Overview

Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.

Episode Overview

For 200 years British writers have achieved great success with their accounts of life on the Indian subcontinent. Less well-known are the writings of those Indians who travelled to Britain and recorded their observations throughout the same period. Hardly any of this work has ever been translated, yet it represents a fascinating perspective on how the Indians have seen us. The film includes the witty observations of Mirza Abu Talib, a guest of the aristocracy, on the British class system in 1799; the slavish admiration for Victorian industrial might expressed by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan ; the disillusion which set in during the 30s with the writing of Sajjad Zaheer ; and the introspective poetry of Mazhar Tirmazi - an outstanding poet of a new generation of writers who have settled or were born here. With specially commissioned translations Arena presents this extraordinary testament for the first time.

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