LEGAL LUMINARIES

100 Legal Luminaries of India ; Published by LexisNexis; Pages 465 ; Price Rs 4500/-                                                                                      *********************  

 This is a magnificent Coffee Table book on 100 legal luminaries of India. It highlights the men behind the black robes—their personal desires, hobbies, pastime and the road map of success that distinguished them from the rest.

       

Behind the laudable project is a team comprising members who have experience in the legal field, journalism, research, content development, photography. Of course the team is fortunate to have as their Mentor, Lalit Bhasin, who is the President of the “ Society of Indian Law Firms”.

The volume is divided into four parts—it recounts the journeys of struggle and success of eminent counsel, law firms, in-house counsels and teachers of Law.

In each life-sketch of the luminaries what is succinctly furnished are the influences of their families and their own experiences as a child, parent, friend-  their remarkable success—how they captured “ heights of glory”. What makes them stand out is the boundless energy and zest for life which they display through their interests, lifestyles and hobbies ranging from music and theatre to travelling and trekking.

The first Section on “ Eminent Senior Counsels “ has 51 luminaries. Obviously in a brief review we cannot cover all and we select a few.

Abhishek Manu Singhvi, born with a silver spoon in his mouth believes in the motto—            “ Work hard, enjoy life and die with your boots on “. He holds the record for being the  youngest “ Senior” designated by the High Court at the age 34, the youngest Solicitor General at 37 and one of the youngest Vice-Presidents of the Supreme Court Bar Association at 39.

Fali Nariman is a celebrated constitutional jurist and an authority on international arbitration. He is noted for his humility, humour and eloquence. His integrity is impeccable. He resigned from the post of Additional Solicitor General in protest against the infamous Emergency. His son Rohinton Nariman is a sitting Judge in the Supreme Court of India.

 Indira Jaising is a pioneer in fighting on issues for women. A set of variegated cases argued by her include “ Rupen Deol, Mary Roys and the Landmark case of Githa Hariharan”. She always wanted to be in a profession that lent her opportunities to make critical difference to people’s lives. A Hindustani classical enthusiast, she sings and practices with her Guru, Shamsher Sing. Jaising is the first woman to be elected to the  U N Committee on elimination of discrimination against women and the first woman to become India’s Additional Solicitor General.

The present Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Shri.Ravi Shankar Prasad is the son of a highly distinguished Patna advocate. He argued and won in the case of a muslim prisoner incarcerated for 49 years without trial. He won for the victim freedom and a good monetary compensation. Prasad  was jailed during the Emergency and he used the time to study Hindu philosophy, Marxism and the classics. His wife Maya and Ravi share interest in Hindustani classical and Carnatic music.

Soli Sorabjee has unfailingly fought to uphold constitutional law as well as freedom of speech and expression. This octogenarian remains a strident voice of caution against injustice speaking up for tolerance and human rights. He has held several high international judicial posts. Of his four children Zia is a lawyer and two grandchildren are prospective lawyers. Soli is not all law. He is a lover of poetry and a Jazz buff. He plays the clarinet gifted to him by Benny Goodman and he started the Jazz Yatra in 1978.

Under the leadership of Dr.Lalit Bhasin, a Society of Indian Law Firms was established and it advises on matters of corporate law, taxation, contracts and intellectual property laws. The book has a section dedicated to 40 law firms. Dr.Lalit Bhasin has been a legend in the Indian legal firmament. He has annexed several awards but declared,  “I am the only second Indian to be made President of the Inter-Pacific Bar Association” His vision is to make India a hub of arbitration and mediation for international commercial disputes. Other law firms include, inter alia  those headed by Akil Hirani, Anand Phatak, R.N.Jhunjhunwala, Zia Mody.

There are four In-House Counsel members and ten Legal Educators. These ten highly respected teachers were the Gurus of the eminent lawyers appearing in the earlier parts of the book. A great tribute to the great masters.

