Category: Essay

Essay

The Trouble with Cioran

By Satyarth Pandita

Emil Cioran (1911-1995). Photo provided by the author

It was the summer of 2019. The hostels were empty. Vacation had begun, and most students had already left for their hometowns. I was to leave the next day. While packing, I suddenly remembered The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky, which I had lent to a senior months ago.

I walked to his nearly abandoned hostel block and knocked on his half-open door. The room was dark—uncannily dark for the middle of the day. Thick curtains strangled the sunlight, casting the room into a premature night. There he lay on the bed, flat on his back, a laptop balanced on his belly. He handed me my book and resumed the video he had been watching—with monastic focus—from the fifty-sixth minute. It was footage of a man slowly cutting down a giant tree with an axe. He had been watching it, second by second, without skipping. He didn’t pause even when I left.

That was the man who introduced me to Emil Cioran.

It was not until much later that I finally read him. The Trouble with Being Born opens at three o’clock in the morning with Cioran contemplating the futility of existence:

“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

The book proceeds as a collection of aphorisms circling around the nausea of existence and the idea of suicide as both temptation and reprieve.

Before I began to read his work, I tried to prepare myself by reading his biography and interviews. I wanted to understand the man behind the words, as if glimpsing his life might help me endure the weight of his thoughts. One such childhood story was telling. In an interview, Cioran confessed that when he was a child, one of his favourite pastimes was to play football with human skulls excavated by a gravedigger who was his friend. But little did he know at that time that what seemed like play was the seed of a lifelong fixation, depriving him of sleep, driving him to insomnia, in the hope of a long, never-ending slumber.

For Cioran, suicide was not a prescribed act but an ever-present possibility—a metaphysical escape hatch that bestowed dignity on existence. The mere awareness of this option granted him a strange form of freedom. The power of contemplating death, rather than executing it, was his way of wrestling with life’s meaninglessness. Suicide was philosophical, not prescriptive; a potential that loomed, yet never fully realised.

Yet one question persists: if Cioran saw life as an error and glorified suicide as the only coherent act, why did he never end his own life? His own words reveal the paradox:

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

According to him, suicide comes too late to undo anything. The damage is already done. You’ve already suffered so much that ending it doesn’t fix anything—it merely ends an already exhausted life. By the time you do it, you’ve already endured the worst. You’ve already been broken, emptied, eroded by suffering. So, what’s the point? The act becomes redundant, even absurd.

At another moment, he offers a different angle, confessing his indecision:

“The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.”

Although Cioran ascribes his procrastination for suicide to his extreme weariness and boredom, yet, contrastingly, at another place, for him the power of ending one’s life is the greatest power.

“No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.”

This is the Cioranian condition: every insight undermined by its opposite, every aphorism shadowed by contradiction. He frames suicide as the ultimate sovereignty. The mere thought of being able to end one’s life surpasses the power of kings. And yet, he never exercised it. Instead, he transformed the possibility into philosophy, into aphorism, into art. His writing is not a system but an ongoing quarrel with himself. Instead of answering any particular question, his writings raise towers of new questions.

This tension, of circling but never arriving, defines his thought. He writes with precision, but his precision is not in building arguments―it is in dismantling them. Each aphorism is like a shard of glass: sharp, illuminating, but impossible to piece into a whole. Consider his reflection on sleeplessness:

“If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.”

Cioran knew the price of insomnia. To be awake at three in the morning is to be exiled from the world of the living, suspended in a state where thoughts spiral without conclusion. For him, insomnia was both torment and revelation. Perhaps, if Cioran had been able to sleep well, he might not have been trapped in this endless dialogue with futility. Instead, he lived in perpetual wakefulness, speaking to his own emptiness:

“No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.”

“Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. ‘Self-knowledge’? A contradiction in terms.”

If, according to Cioran, true self-knowledge is not possible because we are too attached to our own depths and ego to judge ourselves truly, then there is no way he could have unearthed any truths about himself while living close to his emptiness (skeleton).

Cioran is, however, conscious of his contradictions. They were not accidents; they were his method. But are those contradictions a mirror of the thinkers he admired? In one of his aphorisms, he confesses:

“In the Orient, the oddest, the most idiosyncratic Western thinkers would never have been taken seriously, on account of their contradictions. This is precisely why we are interested in them. We prefer not a mind but the reversals, the biography of a mind, the incompatibilities and aberrations to be found there, in short those thinkers who, unable to conform to the rest of humanity and still less to themselves, cheat as much by whim as by fatality. Their distinctive sign? A touch of fakery in the tragic, a hint of dalliance even in the irremediable.”

Cioran points to that strange quality in writers like Nietzsche, Baudelaire or even himself-deeply tragic, but also stylistic, artful, and aware of the absurdities of their drama. For him, the appeal is not in the polished answers but in the drama of the doubt, in the visible struggle of a mind with itself.

Cioran is always in a perpetual state of perplexity. His thoughts are malleable. What is true for him today becomes obsolete tomorrow. And all this he has tried to betray through words. He knew his thoughts were mercurial, unstable. He confesses his extreme mental variability:

“I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!

Every time he pronounces a new opinion, he does so with the implicit suggestion that this one is right―that this is the truth. He accuses himself of a kind of fraud, i.e. knowing his judgments are volatile, yet he delivers them as if they were true.

Amidst all these contradictions and paradoxes, what, then, did Cioran truly long for? Because what he wishes for in one place, he rejects in the other. But there is one feeling, or a longing, that recurs throughout the book―a longing for a time before time, a time before creation. He speaks of it with yearning, as if for a paradise never lost yet never possessed.

“There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

“O to have been born before man!”

This longing resonates the idea of what the Portuguese call saudade, a longing for something that never was or will never be attainable. Unlike nostalgia, which mourns a past that once existed, saudade is a longing for an unattainable ideal, a sense of melancholic absence that can only be evoked in poetry and art. This yearning captures the profound melancholy that saturates Cioran’s philosophy—a feeling that seeps like a grey mist into a distant blue sky. And yet he admits the impossibility of feeling it:

“It is impossible to feel that there was a time when we did not exist. Hence our attachment to the personage we were before being born.”

We cannot experience absence, so we cannot truly imagine our non-being before birth. In our memory and awareness, we’ve always been — we cannot step outside ourselves to picture a time when we were nothing. This is not a metaphysical claim, but a psychological one.

If Cioran were a simple nihilist, one who believed in nothing and cared for nothing, why would he write at all? Why invest thought and feeling into a world he found so painfully absurd? The answer lies in his profound sensitivity. Cioran was a nihilist who felt too much. He was wounded by life. Writing, for him, was both a compulsion and a failure. Cioran was a master of paradox. He despised life yet wrote nine books about it. He dismissed language as futile yet clung to words as his only tool. He longed for silence yet confessed:

“We write books because we are ashamed of not having been able to remain silent.”

Writing was a failure to keep still in the face of futility. Yet silence was a greater failure, an impossibility. Thus, he turned his torment into words. For him, each book was a kind of reprieve. Perhaps, his most telling aphorism is this:

“A book is postponed suicide.”

For him, writing a book symbolised a form of delayed self-destruction or self-sacrifice, where the author channels inner turmoil into the work and thus postpones an existential “death”.

On a similar note, he explains the need for language, the need for writing.

“The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.”

Language itself, for Cioran, is paradoxical. It is both empty (words are mere signs, lacking substance) and the only tool we have to approach the eternal. So even while writing may seem futile or illusory, it’s also the only space where something indestructible can be momentarily glimpsed.

The Cioranian paradox yet again comes into the picture, where he proclaims:

“One must be mad or drunk,” the Abbe Sieyès said, to speak well in the known languages. One must be drunk or mad, I should add, to dare, still, to use words, anyword….”

In his earlier aphorisms, he advocates for the meaning or use of writing, but then in the following aphorisms, he expresses the futility of writing, or words, of language itself. To use language sincerely is itself madness. If words distort, then every attempt to write is a betrayal. And yet he could not stop writing. This was the paradox that sustained him.

In the book, Cioran traces this disposition back to his family:

“Every family has its own philosophy. One of my cousins, who died young, once wrote me: ‘It’s all the way it’s always been and probably always will be until there’s nothing left any more.’”

Whereas my mother ended the last note she ever sent me with this testamentary sentence: “Whatever people try to do, they’ll regret it sooner or later.

“Nor can I even boast of having acquired this vice of regret by my own setbacks. It precedes me, it participates in the patrimony of my tribe. What a legacy, such unfitness for illusion!”

Cioran interjects with irony: he can’t even take credit for being regret-prone as a result of his own failures. It’s not just personal experience that made him this way—regret runs deeper; it’s not biographical but ancestral.

Yet Cioran was not only drawn to grand despair. He had a peculiar love for the banal, the ordinary, and the infinitesimal things in our everyday life. Like Georges Perec’s concept of the “infraordinary”―the unnoticed texture of daily life―Cioran wrote:

“The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.”

“No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.”

For him, the ordinary was not a distraction from philosophy but its truest field.Emil Cioran was also deeply influenced by the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism. He often returned to the idea of renunciation and detachment:

“It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even ‘realities’; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a ‘solitary elephant’.”

“I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the self’s humiliations.”

And yet, while he admired Buddha’s teachings on suffering, he could not detach himself from his own disappointments:

“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”

Cioran is the kind of person who is aware of his suffering, knows the cure, but won’t take the medicine because the illness has become who he is. For him, disappointment is instinctive, all-consuming and more intimate than thought itself. Since Buddha taught that life is marked with Dukha (suffering/disappointment), Cioran feels connected to Buddhist philosophy, but he cannot follow that path because to follow Buddha requires detachment, letting go of even disappointment, which Cioran cannot do.

Cioran also reflects on a peculiar way to cope with life’s anxieties. He says:

“In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all…”

This aphorism resonates directly with the Hindu practices, as especially embodied in Banaras (Varanasi), where the city itself is a living memento mori, where cremation fires at Manikarnika Ghat never extinguish, and death is not hidden away but displayed as part of life. In Varanasi, the pilgrims are encouraged to watch the burning pyres, not to indulge morbidity but to confront impermanence directly. But even here, he reminds us of the futility of origins:

“The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.”

