ART-BASED LEARNING | ARTS AND CRAFTS | SOCIAL JUSTICE
Give me a piece of hands and I tremble
(Barbara Hepworth and the hands of a surgeon in Bristol)
Did you know that Bristol is one of my favorite cities? For most of my readers it would be easier to imagine Delhi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Singapore, Manila, or Kyoto. Or am I above all a European? — Then London, Copenhagen, Paris, Lisbon, and Barcelona. However did Bristol appear on a list among these seemingly unsurmountable peers?
Bristol is intimately linked with social activism, reform, and the budding of all kinds of new ideas. Yes, there is Banksy: Bristol’s most famous inhabitant. But surely there is more.
The city has a close relationship with Bengali reformer Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), the founder of the Brahmo Samāj, a Hindu reformist movement which would stay at the vanguard of Bengāli intellectual life all the way up to the times of Rabindranath Tagore’s Shāntiniketan and Vishvabhārati University, and its impressive circle of alumni who have shaped the world of ideas and arts and crafts trailblazed by the Great Bengali Renaissance.