This is an outstanding contribution to the legal history of Free India, The rich and opulent photographs of the luminaries, their families ( and their dogs too !) can match the best of the classics of Yosuf Karsh of Ottawa.

The book throws a flood of light on the luminaries and is compulsory reading for all lawyers, students of law and of Indian history. LexisNexis has covered itself in glory with this resplendent tribute to the best and brightest of those men  in black robes.

P.P.Ramachandran.

26/07/2020.

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SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson ; Published by Harper Collins; Pages200; Price Rs 325/-

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An impressive series of biographies edited by James Atlas include “Muhammad” by Karen Armstrong, “Thomas Jefferson” by Christopher Hitchens and “Beethoven” by Edmund Morris. The latest in this series is “Shakespeare’ by Bill Bryson. Bryson, is of course the well known author of “A Short History Of Nearly Everything”, which book was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, bagged the Aventis Prize for Science books in 2004 and was also awarded the Descartes Prize in 2005. Bryson’s last book was the semi-autobiographical hilarious “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”. 

 The book under review is a biography of William Shakespeare which will cause several eyebrows to be raised—Since there are thousands of books on the Bard of Avon—why one more?. Reading the volume will make one realise that biographies of Shakespeare have so far been based on a jungle of wild speculation based on negligible, unverified facts.

Bill Bryson has waded through the entire Shakespeare-iana, sifted and recorded episodes in his research with considerable wit and commendable vigour. The biography is at once a vivid, fast paced work that encompasses every facet of the Bard’s life and times.

Facts unavailable hitherto tumble out of this cornucopia and a few are culled out and given for the entertainment and education of the reader.

Scholars have counted every word Shakespeare wrote, logged every dib and jot. Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks ; ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays ; his characters refer to ‘love’ 2,259 times but to ‘hate’ only 183 times; altogether he left us 888,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.

Much is made of Shakespeare’s learning—he knew as much as a lawyer, doctor or statesman or accomplished professional of his age. He is supposed to have deduced the orbital motions of heavenly bodies well before any astronomer did. Shakespeare was made into a Committee of Talents. His vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs and natural history. He mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms.

However ,Bryson proves that Shakespeare’s knowledge was not all that distinguished. He gets his geography wrong. He puts a sail- maker in Bergamo-- the most landlocked city in Italy. If he knew Venice had canals, he gave no hint of it in the plays he set there. Ancient Egyptians played billiards. Caesar’s Rome has clock –the first one ticked fourteen hundred years later. Whatever his other virtues Shakespeare was not conspicuously worldly.

Shakespeare’s real gift was as a phrasemaker. Many of his phrases have entered the common language. Among them : one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, more in sorrow than in anger, tower of strength, foregone conclusion.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, then roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances in English are from Shakespeare- –an impressive proportion, indeed.

Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost except for the efforts of his close friends John Hemminges and Henry Condell who brought out a folio edition of his complete works. It contained 18 plays. The great repository of the First Folio today is a modest building two blocks away from the Capitol Hill in Washington D.C—the Folger Shakespearean Library.

Mention must be made of the ludicrous attempt of P.T.Barnum of “ Barnum and Bailey Circus” fame –who tried shipping to U S A the birthplace of Shakespeare , placing it on wheels and sending it on a perpetual tour round the country—a prospect so alarming that money was swiftly raised in Britain, through a Committee headed by Charles Dickens-- to save the house as a museum

and shrine.

 This reviewer had a chance to pay homage to Shakespeare at his birth-place and was deeply moved by the impressive manner in which it is preserved for posterity.

Lytton Strachey wrote , “the first duty of a biographer is to preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant”. Strachey who evolved a new genre of biographical writing could not have had a better disciple than Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson’s book is a tour-de-force and worth reading and re-reading many times. It is pure nectar.

P.P.Ramachandran.

19/7/2020.