He knows that obsessing over the question of birth, of life, is futile, insoluble and unanswerable. To take this obsession with origins, with life’s beginning, so seriously — to revere it, to found ideologies or hope on it — is, for Cioran, madness. It means you are so committed to wrestling with the unanswerable that you’ve abandoned sanity. It’s a form of spiritual masochism: continually turning to the one question — Why was I born? — that has no satisfying answer.

A man who spent all his life thinking about the tragedy of birth, the futility of life and the meaning of death confesses at one point in the book that he has known nothing new in all his later years that he knew when he was young. All his thinking, the sleepless nights, the anxiety and the dread have contributed nothing to further his knowledge. In his own words:

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labour of verification.”

Despite all of Cioran’s nihilistic or dark thoughts, he granted failure a strange dignity:

“This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”

“Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction.”

In this sense, he inverts conventional wisdom: failure is not defeat but a revelation, a mirror of the self, stripped of illusion.

The Trouble with Being Born is not an easy read. The book is a constant rumination and meditation on the bliss of nonexistence, the deep nostalgia for a state before being, before consciousness, before identity. There is an uneasiness, an anxiety, a restlessness and an unknown dread that creeps in and grows with every sentence one reads. It has the potential to scratch the old wounds of one’s soul, which one has forgotten. Yet, if one reads and analyses the aphorisms from a distance with a particular perspective, it can also provoke laughter―the laughter of someone who has stared too long at the abyss and found it absurd.

Emil Cioran is like a chess master, and each of his aphorisms is a calculated move. For every aphorism that he mentions, he has already anticipated the reader’s move. He has anticipated every question, especially the most obvious one, why he did not kill himself and his reply is already there.

Reading Cioran is like walking into a fog. Every sentence brings a chill of recognition, but also a deeper uncertainty. He lived next to his emptiness, befriended it, argued with it, laughed at it—and wrote it down. He is frustrating. He contradicts himself. He writes aphorisms that sound like suicide notes, only to retract them with a smirk. But that is the trouble with Cioran. He lived. He wrote. He suffered. And somehow, he made it all sound beautiful.

And perhaps that’s the final paradox: the man most disillusioned with life gave us one of its most enduring voices.

After reading him, I’ve come to admire Cioran because, to me, he is like a mathematician devoted to solving the equation of life and death. Every variable, every permutation and combination, has passed through his mind; the possibilities now stand exposed on the blackboard, supporting and undermining one another in turn. The solution, if it exists, hovers just within sight—yet he chooses to work through it endlessly, not in pursuit of an answer, but in devotion to the act itself. He is a modern Sisyphus, who has not merely accepted his fate, but learned to love the rolling of the boulder, again and again, to the mountain’s top.

Satyarth Pandita is a PhD student at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. He completed his dual degree, a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Biological Sciences (major) and Humanities and Social Sciences (minor), at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal (IISERB). His works have appeared in various newspapers and periodicals, including The Quint, Outlook India, The Wire, Madras Courier, Borderless, and Kitaab, among others.

Links to Satyarth’s published works, email address and social media handles can be found here.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Tags Banaras, Baudelaire, Buddhism, Dostoevesky, Emil Cioran, Hinduism, Manikarna Ghat, Nietzche, Sisyphus, The House of Dead, The Trouble with Being Born, Varanasi

Essay

Once a Student — Once a Teacher

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date November 14, 2025
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Odbayar Dorj writes of celebrating the start of the new school year on September 1^st in Mongolia and of their festivals around teaching and learning…

Mongolians are a people who celebrate festivals wholeheartedly and work with the same kind of enthusiasm. Among our many traditions, one of the most beautiful and meaningful to me is the way we welcome each new school year. In Mongolia, September 1st is not just the beginning of classes—it is a joyful national celebration for teachers and students. On this day, schools across the country hold ceremonies to mark the opening of the academic year. Students eagerly wait for this day, dressed in clean uniforms, their faces full of excitement. Traditionally, the new school year officially begins with a special lesson taught by the President of Mongolia, often about Mongolian script or history, which symbolises the importance of education and cultural heritage.

My own memories of this day are filled with music, excitement, and warmth. Unlike in many countries, Mongolian schools do not separate students into different buildings for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary levels. Instead, everyone studies in the same school building, simply moving from classroom to classroom as they grow older. This creates a strong sense of community—older students and younger students share the same space, the same celebrations, and the same traditions. The ceremony usually begins with a speech from the school principal, followed by short performances by younger students. Songs about schools and teachers are sung, and the gentle melodies of the morin khuur—the traditional horsehead fiddle—fill the air. We sing, dance, and perform music to welcome the new academic year. Sometimes, I wonder how many other nations celebrate the start of school with such joy and artistry.

A man holding *a morin khuur*, whose music has been named as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. From Public Domain

One of the most touching parts of the ceremony is the first bell ringing. This moment marks the official opening of the school year. First graders who are starting school for the very first time are given the honor of ringing a small handbell, while teachers line up their classes and lead them ceremoniously into the building. To ring the bell is considered a great honor, both for the child and their family. I will never forget the day my daughter entered first grade. She was chosen, together with a little boy, to represent all first graders and ring the bell. It was a chilly September morning, as it usually is in Mongolia. With one hand tucked into her uniform pocket to keep warm, she raised her other hand high to match the boy’s height and rang the bell. She was one of the smallest children in her class, but in that moment she seemed so brave and proud. That image remains clear in my mind even now—such memories stay with us forever.

For Mongolians, bells carry deep meaning. We even call our graduation ceremonies “Bell Ceremonies”. These are held for students finishing 5th grade (primary), 9th grade (lower secondary), and 12th grade (upper secondary). For 12th graders, the final bell has special significance: it is the last time they will hear the school bell as students before moving on to university or the adult world. That sound marks both an ending and a new beginning.

For teachers, September 1st is a day of joy. It is the moment we reunite with our students after the long summer break and see how much they’ve grown and changed in just three months. For students, it’s the thrill of seeing their classmates again. The entire month of September is a period of readjustment to school life, and it is followed in early October by Teacher’s Day, one of the few days in the year when teachers can celebrate their profession. Another beloved tradition in Mongolia is “Student Day.” On this day, graduating students—or, if the class is small, students from other classes too—take on the role of teachers for one day, while teachers become students. It’s a playful and meaningful role reversal that leaves deep impressions on both sides.

I still remember my first Student Day vividly. I was in 9th grade when my Mongolian language and literature teacher selected me to become a teacher for the day. It was the first time a lower secondary student had been chosen. I was nervous, especially standing alongside the older students from upper secondary school. I spent the entire night preparing, determined not to let my teacher down. On that day, I taught a 9^th grade literature class. I was frightened at first, but the time passed in a flash, leaving me exhilarated.

The following years, I was chosen again—first as a biology teacher in 10^th grade, then as a Russian language teacher in 11^th grade. I participated as a student-teacher for three consecutive years. I especially remember the biology lesson; that day, I felt a special joy and excitement, a spark that would later lead me to choose teaching as my profession.

Years later, after graduating from university, I returned to school as a real teacher. During my first year at a public school, Student Day came again—this time, from the teacher’s side. My 12^th

grade students drew lots to choose teachers, and a sweet girl named Khulan was selected to teach English in my place. She told me with a smile, “Teacher, you probably don’t have a student uniform anymore, so you can borrow mine tomorrow and join our class as a 12^th grader.” The next day, the 12^th graders handed us invitations, asking us to come to their class as students. Attached to each invitation was a class schedule for the day. When I put on the school uniform again, it truly felt as if I had traveled back in time to my childhood.

As a student, I used to think, “I can’t wait to grow up and start working. I’m tired of wearing this uniform.” But as a teacher, wearing it again brought back a wave of nostalgia. Returning to the classroom as a student for one day became one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. On Student Day, everyone—teachers, administrators, and staff—puts on uniforms and attends classes together as “students.” The day is filled with laughter and playful mischief. Some pretend to be naughty students: interrupting class, asking silly questions, teasing each other. We laugh and call each other “bad students”.

At the end of the day, both the student-teachers and teacher-students gather to share their thoughts. This is always a moving moment. Older students often talk about how difficult it is to teach large classes and apologise for times when they had been troublesome. They express a newfound respect for their teachers, having experienced the challenges themselves. For us teachers, hearing this is incredibly rewarding. If there were a train that could take us back to our childhood, I think everyone would want to ride it. For teachers, Student Day is exactly that—a once-a-year chance to return to childhood.

For the past three years, I have spent September 1st, Student Day, and Teacher’s Day far away from Mongolia. At first, when I saw my friends’ photos and posts on social media, I felt a quiet envy. But at the same time, remembering these traditions filled me with warmth, pride, and a deep love for my profession. Throughout my life, I have met many wonderful teachers. Thanks to them, I have continued to learn and grow, always inspired by their example. These traditions, these bells, these memories—they are not just part of my past. They are part of who I am, both as a former student and as a teacher.

No matter where I am in the world, once a student, once a teacher—those identities live within me, carrying the echoes of September bells wherever I go.

Odbayar Dorj is an international student from Mongolia currently studying in Japan. Her writing reflects on cultural identity, personal memory, and the power of connection across borders and generations.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Tags Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, Japan, Mongolia, Mongolian, Odbayar Dorj, UNESCO

Essay

From Madagascar to Japan: An Adventure or a Dream?

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 14, 2025
No Comments on From Madagascar to Japan: An Adventure or a Dream?

By Randriamamonjisoa Sylvie Valencia

For as long as I can remember, I have been an introvert — this is who I am and will always be. Yet, few believe it. I come from Madagascar, a distant island where the people are called the Malagasy — a community bound by culture, tradition, and a shared sense of identity. Malagasy people are known for their warmth and generosity, often revealing a talkative side as they delight in conversation, and playful exchanges. In contrast, I am reserved — a shy person who expresses myself freely only when comfortable and among those I trust.

