The rebellious life of a novelist, screenwriter and revolutionary activist Born in Poona, India, Farrukh Dhondy came to England in 1964 and immersed himself in radical politics and the counterculture. He kicked off a career in journalism interviewing Pink Floyd and Allen Ginsberg and covering the first meeting between the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Dhondy was soon drawn into political activism. He joined the Indian Workers Association and the British Black Panther Movement. Within the radical activist collective Race Today, he worked alongside Darcus Howe and C. L. R. James. An award-winning writer, he co-wrote the ground-breaking sit-com Tandoori Nights. In 1984 he became Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for multicultural programming and was a driving force behind Desmond’s, Salaam Bombay!, and the trailblazing Bandung File. In Fragments against My Ruin, Dhondy explores a life to salvage precious moments against the inevitable decay of age. The result is a fascinating social and historical document of the late twentieth century, addressing politics, culture, friendship, and the determination to break down boundaries. It is an autobiography packed with compelling anecdotes, such as an insightful take on Jeffrey Archer’s conviction, as well as portraits of Richard Attenborough, Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, Charles Sobhraj, and many others.
Bombay duck, hobson-jobson, big cheese, minaret - words are cultural signifiers, slices of history made up of letters. In Words, Farrukh Dhondy reveals a certain landscape of India through a joyful exploration of Indianisms and Indo-British usages, including slang, choice curse words and colonial coinage. He cites Anglo-Indian dictionaries and Cockney kids, Parsi grandmothers and bartenders, foul-mouthed neighbours, history books and tour guides. Dhondy's musings on etymological evolution bring to light the social, moral and often less-than-moral beliefs and behaviours these sayings stem from.Just goes to show - whether it's an earnest chat or gossip, we are saying more than we realize.
In this exhilirating collection of stories, Farrukh Dhondy looks back to his childhood and youth in Poona, and vividly recreates the small dramas of Chowk tea-house life, which are sometimes funny and occasionally tragic.
Dino's a smart talker. But some moves are smart, and some are not so smart. This play is is Set C of the "High Impact" series of plays desined to develop the confidence, reading ability and enthusiasm for drama of reluctant secondary school students.
While taking care of an elderly man, Rose realizes that they are being watched, and becomes caught up in a mystery going back to Elizabethan England involving Shakespeare, Marlowe, and an extraordinary black slave.
When Rashid Rashid's grandfather dies he leaves behind him his grandson with a major problem. Rashid does not exist in the eyes of the British Government. He has no passport and no legal argument to stay in Britain. His mother has gone to work abroad and he doesn't know where his father is. Rashid has no choice but to go on the run. Rashid's journey takes him through a complex and complicated society. A world with good people, and bad, and it is not always obvious which are which. A society full of conflict and concerns and people trying to make sense of the lives they live. In short Rashid takes a journey across contemporary Britain and has some interesting conclusions to make by the end of his journey about the nature of good and bad, urban and rural, belonging and not belonging.
A British man who wants to start a family corresponds over email with an Indian whose cousin has agreed to donate his testicles; in the process money is extracted from the patient.
Farrukh Dhondy brings alive the history of India from its earliest years to its present position as a global powerhouse - with a highly informative, highly readable and personal account of its development - debunking, illustrating, revealing and challenging established views, based on his scholarship and particular insights.Available in a complete edition, it is also published in 3 volumes of which this is Volume 3. In Volume 1, Farrukh looks at the earliest migrations into India, the waves of invasions - not least that of Alexander the Great, the emergence of the Hindu and other religions, and the way that modern politicians and commentators are using elements of that history, not always in quite the way that you might expect. In Volume 2, Farrukh looks at the rise of Islam, the way the Mughals developed their power base in India and then consolidated their position.In this book, Volume 3, he takes the story forward from the rise of the East India Company, through the British Raj, the struggle for independence, and then the creation of what is rapidly becoming one of the global powerhouses, modern India. Farrukh brings his impish sense of humour to the fruits of his scholarship and creates the most engaging and highly informative narrative.Whatever you think you already know about India, you will be given new perspectives and new ideas in one of the most entertaining and witty history books - and introduced to the unique personality of Farrukh Dhondy, whose experience as a writer, scholar, Channel 4 Commissioning Editor, and political force will both amaze and delight you.