RAVI VARMA

Raja Ravi Varma - Painter of Colonial India by Rupika Chawla; Published by Mapin; Pages 360; Price Rs.3950/-

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The Governor of Maharashtra - Shri. K. Sankaranarayanan, releasing the book under review said, Raja Ravi Varma was a rare phenomenon to have happened to the world of art and it was he who brought Indian paintings on the world canvas, gave ‘face’ to many Gods and Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. If there was ever a painter who could claim to have completely changed the way popular Indian imagination pictured its Gods, Goddesses, myths and legends, then it was that charismatic Keralite Raja Ravi Varma.

This book by Rupika Chawla is an account of the painter from a royal family in the background  of colonial India, and the impact of  this milieu on his profession as an aristocratic itinerant painter. This lavishly illustrated book is a great collection of paintings from royal and private collections and museums, and works hitherto unseen, along with previously undisclosed maps, letters, photographs and other archival material.

For this magnificent Coffee Table book Chawla has travelled all over the country for long many years, prising out the slightest of secrets. This book offers fresh insights especially into the way he painted and obtained from the diary of the Raja of Aundh (near Pune), in whose court the prince-painter spent a lot of time painting. The Raja was a very careful observer and questioner and asked genuine questions. To quote the author, “he writes about the way Raja Ravi Varma painted, the hours he painted and about the time and trouble he took to get emotion on the faces he made, reworking them several times... He also writes about the painter’s fascination for the nine yard sari because it showed the body so well.” Chawla portrays the times the painter lived in. She shows us how this modern man with a vision was able to use turn-of-the-century technological innovations such as electricity, the railways, newspapers and oleographs.

The author, who is the wife of the ex-Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, is a conservator of paintings based in Delhi who has restored several Ravi Varma paintings at her studio in Delhi and also gives training in conservation. Together with artist A. Ramachandran she organized the seminal exhibition on Raja Ravi Varma in 1993 at the National Museum, Delhi, which brought about a strong revival of the artist and his work.

This well-researched book traces the sources used by Ravi Varma, examines the techniques and methodology of his paintings, and discusses their conservation and the problem of fakes and copies and is a goldmine for historians, collectors, curators and art lovers.

Rupika Chawla revealed how she was fascinated by the Kerala painter and spent over two decades tracing his life, locating lost paintings, and interviewing descendants of his family members, friends and acquaintances. This book provides a peek into the artist’s inner world, his muses, visits to different parts of the country and the influences in his work.

The author declared that very little was known about this painter. Who was he? How was he able to make the kind of paintings he made, what motivated him, what was his background, the times he lived in, who were the people he knew, his collectors, the value of his art - then and now, his technique and method of painting, the people who were influenced by him and the value of his art today. In her research, all these questions were answered, and much more. Her favorite paintings were the Mysore collection. They were among the last that Ravi Varma did. In terms of composition, they are complex, well executed and exquisitely beautiful, while also concentrating and expressing the drama that involves their narrative. Ravi Varma balanced tradition and modernity, combined business enterprise with his love of painting, understood the commercial value of art and was a forerunner in propagating art. With that in mind he started the oleograph press and wished to make a museum but died before he could manage that.

Raja Ravi Varma was born on April 29, 1848, in Kilimanoor, Kerala. He belonged to a family of scholars, poets and artists. Noted in his family were Vidwan Koil Tampuran, author of the famous Kathakali work Ravana Vijayam; Raja Raja Varma, who painted after the Tanjore style, and Uma Amba Bai Tampuratty who composed Parvati Swayamvaram, a work for the tullal dance. As a small boy, he filled the walls of his home with pictures of animals, acts and scenes from his daily life, which impressed his uncle, Raja Raja Varma as the signs of a blossoming genius. The uncle, not only gave the first drawing lessons to his nephew, but took a keen interest in his further training and education with the help of the ruling king, Ayilyam Thirunal. When he was only 14, Ravi Varma was sent to Thiruvananthapuram where he stayed in the Kilimanoor palace and was taught water painting by the palace painter Ramaswami Naidu. Here Varma’s talent was nurtured by the personal interest of the King who exposed him to the famous paintings of Italian painters. Ravi Varma had been using the indigenous paints made from leaves, flowers, tree bark and soil which his uncle Raja Raja Varma prepared for him. His first set of oil paints was brought from Madras after noticing a newspaper advertisement.