As a child, I was the most talkative among my siblings, recounting every detail of my school day to my parents. I delighted in describing the funny expressions my primary school teacher made while explaining lessons, or the mischievous boys who always stuck their chewing gum on the pupils’ desks and all the tasks I had accomplished. I wanted my parents to know I was doing well, that the teacher praised me, and that I helped classmates who struggled.

Both my parents are very talkative, especially my father, from whom I inherited the gift of words. Speaking in front of my family comes naturally, yet in front of others, my words often falter — a fear that has always troubled me. I speak freely only with those I know well— my family and a few close friends.

Facing a large audience has always been daunting. My father encouraged me to confront this fear, to be confident, and to meet the audience’s gaze. I tried many times: presenting in group projects, speaking as a class representative, even addressing an audience at a classmate’s parent’s funeral.

As I grew older, my determination to overcome this fear grew. I devoured books and videos on public speaking, eager to communicate with confidence. My first real test came in 2018, when I delivered a speech in a Japanese language contest. I had loved Japanese language since childhood, captivated by its culture, and dreamed of becoming fluent. Entering the contest was a dream — an opportunity to speak publicly and a chance to win a trip to Japan.

I was guided by two close friends who practiced with me daily. They corrected my mistakes, offered feedback, and most importantly, encouraged me. Having known me for years, they understood how terrifying standing on stage could be, yet they supported me out of love, friendship, and belief in my potential.

During rehearsals, I gave my utmost effort, memorising the script when necessary. Still, doubts lingered about meeting expectations, conquering fears, and not disappointing those who believed in me. The days of practice passed quickly, and soon, the big day arrived. Nervous at first, I gradually became more at ease while speaking. I managed to control my anxiety but knew my performance was imperfect. I focused on each word, yet my mind occasionally went blank, struggling with the judges’ questions. Embarrassment washed over me; I feared I had let my friends and family down.

In the end, I did not win the first prize, but my closest friends congratulated me. They reminded me that the true milestone was stepping onto the stage, speaking in front of an audience, and maintaining composure. Their encouragement helped me realise that courage and effort mattered more than the outcome itself.

As an introvert, talking to strangers is challenging, let alone addressing a crowd. Hearing the words “public speaking” makes my stomach tighten, palms sweat, and heart race. Stage fright, fear of facing many people and sharing my thoughts has always been real. Each time my name is called, I shake, my mind blanks, heart pounds, mouth dries, and confidence seems to vanish before I start. Yet, I have never lost hope. Deep down, I knew a strength within me would help rise above fear and grow into a better version of myself.

One year later, I stood again in the same contest. This annual competition was a goal I refused to let go of. As before, my friends encouraged, pushed, and trained with me every day until the D-day. Their support gave me the strength to continue. I prepared even more fiercely — joining language clubs and volunteering in storytelling activities. But it was not easy. I never felt comfortable speaking or working with strangers. I was told teamwork required discussion, sharing, and collaboration — a nightmare for an introvert.

Solitude had been my ally, yet suddenly, I was surrounded by people of all ages and personalities. Cooperation was no longer optional. However, through this challenge, I discovered an important truth: whether introverted or extroverted, whether silent or talkative, we must learn to connect with others. Survival and growth depend on collaboration and support.

The big day of the speech contest arrived in May, a season of transition between summer and winter. I arrived at the hall just in time, accompanied by a close friend. A staff member guided me to my seat, only a few meters from the judges. I felt cheerful, and calm, even giving a fist bump to nearby contestants. For the first time, I felt truly ready to give a speech — optimistic, and at peace. Perhaps it was the preparation or my friends’ wholehearted support, or maybe I had begun to trust myself.

There were four contestants in the advanced level, and I was the last to speak. Each of us hoped to win the grand prize — a trip to Japan. I did not worry about the others. I believed in my success and was determined to win first place. Just days before, I even dreamed of visiting Japan, so nothing could stand in my way.

Finally, it was my turn. I adjusted the microphone, greeted in Japanese, and bowed to the judges and audience. I spoke for about five minutes on how Malagasy parents raise children. Three judges asked each two questions. Thanks to countless practice hours and mock questions and answers sessions with my best friends, I answered every tricky question. For the first time, right after my speech, I felt like a winner.

The event lasted about three hours, and the final verdict came. The Master of Ceremonies announced winners, starting with the beginner level, then the advanced. Among the four in my category, only two remained. The Master of Ceremonies paused dramatically before announcing the first-place winner… and pronounced my name. I whispered a silent thanks to God. This result — the goal I had worked so hard for — had become reality. The trip to Japan was the reward, and even more importantly, I had overcome stage fright. I spoke naturally and confidently in front of the audience — another milestone achieved.

Later that year, in 2019, I visited Japan for the first time. The experience was magical. I met wonderful people, explored my favorite country, and fulfilled a long-cherished dream.

Six years later, I returned to the Land of the Rising Sun—this time as an international student. I now live in Tokushima prefecture, which is in southeastern Japan, far from the bustling cities, in a quiet countryside where few tourists venture. Yet, the city and its neighbourhoods are simply wonderful. It is peaceful, surrounded by greenery, and while the locals may seem reserved, they are incredibly welcoming. Even with some grasp of the local language, adapting to a new country as a foreigner is challenging. Still, thanks to the support of my seniors and friends who have lived here for years, I managed to navigate my first six months successfully.

The city where I live hosts an annual Japanese speech contest open to foreigners who have been residing here for some time. I was encouraged to participate, partly because I could speak some Japanese, and partly because it was a great chance to gain experience. I thought, why not? After all, I gradually grew more comfortable speaking in front of others.

This time, participants could choose their own topics, though it was suggested to focus on their experience in Japan or explore cultural connections between their home country and Japan. I was eager to participate, but selecting a topic was harder than I expected. Inspiration felt scarce, and I had no clear direction. Still, I knew that finding my own perspective was key to making the speech meaningful.

Overwhelmed by my studies, I barely noticed the passage of time. Before I knew it, the deadline had arrived. I had not written a single word, though ideas swirled in my mind. I opened my laptop, took a deep breath, and began writing everything that came to my mind. Reflecting on my experiences in Japan, I realised that people often struggled to pronounce my name correctly. That inspired me to talk about the hidden culture behind Japanese and Malagasy names.

With my theme set, I focused on making my speech coherent and captivating. I tend to draw inspiration at the last minute. I wrote, rewrote, and proofread repeatedly, staying up all night without noticing morning approaching.

Finally, I finished my manuscript and emailed it to one of my Japanese teachers to check for grammatical errors. She responded immediately, and her quick proofreading allowed me to submit my speech on the deadline. I felt relieved, yet strangely nervous, a sensation I could not quite describe.

Six years have passed since I last spoke in front of an audience. Preparing another speech made me feel nostalgic, bringing back memories of long rehearsals, the advice of my best friends, and countless sleepless nights.

A month after submitting my manuscript, I received an email from the event organizer announcing my selection. I was among the fourteen candidates chosen to compete. I whispered a quiet “wow,” but doubts immediately surfaced. I had two months to prepare. To understand what awaited me, I watched recordings of previous competitions, while my seniors and Japanese teacher helped me refine my speech.

Four students were selected from my university. The other three were Asian students with extensive experience in Japanese language and culture. They read Kanji （Japanese characters）effortlessly and conversed naturally. And then, there was me. Though I had been exposed to Japanese language and culture since childhood, memorising every character reading and grasping dialects was never easy. Back in my country, despite growing interest in Japanese language and culture, opportunities to use it in daily life remain limited. Once again, I faced a new challenge—this time in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Time flew, and soon the two months of preparation had passed. Finally, the big day arrived. Early that morning, a kind university staff member greeted us with a bright smile. As I descended from my dormitory, I saw her waiting by her car near the main gate, bowing politely. Her excitement was palpable. Three of us rode in her car; she asked about our preparations and told jokes, perhaps to ease our nerves, which were all visible.

After twenty minutes, we arrived at a large building and walked up to the fifth floor through corridors decorated in traditional style. Japanese architecture and design have always fascinated me, and I was struck by their beauty once again. The event hall was medium-sized, with a small table at the entrance holding our name tags.

One by one, the other candidates arrived. We were then led to a smaller room for a preparatory meeting. While waiting, we chatted briefly to get to know one another. The competition began in the early afternoon. We were instructed to enter the hall one by one, greeted with warm applause. Observing the other candidates, I could tell they were ready. Fourteen contestants competed in total. Thirteen were Asians from countries including China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. I was the only African, from a distant country few people knew. Before each speech, the Master of Ceremonies shared a brief anecdote about the candidate’s country, offering the audience a glimpse into its culture. Each contestant then delivered a five-minute speech.

There were two types of awards: the Golden Prize for first and second place, followed by four Silver Prizes. I had hoped to place among the top five while preparing my speech.

As I listened to the first three candidates, I was deeply impressed. Their speeches were powerful, emotional, and delivered with near-native fluency. I was surprised by how advanced and impressive their speaking skills were. I was the sixth speaker. Perhaps it had been so long since I last addressed an audience, or perhaps it was the absence of my closest friends but standing alone in a foreign country in front of strangers was overwhelming. My hands trembled. When my name was announced, I feared I might not endure those five minutes on stage.

Still, I stood before hundreds of people. I bowed, held the microphone firmly, and began. My heart raced and sweat ran down my face and back. Gradually, the pressure eased. When I shared the example of the longest name in the world—from my country, the audience reacted with surprise and amusement. I realised how attentive they were and regained inner calm. Although I forgot one line, I finished my speech smoothly and expressively.

The remaining eight candidates were equally impressive. Their eloquence was such that, with eyes closed, one might mistake them for native speakers. It was the highest-level contest I had ever participated in. Each theme and presentation were unique, and every contestant spoke with confidence. I doubted whether I would receive a prize, but reassured myself that even without one, the experience was worthwhile. Most participants had lived in Japan for over three years, and the Chinese and Taiwanese contestants were especially strong in oral expression. Yet, standing among such talented competitors was an honor.

