बाळ गंगाधर टिळक, जपानची मेजी राज्यघटना आणि १८९५चे स्वराज बिल...How Meiji Constitution Moved B. G. Tilak

Linda Colley, 'The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World', 2021:  

“…There was yet another massive Asian empire in constitutional flux at this time – British India. Unlike the others, it did not erupt into revolution in the decades immediately before 1914. But levels of activism and resistance increased, and so did the production of innovative constitutional texts. Pressure for change and reform had been growing here since the repression of the Indian Revolt of 1857. Some of the military rebels that year had themselves produced a twelve-point political document, the Dastur-ul Amal, an embryonic constitution. There were also attempts from the 1860s onwards in some of the Indian princely states to draft local written constitutions. But the first major, though unofficial, attempt at writing a full-scale political constitution for the Indian subcontinent as a whole was the Swaraj (or Self-rule) Bill of 1895.

This text seems to have been mainly the work of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an educationalist and journalist from western India, who was deeply conservative on the matter of women’s rights but influential in his early nationalism, and from 1890 a member of the Indian National Congress. Tilak planned that – were his Swaraj Bill to pass – the resulting act would be called the ‘Constitution of India Act’. Moreover, as the draft introduction to the bill made clear, this legislation was to extend ‘to the whole of India’. Its 110 articles included broad provisions for rights. There was to be freedom of speech and written expression in India. There was to be a right to petition, equality before the law and free state education. And, as in the Meiji constitution, all citizens (which in practice meant men) were to enjoy equal access to public employments, and to have a duty to bear arms if need be.

Indian historians have yet to investigate the echoes between these and other provisions in the Swaraj Bill of 1895 and the Meiji constitution six years earlier. Yet that these should have existed was hardly surprising. The detailed commentary published on Japan’s constitution in 1889 had been issued in an English translation, while the text itself was widely reported on and extracted in the British and Indian press. A highly educated man like Tilak would have found it easy, and, given his interests and ambitions, irresistible, to familiarise himself with a pioneering east Asian example of engineered constitutional reconfiguration, along with British and American political and legal writings.

 Recognising this helps to explain why the Swaraj Bill strives for some of the compromises between modernity, conservatism and tradition that also appealed to the Meiji elite. In Tilak’s plan there was to be a bicameral parliament for the ‘Indian nation’, just as Itō Hirobumi and his allies had sought a bicameral parliament to give expression to a remodelled and reinvigorated Japanese nation. But, as in Meiji Japan, formal sovereign power in Tilak’s reformed India was to be invested in a monarch, in this case, the Empress of India, Britain’s Queen Victoria. Like the emperor in Japan, she was to function in India as a still point in a fast evolving realm….”

 Meiji Constitution promulgation, 1889 by Toyohara Chikanobu

Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin@30

Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin was released on July 12 1991.

Kneeding A Lift, 1940

Artist: Gil Elvgren

Can There Be Tragedy In a World That Is At Bottom Chaotic?

आज जुलै १० २०२१, जी ए कुलकर्णी यांची जयंती 

John Gray:
"...Even if the ancient Greek tragedians did not believe in the gods, they assumed a kind of order in the world; it was against this order that tragic heroes rebelled. But can there be tragedy in a world that is at bottom chaotic? This was the question posed by George Steiner in his seminal book The Death of Tragedy, first published in 1961..."

David Simon: 
“...to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The idea that… we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious… But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts… In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalised, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak....”

Artist: B E Kaplan, The New Yorker, 2018

My book is a painting: Marcel Proust@150...The Colouring of a Ghirlandaio

Eric Karpeles, "Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to 'In Search of Lost Time", 2008:

"...Like the labyrinthine galleries of the Louvre frequented by the young Marcel Proust and his friends. In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du tempsperdu) houses a vast repository of paintings. In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art from the trecento to the twentieth century, from primitivism to futurism, from Giotto to Leon Bakst. Whether plunging into Proust for the first or the fifth time, each reader encounters many esoteric and increasingly obscure pictorial references that keep testing his mettle. These can leave him nodding his head, with a smile frozen on his face just like the Princesse de Parme...."

Marcel Proust, 'Swann's Way' from "Remembrance of Things Past/ In Search of Lost Time", 1913-1927:

"...He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern original, whom it was not intended to represent...."

 "An Old Man and His Grandson", 1490 by Domenico Ghirlandaio