Who is Johnson Thhat? And how has he managed to escape justice for so long, even when in jail?In a Kathmandu casino, retired Inspector Pradhan nabs the notorious serial-killer who has eluded him for twenty-five years. But did Pradhan just get lucky or is there a larger plan at work? Why would Thhat risk coming to Nepal though he is still wanted there for an American girl's murder? What is the message he now desperately wants to get across to the American government?Pradhan tries to piece the puzzle together from what Thhat tells him - and leaves out. About the beginning of his career in crime as a teenager in France; the search for his Indian father; being drawn into the world of diamond smuggling; his 'chemistry' with his accomplice, the ravishing Ravina, together with whom he drugged, robbed and killed tourists in Thailand and India, before being caught and sent to Tihar.Did Thhat mastermind his own long imprisonment? Is he behind an international double-cross, involving the Taliban, his prison connections with Pakistani terrorists, and the CIA?Has Thhat finally been made to pay for his crimes - or is he just playing the biggest con of his life?
This was egalitarian England. I would neither need nor have servants here. Everyone I met in India mentioned this fact as if it were the most significant feature of Western civilization and modernity. When young Farrukh arrives at Cambridge from small-town Poona, he?s resigned to having no servants to wait on him, wearing tweed and studying hard, but what he encounters is an England that no one has prepared him for. This is the sixties, when Britain is in the throes of the Mods and the Rockers ? and the sexual revolution, along with endless protest demonstrations, is in full swing. Farrukh quickly realizes that he has a lot to learn: from figuring out how to load the washing machine to coming to terms with a long-distance relationship; from expounding on religion and sexuality to discovering his love for theatre. Told in a series of vividly detailed vignettes, Cambridge Company is a witty and charming account of collegiate life that captures the exuberance and the idealism of youth.
‘The movements of people change the world. The currents of change are turbulent. You wanted me to write a history, but history is a smoothing of ripples...’ It is the sixties and Britain is in the throes of a revolution with a difference. Recently graduated from Cambridge university, ‘full of mods, rockers, defiant young men with unkempt hair, and young women with the beginnings of the idea of a sexual revolution’, Farrukh and his girlfriend Natasha come to London for what the city holds for them. Turned away repeatedly by landlords wary of their racial origins and directing the m to the part of town ‘where Indians live’, and by bar owners keen to protect their local clientele, the defiant and indignant couple is drawn into a movement inspired by the American Black Panthers, claiming to fight for equal rights of minorities and all non-white immigrants in Britain. Farrukh and Natasha immerse themselves in leafleting, protest marches, and surviving racist attacks, unaware that they are, even within the movement, navigating a charged environment that is complex, contradictory and often disenchanting. Vividly portraying the internal lives of a fascinating cast of characters, this fictionalized memoir is about idealism, rebellion and street politics, and love and betrayal. Impassioned, honest and affecting, it traces the evolution of an immigrant writer who finds the courage to live, to write , on his own terms.
Part of Set A of the "High Impact" series, this play is aimed at motivating struggling secondary school readers. In the play, Rex is knocked down by a star footballer, and sees a chance to make some money.
High Impact" offers high-interest books for the full secondary age range to motivate reluctant readers. Grouped into four language levels (reading ages A 6-7, B 7-8, C 8-9 and D 9-10), they gradually develop students' literacy skills and confidence.
CLR James will be remembered wherever cricket is played, yet his career is enigmatic. Farrukh Dhondy's new biography sets out to decode the enigma and unravel the long journey James made from Trinidad to Brixton. CLR James was a marxist philosopher, intent on paper at least on world revolution. But later in life, he rejected the incendiary rhetoric of his youth. He was an unabashed elitist, but at the same time fought discrimination of any sort. Farrukh draws on his friendship with CLR James, which began when James was already an old man and continued until his death at the age of 89. He assesses the contribution James made to modern political thinking and to the growth of Black consciousness. He celebrates his love of cricket and shows how the concepts of fair play and gamesmanship could and did become the abiding principles of a Black colonial revolutionary.
Marked by lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi's poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images. While many recent 'translations' have sought to give Rumi's poetry a certain hippy sensibility, robbing it of its true essence, Farrukh Dhondy attempts to bring out the beauty and sensibility of the verses whilst imitating the metre of the original. Dhondy's translations provide a modern idiom to the poems, carefully keeping intact their religious context.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Chagunas, Trinidad on 17 August 1927 and he died in London on 11 August 2018, leaving behind a rich, vibrant and challenging legacy of fiction and non-fiction. His novels, for example A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River, have been recognised as great literature. His non-fiction, for example A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief, is controversial and has managed to upset Muslims, Africans, Caribbeans and women. He was a much garlanded writer, winning the Booker Prize in 1971, receiving a knighthood in England in 1990, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. John Mair, Richard Keeble and Farrukh Dhondy have edited a collection of new and previously published articles and contributions about V.S. Naipaul and his legacy. Written by some great scholars, friends, journalists, and enemies, reflecting on his legacy, this book is a timely appreciation of the man, his work and his times.
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