After a break that was supposed to last twenty minutes but stretched to fifty, results were announced. They began with six Encouragement Prizes. I thought I might be among them, but my name was not called. Two more awards followed, still not mine. A friend nudged me, whispering, “Congratulations!” I replied, “Stop joking. Congratulations to you instead!”

Finally, the Silver Prizes were announced. They first called my country, then my name. The applause and cheers overwhelmed me, and tears welled in my eyes. I had not expected to win a Silver Prize, given the competition’s level. One friend from my university won the Golden Prize, and the second Golden Prize went to a Vietnamese contestant.

Participating in such a high-level competition was a tremendous challenge. Every step—from manuscript preparation to standing on stage—pushed me beyond my comfort zone. Yet, when it was over, I felt immense pride. I had once again delivered a speech before a large audience, this time in the country whose language I had cherished for years.

Though I had been nervous, the audience remained unaware. Their attentive expressions and warm applause carried me through. Afterwards, my Japanese teachers praised my performance, saying I had done exceptionally well. In that moment, I realised every hour of preparation, every doubt, and every fear had been worthwhile. I had faced a formidable challenge, stood my ground, and expressed myself fully, a reminder that courage, practice, and determination can transform daunting experiences into triumphs. It is a memory I will treasure forever.

Randriamamonjisoa Sylvie Valencia is from Madagascar and is currently studying in Japan as a trainee student. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, and traveling to explore new cultures.

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Tags African, Chainese, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Japanese, Kanji, Madagascar, Malagasy, Philippines, Randriamamonjisoa Sylvie Valencia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Taiwanese, Thailand, Vietnam

Essay

Peddling Progress?

By Jun A. Alindogan

I grew up in a town where fish, shellfish, and seafood are abundant, so the specialty dishes are related to its topography. The location is humble, yet it boasts special delicacies such as noodles, porridge, tofu, duck eggs, and rice cakes. Many stores line the town’s main street, serving these types of morning and afternoon snacks that I was quite fond of. I particularly remember a store famous for its huge burgers with generous slices of cucumber, tomatoes, and onions on a tangy mayo-ketchup dressing — also popular for its all-day breakfast meals. Despite its marine resources, my hometown has no particular brand associated with it.

A Philippine-based fast-food chain was recently established in the area, and residents claim that development has now been put in place. Consumption is erroneously classified as development. A former English language student mistakenly believed that the Philippines was a wealthy nation because of the abundance of malls, only to realise later that poverty is widespread behind these malls. Consumption is peddled as a sign of progress.

This also happened during my university years when I had to take the elevated rail system to go to school. At the north end point of the train system stood a central grade school on a sprawling campus, which has now been transferred to a much smaller space but is still referred to as a central school. All central schools in our country are located on large campuses. Its original location is now part of a nationwide mall chain. Is going to the mall productive?

Years ago, my younger brother moved to the southernmost province of Luzon Island, which was our father’s hometown. In the past, I would spend holidays at my brother’s residence with some very close friends. The roads are well-paved, and in the city half an hour away, there are small commercial shops and a local fast-food chain unique to the area. The province is well-known for its “pili” nuts and handicrafts.

According to my brother, the city’s landscape has drastically changed with the addition of a big mall chain and a Roman-inspired colosseum. My nephew recently informed me that the provincial projects mainly consist of community-based gymnasiums. “Progress” seems to be selective and does not necessarily foster a strong culture of creativity and productivity in each household.

In my current municipality, the main issue is the lack of social infrastructure to support entrepreneurship. The prevailing norm is consumption, whether physical or digital. Bureaucratic red tape makes business mechanisms inaccessible, discouraging newcomers from starting any kind of enterprise.

Perhaps another reason for this lack of visitors is the municipality’s location. Being the last town in the province, only residents and haulers typically come to the area. It is isolated from the main arterial road that traverses the entire province.

The town does not have a specific product to boast of, unlike other cities and municipalities known for their specialties like shoemaking, salted and duck eggs, fish sauce, specialty noodle dishes, and slippers made from water lilies.

The town’s main products are concrete and sand, extracted through continuous quarrying activities that are detrimental to both human health and the environment. Agricultural produce — such as bananas, mangoes, tomatoes, okra, and eggplants — is limited due to the town’s rocky terrain. During a visit to an upland village, I met a caretaker of a small property that was supposed to be organic, but I discovered during our conversation that it was merely a facade by a large mobile phone provider for its social enterprise project. Additionally, the population of native tilapia[1] is low due to murky waters caused by silt and mud. Despite having numerous hiking sites that also cater to consumerist interests, the municipality lacks a distinct specialty dish for people to enjoy and remember as part of its commercial offerings.

According to my sister-in-law’s brother, the main source of income for their island-province is remittances from Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) [2] .He also claims that the province is an ideal place to retire and spend money, boasting beaches, volcanic hot springs, coconut plantations, rice farms, nature resorts, and rivers. Despite having a root-crop based delicacy and an abundance of dried fish, the province lacks production or manufacturing facilities, with the exception of mining, which unfortunately led to one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s history. As a result, consumption is the prevailing norm on the island. Isn’t it ironic that the ex-girlfriend of a close friend pursued a degree in BS Entrepreneurship but currently works as a Customer Engagement Manager at a global fast-food chain? She should have considered starting her own business, no matter how small. She is actually promoting a perpetual cycle of consumerism, rather than entrepreneurship.

Based on online sources [3], there are only ten small manufacturing firms in my current area, Montalban (Rodriguez), which covers a total land area of 172.65 ^{km 2} (66.66 sq mi) [4]. This implies that a culture of production is not the town’s priority when it should have been the first step to economic and social progress, alongside environmental protection and sustainability.

In hindsight, society generally encourages individuals to consume the latest gadgets, trends, food, technology, shoes, fashion, apps, make-up, and hairstyles. We are therefore told to consume and discard in a never-ending cycle of consumption and waste. Creativity in building enterprise is relegated in favor of a consumerist culture. To move forward, communities must do the reverse, so wealth is neutralized. Not everyone has the business acumen to succeed. However, production must still exceed consumption.

One main reason for the failure of production to establish a strong foothold in our communities could be attributed to the lack of practical and relevant entrepreneurial courses that are accessible to everyone in terms of fees, range, and distance. These courses are not tailored to the specific needs of each locality, as businesses tend to be similar in one area, causing most enterprises to struggle to take off without offering anything unique to attract patrons. Creativity and productivity go hand in hand.

To create a more sustainable society, we need to move away from consumerism and focus on increasing production through manual, mechanical, automated, or digital means. A thriving community relies on its ability to expand and improve production capabilities.

[1] Fish

[2] https://psa.gov.ph/statistics/survey/labor-and-employment/survey-overseas-filipinos/node/1684600

[3] https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-information.manufacturing.ph.rizal.rodriguez_%28montalban%29.html

[4] https://www.philatlas.com/luzon/r04a/rizal/rodriguez.html

Manuel A. Alindogan, Jr. or Jun A. Alindogan is the Academic Director of the Expanded Alternative Learning Program of Empowered East, a Rizal-province based NGO in the Philippines and is also the founder of Speechsmart Online that specialises in English test preparation courses. He is a freelance writer and a member of the Freelance Writers’ Guild of the Philippines (FWGP).

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Tags Colosseum, Jun A. Alindogan, Luzon Island, Montalban, NGO, OFW, Overseas Filipino Workers, Philippines, Rizal, Rodriguez, Roman

Essay

From Bombay to Kolkata — the Dhaaks of Durga

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 14, 2025
No Comments on From Bombay to Kolkata — the Dhaaks of Durga

Ratnottama Sengupta travels through time and space to explore a UNESCO-declared ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity‘, a festival called, Durga Puja

*Dhaakis* (Drummers) playing *dhaaks* (drums) at Durga Puja. From Public Domain

It was Saptami, the second day of the five-day Durga Puja that had been inaugurated the previous day. I had new dresses lined up for all five days. But the dawn of Saptami brought us news of disaster. A short circuit had razed the entire pavilion along with the clay icons of Durga, her brood comprising Ganesh, Kartik, Lakshmi, Saraswati and their vahanas — the lion, owl, swan peacock and mouse. Gone was the chaalchitra, the halo-like backdrop presided over by Lord Shiva and depicting the story of the goddess who fought the demons Chanda Munda, Shumbha, Nishumbha, Madhu Kaitav, Raktabeej Mahishasur…

We were mourning all through the Pujas that particular year. No new dresses worn, no new shoes on our feet, no ‘Dussehra Greetings’ nor any sweets on ‘Bijoya’. We felt sad not because of the effort my father, Nabendu Ghosh, had put in as the President of the Puja conducted by the Udayan Club, but because of the belief that “Durga comes home to her parents during this period.”

My father’s ancestral home was in East Bengal. My grandfather, Nabadwip Chandra Ghosh, was an Advocate who relocated to Patna in 1920. Every autumn after that the family would travel back to Dhaka for a month. Because the Durga Puja in their family home was the lone puja of Kalatiya, the village which is now a suburb of Dhaka. Everyone there would flock to ‘Ukil Babur Bari’[1]for the puja and prasad in the afternoon and the cultural programmes in the evening. Jatra, theatre, Pala Gaan, Naam Sankirtan — the itinerant groups of performers comprised of singers, actors, the narrator or the sutradhar, and the adhikari or the manager. It was at one such performance that Baba[2], then all of seven, fell in love with a ‘lady’ who had played Draupadi. Imagine his disappointment when the departing ‘lady’ turned out to be a clean shaven youth!

The next year at that very Puja Mukul [3]— the pet name of Nabendu Bhushan — first ‘acted’ as a Sakhi[4]! At eight his ‘manhood was offended at the thought of playing a handmaiden. But when he stood on the stage with three other boys, all dressed in finery and wigs, all praying ‘Madhav rakho charaney[5]!’ he was transported to Lord Krisha’s court in ancient Dwarka. That was his first experience of Rasa[6] — and unaware even to himself he had set on a lifetime’s journey with the arts.

