Tag: Andrew Robinson

Categories
Contents

Borderless, August 2026

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Bells, Corners, Changes and Life… Click here to read.

Translations

Robihara 2 (Sunless 2) by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Chapter 1 of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne, has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Aslam Dostain‘s novel, Sótkál, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

A Sudden Shower has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.

Jhor or Storm, a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Akil Contractor, George Freek, Pramod Rastogi, Khayelihle Benghu, John Grey, Mary Tina Shamli Pillay, John Britten, Bharti Mehra, David Francis, Laila Brahmbhatt, Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In Bell Poems, Rhys Hughes shares a series of poems inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Bell’. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

The Elusive Horizontal Falls

Meredith Stephens writes about her sailing adventures in Australia as Alan Noble shares his photographs. Click here to read.

Reading, Writing, and the Long, Dark Tunnel of Despair

Jeena R. Papaadi explores her own literary journey. Click here to read.

Another Waterworld?

Jun A. Alindogan writes of typhoons that are on the rise in Philippines. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In The Zine Scene, Suzanne Kamata participates at ‘The Zine Festival’ in Kobe. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Riverside Reflections, Devraj Singh Kalsi gives a dark satire which almost reads like fiction. Click here to read.

Essays

When Life gives us Lemons, make Lemonade!

Farouk Gulsara looks at the impact of climate events and climate change. Click here to read.

On Both Sides of the Border: The Techno-Political Erasure of Bureaucracy, Memory, and Refugee Lives

Rengin Uçkan takes a look at the plight of refugees. Click here to read.

Neither Automaton nor Oracle: A Satirical Inquiry into Morality, Conditioning, Football, and the End of Human Civilisation

Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan muses on the modern civilisation and its outlooks. Click here to read.

Stories

Shadow Play

Yi-jung Chen shares a unique love story set in Taiwan. Click here to read.

Fairway

Brindley Hallam Dennis shares a short narrative about a dog. Click here to read.

The Space Between Notifications

Jay Samanta shares a modern day relationship. Click here to read.

My Brother’s Room

Devraj Singh Kalsi gives a story of two brothers. Click here to read.

A Walk Through Nature

Naramsetti Umamaheswararao shares a fable set in a village in Andhra Pradesh. Click here to read.

Interview

Keith Lyons interviews author, Jayanthi Sankar, who also shares an excerpt from one of her stories. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Rhys Hughes’ The Biscuit Thief. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Ramananda Bharati’s The Forest of Snow, translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Aruna Chakravarti has reviewed Ramananda Bharati’s The Forest of Snow, translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Click here to read.

Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Arupa Patangia Kalit’s The Moonlight Saga, translated from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, co-authored by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. Click here to read.

.

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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

Categories
Editorial

Bells, Corners, Changes and Life

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, Painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Perhaps, the only constant that makes a difference in this ever-transforming world is how we react to changes around us. How do we interact with not just humans but our whole planet with its climate, contours, its plethora of flora and fauna?  Will that impact our survival in the long run? And yet with our focus on legacies, traditions, beliefs, we tend to ignore the call to adapt to the new that might help us move towards an unpredictable future. We forget perhaps that these systems had all been made by our ancestors to ensure survival. Somewhere along the way, these have become like fences caging us into small subsets. The strange thing is we continue to allow that to happen and create enclosures which we fight to maintain. The future that we face now seems even more tumultuous with climate change, rising sea levels and global warming taking a front seat while influx of refugees from war and natural disasters have already started making themselves felt. Add to that the shortages of resources that we have taken for granted for centuries. How would we survive these?

Is it by redefining the constructs we have created or just meeting in corners and finding commonalities as suggested by Ryan Quinn Flanagan in his poem ‘Corners’?

Corners are a meeting place, 
they hold a room together

Our poetry section often reflects what we experience, feel or see around us. We have poems on how nature overrides human constructs by Khayelihle Benghu. In ‘Passport for the Rain‘, she writes:

If rain possessed a passport, it would read:
Citizen of every place that drinks.

We have variety from around the world with poems from Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Akil Contractor, George Freek, Pramod Rastogi, John Grey, Mary Tina Shamli Pillay, John Britten, Bharti Mehra, David Francis and Laila Brahmbhatt. Rhys Hughes has given us poetry inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Bell. While Poe wrote one poem in 1848 ( published posthumously in 1849), Hughes has written nine sprinkled with his brand of humour, including on cowbells and bell peppers!

