Forward:
Shaharnama Jabalpur is a wonderful new book for me. It is about the life and times and people of the town of Jabalpur in central India. Written in Hindi by Dinesh Choudhary, it has been well translated by Lakshmi Kant Sharma for us English speakers.
I wrote the forward for this book which makes me a bit nostalgic about my childhood days in Jabalpur where my parents James Edward McEldowney and Ruth lived and worked. I was born in 1941 in Nagpur and spent my childhood during my winter vacation months in the 1950s.
Jabalpur is an amazing town – surrounded by exiting places such as Bhedaghat or Marble Rocks and Madan Mahal. It is a rail center with vibrant commerce and a learning center with universities such as Durgavati and the college where my father was a professor – Leonard Theological College.
See Jabalpur photo album: https://photos.google.com/b/114509611916207320396/share/AF1QipPwbua7_70mTC7UYJb8RWsLKnwbLyip-Lhdw-Jp9YEDrt9KDGilGN8G8gZjVZZa3g?key=WlFzLWlNRnF1cVJuYW5POFQ0UFhqUGRmcGw1QUpB
The book writes about these places and the people and leaders who contributed to the political, social, and arts of the town. One of the book’s personalities was James Sundar Murthy in Chapter 6. I knew him personally. He was an amazing photographer of the area, whom Dinesh further writes about and extends my understanding of him in the town and the world. Particularly notable is Murthy’s photos and articles on the 1997 earthquake near Jabalpur. Lakshmi Kant Sharma also organized a wonderful photo exhibit of Murthy’s works, held during one of Lakshmi’s sessions for his Air Hostess Training Academy. It included a photo of a tigress and her cubs in the
Kanha Tiger Reserve park. I visited Jabalpur at the time in 2007 and enjoyed the exhibit and re-connecting with Murthy.
I think you will enjoy reading Dinesh Choudhary’s wonderful book Shaharnama Jabalpur. We look forward to other similar books in the future. And if you have never been to Jabalpur, you should plan a visit to the town in central India and enjoy all its sites and people.
There are three other ways I am connected to Jabalpur and this book – one through Murthy, one through my Ph. D. dissertation, and finally through my father’s movie on Gandhi.
Murthy was one of the several young men and women trained by my father in media skills, starting in the 1950s. The organization for that training led to the establishment of CARAVS, the Christian Association for Radio and Audio-Visual Service. For several decades it trained young men and women in media skills and was the centre for production of film, photography, music, and other media. The painter Frank Wesley worked there in his early years (1960s), and Ahsan Masih wrote many (200?) Hindi hymns during the second half of the 20th century.
One of my chapters of my history Ph. D. dissertation on the Central Provinces is about ‘Raja’ Gokul Das and his wide commercial interests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and we were able to visit his houses near Hanuman Tal and meet his descendants during our 2019 Jabalpur visit.
A last indirect link to Choudhary’s Jabalpur book is my father’s silent color film on the Immersion of Gandhi’s ashes in the Narbada in 1948 which is held at the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives in Delhi and available online. It is a treasure even though it is a silent color 8-minute film.
[This blog post added 20220908 - Philip McEldowney]