When life took him to Bombay in 1951, there were few Pujas and no possibility of publishing anything in Bengali. Pragati Club of Andheri started a Puja in Mohan Studios that had Bimal Roy as the President and Nabendu Ghosh as the Secretary. That Puja continues to this day — and to this day these two names figure in the brochure the club publishes annually. Pragati[7] used to bring out a handwritten magazine back then. PraBas — meaning, migrant life, was an acronym for Prabasi Bangla Samaj.[8] Edited by Nabendu Ghosh, it boasted hand-painted covers by renowned artist Chitto Prasad.

Pragati, Kallol, Udayan, Natun Palli, Shivaji Park, Chembur — all the major Pujas of Mumbai continue to publish a brochure for the Pujas as a souvenir of the festival and also to raise funds through ads by the sponsors.

All through my school life, which I spent travelling to the Bengali Education Society’s English High School at Dadar, I would necessarily spend one evening rolling into late night at the Shivaji Park puja pandal. Long in advance I would plan which dress to wear. The latest Bengali movie would be screened. The Puja Specials would have already come home — in the pavilion we would pick up some new publication of Sunil Gangopadhyay or Shirshendu Mukherjee. The Puja songs would keep playing while we, a bunch of batch-mates from all over Mumbai, would endlessly snack on fancy food and chat.

My university years saw a shift of ‘allegiance’ to Notunpalli, the Puja started by Shakti Samanta at Bandra in 1972 as did all the major Bengali biggies of Bollywood, from Salil Chowdhury, Basu Chatterjee, RD Burman to Jaya Bhaduri and Amitabh Bachchan, who would earlier visit the Puja at Ramakrishna Mission at Khar. Now I would flock to the stalls of handloom saris, salwar suits, fashion dresses — some of which were set up by my cousins or friends. Rupa, Aloka-Tulika-Lipika, Mina Kakima and Latika Kakima — wives of actor Tarun Bose and playback artiste Talat Mehmood, sons and daughters of Dhruv Chatterjee and Asit Sen, seasoned CEOs and young bankers — the stimulating adda[9] here ranged from cinema to career choices, economics to politics.

Talking of Ramakrishna Mission, I am reminded of Manobina Roy, wife of Bimal Roy. Jethima[10] and my mother Kanaklata would set up a stall where they would sell papad and vadi, narkel and til naru, muri moa and kucho nimki[11]. These sesame, coconut or lentil balls were all made at home by Didimas[12], Kakimas and Mashimas[13]who lived in Rana Cottage near our house in Malad. If the Kumari Pujo[14]and Sandhi Puja[15]rituals were special for these seniors, Bijoya was super special for me and my friends. This post-immersion round of socialising to greet friends spelt many visits, to Bandra and Khar, Santa Cruz and Andheri, Goregaon and Borivali. And visiting the family of our parents’ friends meant not only naru-nimki, it could also mean chops, cutlets, cakes, sandwiches — goodies that were not so common in Bengali households 65 years ago, when sandesh and rosogolla, sweets made from cottage cheese, were also sold door-to-door, by men who brought them to our houses in aluminium trays tied in cloth!

That’s a faraway reality from what obtained in Kolkata where I spent some Puja holidays at my aunt’s (Ranjita Mashi’s) place on Motilal Nehru Road. It was opposite Deshpriya Park, where we children would report every morning of the five days, to help distribute the floral offering for pushpanjali and the prasad[16] in sal leaf bowls. Pandal hopping was a must, primarily on foot, as the pavilions designed with cloth themselves were works to admire. And on Dashami[17] evening, Haabu, Dipu, Reena, Minu and I would stand near the Rash Behari post office opposite Priya Cinema and watch the idols, sculpted with the signature of traditional idolmakers of Chitpore, being taken for immersion in the Ganga. What joy it was as we could watch all the Goddesses we’d heard of but not visited — even from Krishna Glass or Teish Palli! A much glamourised and glorified version is now held on Red Road, the main artery of the city, with the Chief Minister presiding over the Carnival of Immersion.

Twenty years ago when I returned to make my home in Kolkata, Deshpriya Park was still home to a Sarbojanin Durgotsav[18]. But it hit the headlines in October 2015 when mayhem broke loose crushing surging crowds who had assembled to view the 88-foot “Biggest Durga Ever.” Effectively the community celebration had become a cause for corporate branding and competition. Sponsors, in some cases, outnumbered the – neighbourhood — ‘parar‘ — volunteers. Reason? Perhaps because television was trying to grab eyeballs in every home. Even Kumari Pujo at Ramakrishna Mission was being watched on screens across the oceans. And as the Arts Editor of The Times of India, I was planning celebrity visits and artistic trophies for our Pujo Barir Shera Pujo [19]competition in high rise buildings and gated communities.

But what was the biggest change in observing Sarbojanin Durgotsav in Bengal? These public worship grounds had transformed into vast galleries where artists were staging the icons as installation art. These concept-driven pujas took leaves out of mythology but interpreted the goddess in the light of contemporary and universal concerns. Some were highlighting Her as a feminist force. Some as an embodiment of Nature. For some, She denotes the cosmic universe. Elsewhere crafts and looms got prominence. Family bonding was not forgotten. From the icons to the pavilions, from the chaalchitra to the fairy-light decoration — there was a unity of thought and execution. In the process, knowledge about practices in distant corners of our country, or of lifestyles several countries away from ours became accessible to the average person on the street.

A traditional Durga with a *chaalchitra* backdrop

There has been another interesting development. For years, the divas of Indian screen, from Bengal to Bombay, have inspired the Pals[20] of Chitpore. Sometimes she resembled Hema Malini, sometimes Madhuri Dixit. The demon too has been modelled after the politicians who are seen as foes.

At Arjunpur near Dumdum airport, the Third Eye of Durga is the nib of a fountain pen – as is the pointed middle of the three-pronged trident, trishul: “The pen represents wisdom and thought, and it is also the contemporary weapon to protest and fight,” explained Shampa Bhattacharjee. The artist from Delhi had designed the icon while her husband, physicist, created the atmosphere with rotating lights and floating balls – al in luminous steel.

Durga as a feminist force is perhaps the most natural interpretation of the goddess who was construed as a Goddess because evil demons had sought immunity against all other forms of power save a woman. Durga was conceived as Durgati Nashini — Destroyer of Misfortunes. The mace, the trident, the circular Sudarshan, the bow and arrow, the sword – every single weapon that empowered her was gifted by a God, be it Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva or Agni, Vayu, Varun, or even Yama. Read, the masculine forces. Perhaps that is why, the jagirdars and zamindars, under the nawabs and the British Raj worshipped Shakti, the icon of empowerment. The Raj families of the City of Palaces, the Debs of Shovabazar, the Chowdhurys of Behala, the Roys and Duttas of Kalutola and Nimtala, the Mullicks of Marble Palace or Rais of Andul – they still pay their obeisance to the Image of Shakti. And the celebration in the ancestral homes of these bonedi – once aristocratic – families are a tourist attraction.

Ironic that, during the struggle for Independence from the imperialists, She became the embodiment of motherland. Abanindranath Tagore’s iconic painting of her as the embodiment of sacrifice stays etched in our hearts and our souls to this day.

And when I stand before any invocation, in any form, in any corner of the subcontinent, these words of my father ring in my ears. “Imagine the map of India as you stand before Maa Durga. To her right are Lakshmi and Ganesha — the two realisations of Prosperity and Success — who are worshipped in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka. On her left are Saraswati and Kartik — representing Learning and Wisdom and Craft — worshipped in Assam, Bengal, Orissa, and the Deccan. At her feet is the Mahishasur, also depicted in our epic as the Dusht Ravan who ruled Lanka. And above her, reigning from the chaalchitra is Mahadev Shiva, identified with the Himalayas. Asamudra Himachal, from the mountain to the ocean, it is our motherland — Bharat Tirtha[21].”

The crux of it? Durga Puja is not merely the worshipping of a Hindu god. What started as a religious phenomenon in the households of the rich or powerful is no longer merely ritualistic. In this millennium, it is a vibrant celebration involving, at every step, the Indian thought and creativity, mind and heart, economy and management. It knits the masses in more ways than one. The castes and classes, the highs and lows of society — no one is left out of the festivity. It is a sociocultural happening. Year after year after year it is, in the truest sense of the term, Sarbojanin.

Small wonder the largest public art festival of the subcontinent has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage!

[1] Lawyer’s house

[2] Father

[3] Bud

[4] A woman actor

[5] Krishna, give us a place at your feet

[6] Flavour or essence

[7] Publisher, name means progress

[8] Bengali Immigrant Society

[9] Chit chat

[10] Paternal aunt

[11] Sweet and savoury snacks

[12] Grandmothers

[13] Paternal and maternal aunts

[14] Worship of girl child

[15] Evening prayers

[16] Snacks given out as blessings

[17] Last day of Durga Puja

[18] Community Durga Puja

[19] The Best Durga Puja Display

[20] The statue makers

[21] Pilgrimage of India

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and writes books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Essay

The Bauls of Bengal

Aruna Chakravarti writes of the Bauls (wandering minstrels) of Bengal and the impact their syncretic thought, music and life had on Tagore

Religious movements such as Bhakti and Sufi have spanned time and territory and entered Bengal, in successive waves, creating a syncretic culture in which music and poetry are amalgamated. One of the forms in which these movements find creative expression is Baul Gaan —the singing of itinerant minstrels.

Universally recognised as foremost among the oralities of Bengal, the Baul Sampradai is a community for whom singing is synonymous with worship. The Baul expounds a philosophy of humanism which rejects religious orthodoxies and stresses human equality irrespective of caste, class, religion and gender. The Baul sets himself on a spiritual journey, lasting a lifetime, towards discovering his moner manush (man within the heart) thereby alienating the notion of seeking the Divine in external forms such as mosques, temples, images and sculptures. Since God is believed to reside within man, the human body is viewed as the site of the ultimate truth –that which encompasses the entire universe. This tenet of Baul philosophy is known as deha tatwabad—the belief that the soul being pure the body that houses it, together with all its functions, is pure and holy.