Rupika Chawla has done detection of an extraordinary type for this book on the life and times of Raja Ravi Varma, considered by many to be India’s first modern painter. She has given us the portrait of a man in full by doggedly following the most evanescent of clues across India, ferreting out unknown Ravi Varma paintings, digging into dispersed archives, studying scores of his work, tracing his scattered descendants in pursuit of bits of information or some forgotten and damaged Ravi Varma canvas - even making the slightest of links lead into fascinating revelations.

The readers are taken on a journey and we can almost visualise the painter prince’s life unfold before us and Chawla draws for us a picture of his artistic struggles. We also learn more about his models and muses. The author has effectively used the diaries of his younger brother C. Raja Raja Varma - they worked and travelled together on commissions.  A man ahead of his times, he was a marketing genius and shrewd entrepreneur. He set up the Ravi Varma Fine Arts Lithographic Press to make his art more accessible, to travel far beyond the circle of wealthy patrons. Not satisfied with the quality of the prints in India, he dispatched a man to Germany in 1893 to find an expert chromo-lithograph printer who could help them produce superior Indian-made oleographs. The young German Fritz Schleicher came to India and became the printer and manager of the oleograph and chromo-lithograph workshop. Chawla tracked down Schleicher’s grandson, Robert Sandhu, to garner fascinating details about the collaboration between Schleicher and the Varma brothers.

Till Ravi Varma arrived on the scene, Indian art was wondrous, metaphoric, symbolic, abstract, geometric and much more but never directly representational of the retinal reality. Most importantly, Hindu Gods were not perceived to be made in the image of man. They were portrayed by the depiction of their attributes in hundreds of different styles and manners. But the setting up of the Ravi Varma Press in 1894 in Bombay changed all that. Soon, from Simla to Trivandrum and from Calcutta to Bombay, every middle-class Hindu home in the 20th century was and is decorated with highly affordable prints of Ravi Varma’s “natural and realistic” renderings of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Rama, Sita and Hanuman, to name just a few. Moreover, Ravi Varma’s penchant for the dramatic pageant influenced popular theatre and films, thereby increasing the impact of his artifice manifold.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the medium of oil on-canvas itself was new to India and Ravi Varma’s chosen style of painting European realism (though outmoded in Europe by then) - was still unfamiliar and novel here. But once Ravi Varma had mastered both his technique and his style around the 1870s, there was no stopping him. His familial links with the Travancore ruling family ensured a network of connections that led to a spate of commissions ranging from tiny states like Pudukottai, Aundh and Bhavnagar to big ones like Mysore, Baroda and Hyderabad. He was much sought after not only for his portraits but also for his “thematic” paintings depicting pivotal scenes from Hindu myths and Sanskrit literature.

Paradoxically in contrast to his immense mass appeal and popular influence as India’s first painter of iconic images, the life and legacy of Ravi Varma had never been seriously studied till now. This volume, which admirably fills a gap, is not a heavy academic tome. In style and substance, it is hugely engaging, carrying its scholarship with a remarkable lightness of grace. Chawla’s chronicling of Ravi Varma’s life and works is full of anecdotes from secondary sources such as accounts of his patrons, colleagues and friends, the most important among these being the diaries kept by his beloved brother C. Raja Raja Varma, who was his pupil and partner in virtually all of the commissions and enterprises that Ravi Varma undertook.

What makes this book  significantly different is that it covers brilliantly social, cultural and political life in colonial India - especially that of the native princes and attempts to underline the newly emerging dynamic link between technology and a colonised society bound by moribund feudal values that was aspiring to modernity, freedom and democracy. So the “shortening of time and distances” by the coming of the Railways, the place of art “in the time of mechanical reproduction” and the double-edged politics of cultural nationalism all come into focus in this absorbing narrative of a painterly transience.

05/07/2020