the age of eight brought up in Abyssinia where his father was consul-general and minister plenipotentiary, he imbibed from his earliest days the best traditions of the colonial service's dedication to service in foreign lands. After an undistinguished education at Eton and Oxford, he joined the Sudan political service in 1935. To his early exploration in Abyssinia was added several years trekking in the deserts of western Sudan and Libya. The Second World War campaign against the Italians brought him back to Abyssinia; he also saw service in Syria, North Africa and Palestine. But it was in the years immediately after the war that Thesiger embarked on his now celebrated journeys in Oman and the Empty Quarter. His first crossing took place in 1946–7, beginning and ending at Salalah on the coast of south-west Arabia. On this, the second crossing of 1947–8, as well as on further journeys in 1949 and 1950, Thesiger travelled with two Bedouin youths, Salim bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha. He wrote Arabian Sands, his narrative of these journeys a decade later. This and The Marsh Arabs (1964), the product of yearly visits to the marshes of southern Iraq until 1958, brought fame and acclamation.

Insiders and Outsiders

It would not be an exaggeration to consider Kiran Nagarkar as one of the least recognized and most talented of Indian English novelists. As such his best book Cuckold (1997), is an obvious and fitting candidate for this book celebrating another canon of Indian English fiction. But before I discuss this text, it would be useful to locate Kiran Nagarkar in the tradition of Indian English writing because as a bilingual and marginalized writer, he himself quite aptly represents alternate canonicity. I wish to approach my task in a somewhat unorthodox way by beginning both on a personal and a parochial note. Originally, the context of such a beginning was Kiran Nagarkar's winning the Sahitya Akademi award in 2001 for the best book in English by an Indian author. Since I knew Kiran and was one of those who had nominated this book for the award, I was particularly thrilled that he got the award – though it came not a day too soon.

Even at the risk of sounding somewhat chauvinistic, I must point out that Nagarkar is not only the first Maharashtrian to get the award for English fiction, but also the first Chitpavan Brahmin to be so recognized. Such an observation, quite paradoxically, becomes relevant or significant precisely because any attempt to capitalize on or emphasize Kiran's Chitpavan-ness or Marathi-ness so as to place him in a larger body of writers or a tradition of writing, comes a cropper.

Sikh migration to the West is well-known. The voice of these rich overseas Sikhs signifies a powerful political force in the current Punjab situation. It is generally communicated through electronic mail, telephonic conversation, postal correspondence, print media, regular remittance and marriage network. Contemporary Punjab leadership also shows respect to this opinion.

The situation is slightly different for Agraharis of Calcutta. They initially came from Bihar more than two hundred years ago, and represent one of the earliest settlers in the city. Neither are they regular visitors of the Harimandir Sahib in Amritsar nor do their views ever figure in any serious public platform. Demographically speaking, they constitute a microscopic minority representing less than .01 per cent of the total population of the metropolis. By virtue of long residence in Calcutta, their lifestyle and taste have increasingly converged with those of the local milieu. They know Bengali well but communicate in their mother tongue (Bhojpuri) when they interact amongst themselves. These Sikhs do not know Punjabi and prefer to maintain a line of demarcation from the numerically dominant Punjabi-speaking Sikhs in the locality. In terms of ethnic identity and physical distinctiveness, the native Sikhs have very little in common with their Punjabi counterparts of the region. The latter constitute a larger group and represent approximately .01 per cent of Calcutta's population. They do not consider Agraharis to be their equals or even pukka (true) Sikhs. To them these indigenous Sikhs are a little sluggish in maintaining the Sikh communal identity markers.