Concentrated mostly in Kushthia, Shilaidaha and Sajadpur in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and Murshidabad and Birbhum in West Bengal, the Baul tradition, though drawing elements from Tantra, Shakta and Sahajiya[1], stems from two main sources — Muslim Sufi and Hindu Vaishnav. Hence the simultaneous presence of Hindu and Muslim bauls in the villages of Bengal and great composers from both streams—Lalon Fakir, Duddu Shah, Madan Baul, Gagan Harkara and Fakirchand. Rejecting religious codes such as Shariat and Shastras, caste differences, social conventions and taboos, which they see as barriers to a true union with God, they sing of harmony between man and man. “Temples and mosques obstruct my path,” the Baul sings, “and I can’t hear your voice when teachers and priests crowd around me.”

Refusing to conform to the conventions of religion and caste ridden Bengali society, Bauls (the word is sourced from the middle eastern bawal meaning mad or possessed) are wandering minstrels who sing and dance on their way to an inner vision. Essentially nomadic in nature walking, for them, is a way of life. “No baul should live under the same tree for more than three days” — the saying seems to stem from the Sufi doctrine of walking an endless path (manzil) in quest of the land where the Beloved (the Divine) might be glimpsed. Bauls live on alms which people give readily. In return the Baul sings strumming his ektara[2] with dancing movements. The songs are rich with symbolism, on the one hand, and full of ready wit and rustic humour on the other. The Baul rails against the hypocrisy of religion and caste and takes sharp digs at the clergy but totally without rancour.

Many of the composite forms found in an older culture of Bengal have become sadly obscured in the present scenario of identity politics. But the one that has not only survived but is gaining in recognition day by day, is the Baul tradition. This is, in no small measure, owing to the intervention and interest taken by Rabindranath Tagore. In his Religion of Man Rabindranath tells us that, being the son of the founder of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, he had followed a monotheistic ideal from childhood but, on gaining maturity, had sensed within himself a disconnect from the organised belief he had inherited. Gradually the feeling that he was using a mask to hide the fact that he had mentally severed his connection with the Brahmo Samaj began tormenting him. And while in this frame of mind, travelling through the family estates in rural Bengal, he heard a Baul sing. The singer was a postal runner by the name of Gagan Harkara and the song was “Ami kothai paabo tare/ amaar moner manush je re[3].”

“What struck me in this simple song,” Rabindranath goes on to say, “was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarefied transcendentalism… Since then, I’ve often tried to meet these people and sought to understand them through their songs which are their only form of worship.” In his Preface to Haramoni[4], Rabindranath makes another reference to this song. Quoting some lines from the Upanishads— Know him whom you need to know/ else suffer the pangs of death— he goes on to say, “What I heard from the mouth of a peasant in rustic language and a primary tune was the same. I heard, in his voice, the loss and bewilderment of a child separated from its mother. The Upanishads speak of the one who dwells deep within the heart antartama hridayatma[5]and the Baul sings of the moner manush. They seem to me to be one and the same and the thought fills me with wonder.”

A Portrait of Lalon Fakir sketched by Jyotindranath Tagore(1849-1925)

Lalon Fakir’s commune was located in the village of Chheurhia which fell within Rabindranath’s father’s estates. Though there is no authentic record of a meeting between the two, it is a fact that the poet was the first to recognise Lalon’s merit which had the quality of a rough diamond. His inspiration was powerful and spontaneous but, lacking in clarity of expression, lay buried in obscurity till Rabindranath brought it out into the open. Publishing some of the songs in some of the major journals of the time, Rabindranath took them to the doors of the educated elite. Not only that. They gained in popularity from the fact that he, himself, often used Baul thought and melody in his own work. “In some songs,” he tells us in his Manush er Dharma[6], “the primary tunes got mixed up with other raags – raaginis which prove that the Baul idiom entered my sub conscious fairly early in life. The man of my heart, moner manush, is the true Devata[7]. To the extent that I’m honest and true to my knowledge, action and thought — to that extent will I find the man of my heart. When there is distortion within, I lose sight of him. Man’s tendency is to look two ways — within and without. When we seek him without — in wealth, fame and self- gratification — we lose him within.”

But it wasn’t only in his compositions that Rabindranath disseminated Baul ideology. It went deeper than that. The primitive simplicity and freedom of Baul thought and living charmed him so completely that he started imbibing them in his own lifestyle. He grew his hair long, kept a flowing beard and wore loose robes. He created Baul like characters in his plays and dance dramas and enacted the roles himself. And, as he grew older, a restlessness; an inability to stay in one place took hold of him. Leaving the ancestral mansion of Jorasanko he relocated to Santiniketan but even there he could not stay in the same house for more than two months. In the last two and half decades of his life, a tremendous wanderlust seized him. He travelled extensively both within the country and without, earning for himself the sobriquet of ‘roving ambassador for India’.

Perhaps, the most powerful testimony of the evolution of Rabindranath from a princely scion of the Tagores of Jorasanko to the man he finally became is found in Abanindranath’s portrait of his uncle. It depicts an old man with flowing white locks and beard, wearing a loose robe and holding an ektara high above his head. The limbs are fluid in an ecstatic dance movement. It is a significant fact that the painting is titled Robi Baul.

Robi Baul (1916): Painting by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). From Public Domain

[1] Different schools of philosophy and religion. The Sahajiya is a philosophy that embrace nature and the natural way of life.

[2] String instrument

[3] Translates from Bengali to: “Where will I find Him — He who dwells within my heart”

[4] The Haramoni (Lost Jewels) is 13-volume collection of Baul songs compiled by Mansooruddin to which Tagore wrote the preface for the first volume published in 1931

[5] Translates to ‘innermost part of the heart and soul’

[6] Collection of Lectures by Tagore in Bengali, published in 1932

[7] Translates to “God’

Aruna Chakravarti has been the principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator. Her novels, Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa and The Mendicant Prince have sold widely and received rave reviews. She has two collections of short stories and many translations, the latest being Rising from the Dust. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.

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Essay

The Literary Club of 18th Century London

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 15, 2025
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By Professor Fakrul Alam

We Bengalis think that no one can match us for our addas[1]. If you were growing up in Dhaka in the 1950s or the 1960s and happened to be literary in your inclinations, chances are you would end up on some evenings in Old Dhaka’s hotel-cum-restaurant Beauty Boarding. You would do so not mainly for the good food sold there at modest prices, but chiefly because you intended to see and hear poet Shahid Quadri regaling everyone in a table that probably included budding poets such as Shamsur Rahman and Syed Shamsul Huq, a promising film maker like Abdul Jabbar Khan, or a gifted painter like Debdas Chakraborty.

Over seemingly endless cups of tea, Quadri and his fellow poets and artists and friends and many other enchanted hangers-on would be entertaining each other late into the evening. Everyone present would in all probability say to each other or to others later: “Was there anywhere any adda as good as the one that took place in Beauty Boarding that evening?”

And, of course, Bengalis of Kolkata will claim that there was never ever any place for chatting and no addas held anywhere that have been able to match the ones at the city’s College Street Coffee House. Who hasn’t heard the song by Manna Dey[2] that has immortalised the conversation and the characters there—poets, journalists, actors, artists—all engaged in intellectual chitchat over nonstop cups of coffee? And though the song laments the passing away of a generation, one can find Kolkata’s Coffee House, like Dhaka’s Beauty Boarding, still very busy and very full of addas even now. But surely among the most famous addas of all times were the ones that took place in 18th century London’s “The Club,” aka “Literary Club”. This was the archetypal club for flowing conversation conducted over good food, great coffee, and suitably stimulating drinks (this last bit is conjectural!). Without a doubt, it is the most famous British literary club in history, and here outstanding intellectuals would engage in always entertaining and often scintillating conversation.

Just consider the luminaries in attendance at the Club on a typical London evening. At the centre of the conversation would be the physically huge figure of Dr Johnson—he of the towering intellect, he who was also known as “Dictionary Johnson” for his incredible feat of penning the first substantial dictionary of the English language almost single-handedly. Listening to him would be his devoted biographer, James Boswell; the greatest painter of the period and the founder of the Club, Sir Joshua Reynolds; Burke, the brilliant orator, passionate parliamentarian and indefatigable critic of the East India Company; Oliver Goldsmith, the renowned author and playwright, and Dr Christopher Nugent, the successful physician. As they conversed, sparks surely must have flown all around the table and Boswell must have been taking notes all the time of the pearl s dropping from Dr Johnson’s lips!

It was Reynolds who had proposed the toast associated with the Club— “Esto perpetua,” Latin for “Let it be perpetual.” Club membership was restricted—at first there were nine members, but soon some more were inducted. They included cultural luminaries such as the greatest actor of the time, David Garrick; the great parliamentarian and minister of the British Government for a while, Charles James Fox; the luminous economist Adam Smith and arguably one of the greatest of British historians, Edward Gibbon. According to the author and member of the Club, Bishop Thomas Percy, as far as Johnson was concerned, the thing that all members were to keep in mind was that the Club “was intended” to “consist of such men, as that if only two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other without wanting the addition of more Company to pass the evening agreeably”. Or, to use the word coined by the great Dr Johnson himself, Club members had to be “clubbable!”

As one can imagine, with such amazing minds and larger than life characters, the reputation of the Club spread far and wide—in London and beyond. For sure, there were other clubs in swelling and increasingly prosperous London (as is the case with Dhaka now!), and Johnson himself was associated with quite a few of them, but who could compete with the members of The Club?

Initially, Tuesday was set aside as the meeting day, then Friday; eventually other days were considered good for clubbing as well. According to one member, the writer and lawyer John Hawkins, The Literary Club soon proved to be “the great delight of Johnson’s life, a centre of conversation and mental intercourse.” As the century progressed and more and more, people vied with each other to become a member of The Club, strict rules were initiated to keep up its reputation.

Eventually, elections and “blackballing” were procedures chosen to control the number of members as well as to ensure that only “quality” people became members. Hawkins, unfortunately, was deemed to be “unclubbable” by Johnson himself and therefore was soon expelled from the Club! But Club members could be of varying political beliefs—Burke, for example, was passionate about the rights of the American colonists but Johnson critical of them. Burning political issues such as the right of the American colonists came up for discussion and debate but tempers were kept under control and wit-combats proved to be the rule and not scuffles. On most days, conversation flowed freely.

On April 3, 1778, Boswell records in his biography of Johnson, for example, “The conversation began with sculpture” and then “the subject is dropped for emigration; it then moved on to “population increase” and “density”; next to parliamentary oratory, then to philology; afterwards to travelling abroad and thence to “human nature generally”!

Johnson died in 1784, and The Club eventually disappeared from recorded history, but it had survived long enough to become a model of clubs where great minds could come together for a convivial atmosphere, free and witty exchange of ideas, and company worth seeking every evening. It became the inspiration of many such institutions all over the world. Dhaka Club, thus, can claim that any recorder of its primordial history would find The Club as one of its ancestors. For sure, for our club members, or literary minded people wanting to elevate their addas a lot, the London Club can be a source of inspiration and the conduct of its members well worth emulating during addas for fantastic clubbing!

**The Literary Club** met on Friday evenings until midnight in London. The club gatherings with all the luminaries spanned a period of 20 years. From Public Domain

[1] Could be a tête-à-tête or just a chat with multiple people.

[2] Manna Dey (1919-2013) sang about adda in the legendary Coffee House of Calcutta.

(First published on August 20, 2018 in Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Essay

‘Verify You Are Human’

By Farouk Gulsara

How often have we, as fully realised human beings, found ourselves in the ironic situation of proving our human status to a computer programme? We have ticked boxes to identify zebra crossings, traffic lights, and buses, only to be told we were wrong, as if we did not know what a bus was. It is as if our fingers were too stubby to press the right keys or too daft to understand. And now, we are deciphering distorted words, as only a human could read wavy or cursive writing.

Now we understand. The verification exercises did not just stop automatons from spying on our data. They were meant to aid computers in digitising old books[1]. Computers sometimes struggle with old pages when converting physical books into digital versions. Due to wear and tear and fading caused by oxidation, the text may appear distorted. Computers use this mundane verification process by making humans interpret these unreadable texts. We play a crucial role in this process, creating a training module to help identify issues and errors to improve digitisation.

While CAPTCHA[2] (acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was initially designed to prevent bot attacks and spam, it is now used by computers to distinguish between humans and bots among users. Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, proposed a test[3] which was later named after him to evaluate a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. Although many machines and AI programmes have passed this test, humans now face a reverse Turing Test to prove our organic status.

The funny thing is, while all this is happening, with automation and the diminishing need for human interaction, humans are gradually losing their humanity. We have lost the ability to look into each other’s eyes and start a conversation just for fun. Suppose Alan Turing proposed the test to gauge machine intelligence, and modern computers give a reverse Turing Test[4] to exclude unwanted chatbots. In that case, humans perhaps need a Turing-like test to confirm they still have some grey cells. We are increasingly losing our capacity for idle chats. We are all just prisoners, best left to our own devices.

Talking about looking into each other’s eyes and melting into the passion of each other’s aura, the dating scene these days is no longer like that. Enter any dimly-lit romantic restaurant, couples are not lost looking at one another but lost in the abyss of cyberspace, looking at the digital restaurant menu or perhaps into each other’s social media or Tinder hits to see what the other half has been up to.

While it is true that automation is changing the job market, it’s also creating new opportunities. My son, for instance, worries about his job, but I remind him that the world has created jobs that were non-existent just half a century ago. Who has heard of social media managers, cloud architects, or veterinary psychologists? My mother told me that my grandfather worked in a printing press. He used to come back smelling of turpentine, which he used to clean off the ink that stuck on his body. Nowadays, printing is done at home with a button, a slight whirring and a whooshing, and out comes a printed document at one’s convenience.

My grandfather later became a chauffeur to a successful business magnate. Once we have sorted out the finer points of bringing self-driving cars to market, we may not need drivers in the future. Now, many self-proclaimed gig entrepreneurs give up their full-time paying jobs to become delivery boys. Do we have news for these boys? Drones are dying to get up and replace you.

If one were to think that only the blue-collar job is at risk, think again. Conveyancing jobs currently carried out by paralegals can be taken over by an AI programme to churn out beautiful Sales and Purchase Agreements[5].

These programmes have also learnt to say the appropriate words during grief and crises. Increasingly, call-in helplines are ‘manned’ by AIs. The field of psychiatry may be at risk of not needing doctors. Even as we speak, we may already be conversing with chatbots about our bank transactions without realising it. This raises ethical questions about the role of AI in sensitive areas of human life and the potential loss of human connection in these interactions.

I remember a time in mid-1990 when the Malaysian civil society expressed concern over Malaysia’s uncontrolled influx of foreigners and our overdependence on the foreign labour force[6]. Someone suggested automation and mechanisation as a possible way to avert this. Still, apparently, the financiers were not too keen to increase business expenses, which would possibly reduce foreign investment. The general acceptance was that third-world nations were not ready to fully automate. They had not been able to provide universal employment to their citizens. This historical perspective highlights the complex relationship between automation, economic development, and social equity.

Moving forward, we sometimes find ourselves in zombie states, clicking reel after reel on social media as if we have so much time. Examples of children turning violent against the hands that feed them when their demand to go online is denied are not uncommon. Have we not heard of spouses immersed in full-blown affairs living under the same roof with the other half with ease, with a bit of help from the need for data privacy? A husband does not know what the wife does behind his back because access to devices is guarded by passwords.

Rock bands once thought using synthesisers on their songs was sacrilegious. The legendary British rock band, Queen, proudly boasted that they never used synthesisers to maintain a traditional, raw, organic feel to their sounds. Now, we must be happy with the digital manipulation of music and voice. Even though AI can compose music at a philharmonic level, music connoisseurs are far from contented. They say it lacks emotion, probably because great music comes from lived experience[7].

What started as automation, where machines aided humans to ease work, has now evolved to something which can learn and mimic human actions. It has come to be called intelligence, albeit artificially developed by the human mind. Like a student surpassing his teacher, the real fear now is that AI is evolving consciousness. If AI is the future, the person who controls the future will be King. Does that not mean that tech entrepreneurs will be the world’s future leaders? The world will indeed be borderless, only determined by digital connectivity.

We already long for the good old days when talking to customer service did not start with, “press 1 for English and this conversation will be recorded for self-improvement.” What they mean is that it will be used against you. Dealing with a computer chatbot already feels Kafkaesque. It feels like talking to a wall without recourse to “talking to the manager!”

[1] https://www.horlix.com/captcha-a-brief-history/

[2] https://soax.com/glossary/captcha

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27762088

[4] https://www.britannica.com/technology/Turing-test

[5] https://ttms.com/will-artificial-intelligence-ai-take-over-lawyers-jobs/

[6] https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/malaysia/publication/migration-automation-and-the-malaysian-labor-market#:~:text=Given%20that%20investments%20in%20automation,both%20sending%20and%20receiving%20countries

[7] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurorobotics/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2022.897110/full

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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Tags AI, Alan Turing, British, CAPTCHA, Farouk Gulsara, Kafka, Malaysia, Malaysian, Queen, Turing Test

Essay

Does the First Woman-authored Novel in Bengali Seek Reforms?

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 14, 2025
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By Meenakshi Malhotra

The translation published by Shambhabi The Third Eye in 2022

Published in 1868, Manottoma: Dukkhini Sati Charit (Manottama: Narrative of a Sorrowful Wife) the first novel written by an unnamed Bengali woman identifying herself as ‘A Woman belonging to the Hindu Lineage’, which is technically not a pseudonym, has been translated by Professor Somdatta Mandal and published recently in 2022. Somehow evading the attention of literary historians, the text, or any detailed information about it was unavailable for a long time till it was unearthed by a researcher in London only in 2010. In the foreword to the translated novel, Prof Rosinka Chaudhuri points out that the year 1868 was only a decade after the introduction of the main genres of modern Bengali literature: the modern novel, poetry and drama. This was a time of revision and reinvention, of recasting selves and literary forms and genres.

Manottama narrates the sufferings of a educated and long-suffering wife who labours under the petty punishments meted out to her by her uneducated husband, depicting the conflict between patriarchal expectations and prescriptions and women’s education and presumably, agency. The eponymous novel depicts a situation where Manottama, an educated woman, is married to an uneducated husband. Because of the latter’s profligate ways, she is subjected to penury and untold hardships, which she seems to accept without demur.

The narrator of Manottama claims it’s a ‘history’. Cast in a dialogic format as a conversation between two friends, Jadhav and Madhav, (a common format in its time) the novel, in one interpretation, tells us about the pitfalls of female education in the nineteenth century, a period that also saw the emancipation of Bengali women through education in a significant way. Written in the traditional Indian Puranic style of narration, with plenty of sub-plots and digressions and without conforming to the western dictates of unity of time, place, and action, it provides a domestic picture where an educated wife has to compromise with the activities and worldview of an uneducated husband. At one level of interpretation, it seems to be an attack on patriarchy. As an early narrative by an anonymous woman, the work needs — and in a way, demands — greater attention now after more than a century of neglect in order to reinterpret and reconfigure its didacticism and question its meek acceptance of status quo.

Can we accord this work the status of a novel? Also is there a way in which we can unpack the didacticism of the text and pave the way to a subversive reading of patriarchies?

In showcasing a woman who seems to meekly accept her lot in life without complaint, the intention purportedly was to show the benefits of education and how an educated woman navigates her destiny. There are many instances of rampant social injustices in the text. The husband’s profligacy, his marrying a second time and frittering away family fortunes — all these are accepted by the protagonist, Manottama, in a spirit of apparent equanimity. She seems to accept the social injustices meted out to her meekly, without demur or protest. She obeys and serves her father during his visit and continues to perform her conjugal and domestic duties vis-a-vis her undeserving husband. If anything, she continues in her endeavour to instruct her children and the children of the quarrelsome second wife. No complaint against marital injustices pass her lips, even when her father expresses concern over the indigent condition of the household. Her behaviour is ideal in every respect and she is upheld as a paragon.

“Manottama” in Bangla can be translated into someone with a superior mind or soul and the protagonist named as such fits the bill. She keeps quiet about her individual woes while trying to ensure the well-being of the whole family.

The novel shows the impact of the many instruction manuals and advice/conduct books that were plentifully available at the time and herein lies part of the problem of the book as a novel. For one, there is no attempt to depict the inner thoughts of the protagonist. She at times seems like a cardboard cutout, a compendium of all the virtues extolled by patriarchs and paternalists in 19^th century Bengal and India. She is a stereotype and seems almost a parodic version of the ’good woman’ who sacrifices self-interest at all times. Whether this narrative qualifies/succeeds as a novel is something which has to be decided by the reader .She embodies the ‘patibrata’ or the devoted wife, a kind of woman who helps in the salvation of the husband and nation. To quote a writer at the end of the 19^th century:

The Patibrata wife is the road to liberty and mobility of man. If the women of India follow the footsteps of Sita and Savitri, then this fallen country will be the blessed land again. (Chandranath Basu, Bagchi 85)

The discovery of this text forms a story by itself and is a precious nugget as it was located in the British library relatively recently, in 2010. The significance of this text is also that it is a woman’s voice addressing other women, advising them with a strong didactic intent. As readers, we can only speculate that the writer intends this homily as a form of advocacy to women that they should not abandon their traditions and customs, but use their education in order to better themselves, and devote themselves to serving their husbands.

The narrative in a dialogic style seems like an extended conversation or debate between a proponent of tradition and a spokesperson and modernity. Some of the conversation between Nilabrata, the irresponsible husband, and Manottama, echo aspects of this debate. According to Nilabrata, who is rendered somewhat insecure by his educated wife and voices the biases against women’s education, only foolish men will send their daughters to school in order to train their daughters as prostitutes. “Educating women and showing them the path to go astray are similar,” he asserts.

One is reminded of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838-1894) essay on Prachina o Nobina or “The Traditional Woman and the New Woman”(Woman Old and New, 1879). The debate on whether to educate women were along the contours of conservatism versus progressivism, albeit with shades and finer nuances.We can suppose that the author is in conversation with a conservative perspective which argues against women’s education and where she attempts to demonstrate that tradition and women’s education are not mutually opposed or divergent.

Bengali literature offers many examples of women who were poised on the brink of the paradoxical conundrum of modernity, which made them embrace education and reform without abandoning traditional values. This attempt to recast and position the ‘new’ Indian woman was a pre-emptive gesture to counter the accusation of Westernization and deracination levelled against the reformist attempts to redefine gender roles and relations in late 19^th century India.

While one can grasp the discursive aspect of the text, the lack of what we understand or perceive as a natural human response on Manottama’s part to any of her husband’s actions — misdemeanours, follies or vices — leave us feeling deeply dissatisfied. If the novel as a form shows the interactions of the individual with other individuals or with society, the lack of any credible response from Manottama casts her in the mould of a ‘patibrata’ woman but stifles the text as a novel.

However, if we keep in mind that many great writers novelists from Bengal and elsewhere — Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhayay— have often used the novel as vehicles of ideas, which generate debate both within the world of the novel and in a larger socio-historical context, this novel can surely be counted as a precursor and a prototype of the discursive/social discussion novel in Bengali. As for the other question raised earlier about the possibility of a subversive reading, Manottama by showing the evils besetting patriarchal systems, manages to show the untenable nature of the same and the fact that men like Nilabrata, for all their bravado, are liable to collapse, unless rescued and sustained by sensible wives. In that sense, it hold a lesson for men to marry wisely and recognise the true worth of educated wives, without getting lured either by false friends or duplicitous women.

The book has received a fresh lease of life in the hands of a competent translator and commentator. The foreword similarly draws out the significance of the narrative, placing it in the context of its times and the larger context of Bengali literature. An exploration of its discursive trajectories and varying cartographies adds to the joys of discovering and reading the narrative.

Meenakshi Malhotra is a Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.

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Tags Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, HansRaj College, London, Manottama: Narrative of a Sorrowful Wife, Manottoma: Dukkhini Sati Charit, Meenakshi Malhotra, Prachina o Nobina, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Shambhabi The Third Eye, Somdatta Mandal, University of Delhi

Essay

It Doesn’t Rain in Phnom Penh

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2025
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By Mohul Bhowmick

Blank faces welcome me in Phnom Penh. That the people smile at all is a miracle; years of haggard living, tortured upbringing, and painful deprivations have reduced this golden city of Indochina to one filled with figurative corpses. What America could not achieve, Pol Pot did in a flash and years of oppression turned into that of a blood-filled regime that the Mekong did not even try to wash away. For all its salubriousness, this river, among the greatest in the world, stood by and watched its children be consumed by an ephemeral fire that could only be extinguished in 1979.

Then the Vietnamese intervened, returning only after being loathed by almost everyone in Cambodia. The former, among other benedictions, took apart whatever little credibility the Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) government had amassed in three and a half years in power. Pol Pot’s name, quite naturally, does not feature on the political billboards and hoardings that seem to have made themselves inconspicuous in Phnom Penh today. The national dish, Amok, made of fish or several vegan accoutrements to serve the European traveller, takes up the spot left by those of the beggars in the parking spot north of the royal palace.

As I sip my umpteenth sugarcane juice, fortified with cubes of ice that may have once come out of Tibet, I wonder whether the king curls his lips in distaste seeing the beggars and rag-pickers waiting outside the golden gates of his palace. But the official line in Cambodia is that Sihamoni is a staunch Buddhist who likes the occasional bit of Czech opera, and all my thoughts of irreverence — born out of weeks of living in Indochina — flush down the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap while looking past Sisowath Quay to the east.

This river, the lifeblood of Indochina, had once emerged as a trickle in Tibet, and I am perplexed by the lack of cohesion it shows while merging with the Tonle Sap, which also shares its name with a large freshwater lake in Siem Reap. During the monsoon season, the Mekong forces the Tonle Sap to reverse its water with such gushing force that the latter is left with no choice but to flood itself with fish.

It doesn’t rain in Phnom Penh; I had heard this phrase before but am accosted with it with painful lucidity for the first time when visiting the Tuol Sleng primary school that served, for years, as a torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. Had it rained on the frangipani-filled lush gardens of the school — belittling the despair and agony that went on inside — I would not have noticed. I envy the frangipani blooms and their ability to distance themselves from such emotions as those that afflict men. Outside, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge years sells his story for a few pennies; recognition from the foreigner seems more validating to him than acceptance from his countrymen, who have long forgotten his ordeals. I am told that a McDonald’s might soon open across the street.

When encountering the fabled ‘baby-killing tree’ in the ignominious Killing Fields in Cheoung Ek outside Phnom Penh, there is a numbing sensation which I have scarcely felt before. The tears fall heavier than the unseasonal rains I would have wished to encounter in Phnom Penh; it was not too long ago when I could have claimed that I had not cried in ten years. That this tree is also a Pipal, a cousin of the one under which Sakyamuni attained enlightenment, seems a cruel joke to me. That there is still some sign of life on it, populated by the innumerable butterflies and twittering sparrows, exacerbates this feeling all the more.

Angkor[1], a few days later, seems resplendent at dawn, but I am unable to escape the reality that the men who built this monument had also given birth to the reality that the Khmer Rouge would later become. Indeed, Pol Pot was known for his selective readings of the classics of the Khmer kingdom of Angkor — if building this city was possible, anything was, even his vastly unerudite idea of returning the country to a year ‘zero’, doing away with the market economy, abolishing money and persecuting intellectuals for wearing spectacles.

The rain that evades me in Phnom Penh finally catches up with me in Angkor Wat; unable to make a visit early one morning on a bicycle in a thunderstorm through the black jungle, I remain rooted to my guesthouse and eventually fall asleep.

On my first visit to Angkor Wat, I am stunned by the intricacies and details that seem to have permeated every angle of Khmer design. The frescoes on the walls and the images on the gates of the large temple complex depict wars fought and construction projects undertaken; for all its virility in eventually losing its grasp over modern-day Cambodia, the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer kingdom — of whose ilk Jayavarman VII had been, and whose predecessor Suryavarman II had ordered this temple made in 1150, at first as a tribute to Vishnu, and eventually, a mausoleum for himself — was remarkable in its aesthetic sensibilities.

The several other temples in the area, including the great Bayon, Ta Phrom and Prasat Preah Khan — not to mention the gigantic meadows located in the heart of the old city of Angkor Thom — attract and drive my senses even as I struggle to cycle on flat roads in the deadening midday heat. The meadows, which feature statues of elephants attired in regal resplendence, remind me of a time simpler than this, when a thousand parasols could be had for cheap and held over the head of the king. The climate of Indochina, I surmise, may not have been too different from what it is now; I look yonder for concrete jungles mimicking the ones that seem to have sprung up choc-a-bloc in west Hyderabad, but encounter only lush blackness.

In effect, understanding Khmer society or the part of it which is shown to the visitor, is a challenging affair unless one undertakes a voyage of the heart that infrequently involves short-changing between lives of a different kind. The Mekong, which makes no appearance in Siem Reap, slithers away from the intemperate nature one finds in Angkor.

When I walk past Sisowath Quay one night under a moonless sky, I am reminded of my own idea of happiness, which seems to have been torn to shreds on this journey; a group of middle-aged Khmer men, devoid of languor in this dark hour and well-fortified with Angkor, the brew and not the temple, beckon me over to join in their game of sai[2]. It is then that I know it is time to put the killing tree to bed. For now.

[1] Angkor Wat is in the city of Siem Reap

[2] Played with the foot with a shuttlecock-like structure

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, poet, sports journalist, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published four collections of poems and one travelogue so far. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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