We also have poetry in our translations with Ihlwha Choi giving us a glimpse of Korean life. Professor Fakrul Alam has brought to us in English a Bengali poem by Nazrul written on the death of Tagore, a poem that was read out in Calcutta radio by the poet himself in 1941. Tagore’s poem, Storm, has been translated in keeping with the heavy downpours in Asia this season. Fazal Baloch has shared an excerpt in English, which reads like a short story, from Aslam Dostain’s Balochi novel, Sótkál, giving us a flavour of the hard life in their region, where self-reliance is a felt need for survival. We have mental heath issues woven into this section with Isa Kamari’s translation of his own Malay novel into English, The Throne. We will be running a chapter every month from this novel.

Book excerpts also has a translation this time with Ramananda Bharati’s Bengali travelogue, The Forest of Snow, brought to us in English by Somdatta Mandal. Aruna Chakravarti has reviewed this non-fiction for us. The other excerpt is from Hughes’ The Biscuit Thief, a book that reflects his distinct brand of absurd humour. Keith Lyons’ interview this time features an excerpt from interviewee Jayanthi Sankar’s short story set in Singapore. Mandal has written on yet another translation from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas of Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Moonlight Saga. Bhaskar Parichha has discussed Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, co-authored by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. He claims that this book is “is indispensable reading for anyone interested in literature, intellectual history, cultural modernity, or the life of a man whose vision of humanity continues to speak powerfully to an increasingly interconnected world.”

This month’s non-fiction section has trotted around the globe. We have Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan’s essay discussing how to redefine norms. His take is a bit different from Flanagan’s. He tells us, using Huck Finn, Terminator and Sangam Literature, people need to ask not, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?” Rengin Uçkan’s writes on the need for framing rules that are compassionate for refugees. And Farouk Gulsara with his inevitable gruff humour talks of climate change while stating things as it is: “Climate change not only shrinks our summer beachwear but also makes outdoor living impossible. Additionally, it’s proving to be more expensive to consume anything…”  Jun A. Alindogan narrates how typhoons have increased in number in Philippines and how it affects them while Jeena R. Papaadi reflects on her literary journey. Meredith Stephens shares her sailing adventures in Australia with stunning photographs by Alan Noble. And Suzanne Kamata has brought us a flavour of the unique Zine Fest in Kobe, where both groceries and books find a place!

Devraj Singh Kalsi hovers between fact and fiction. He has a musing which seems like a hash of dark fiction but based on his experiences. He has also shared a story that is purely fictional. Yi-jung Chen brings to us a quirky love story set in Taiwan across time and space while Brindley Hallam Dennis tells a tale about a dog who sits at a table and sips drinks with a straw! Jay Samanta gives a narrative about a modern relationship based on social media output. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao has shared a fable that talks of freeing nature. The issue is, can we really?

In Borderless Journal, we hope to create a space which will help reflect not just the times but also look forward to ideas that can move us towards surviving in a happier world, built on the basis of accepting differences, filled with love, kindness and compassion. While this may sound clichéd and repetitive, given the current climes, these values cannot be emphasised often enough and perhaps our content to an extent does reflect that, sometimes with a soupçon of humour. Do pause by our contents page for this August and tell us what you think.  

Winding up this issue, we would like to thank our all contributors for their wonderful writings and photographs. Huge thanks to the Borderless team without who this issue would not have been as vibrant. Special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Thank you all. All of you together make this journal come alive.

Enjoy the reads!

Cheers,

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE CONTENTS FOR THE AUGUST 2026 ISSUE

.

READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGIES BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK

Categories
Review

The Myriad Colours of Tagore

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man 

Authors: Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man is among the most authoritative and nuanced biographies of the Nobel laureate, offering a deeply researched portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectuals. The result of a decade of collaborative work by a Bengali scholar and a British writer, the book transcends the conventions of literary biography to present Tagore as a global thinker whose influence extended far beyond poetry.

The biography’s highest strength lies in its refusal to reduce Tagore to a single identity. While Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize naturally occupy an important place, the authors devote equal attention to his work as an educator, philosopher, playwright, composer, painter, and social reformer. His founding of Visva-Bharati University, experiments in rural reconstruction, and engagement with questions of nationalism, internationalism, and cultural identity receive careful and balanced treatment. Readers come away with a renewed appreciation of Tagore as a visionary who sought to reconcile India’s civilisational heritage with the demands of modernity.

The authors contend in the Introduction: “This is an ambivalent book. It has to be, whichever way one views Rabindranath Tagore, well over half a century after his death. Seen from the West, Tagore appears to have come out of nowhere in 1912 and collected a Nobel prize without the least effort; to have travelled the world and enjoyed a worldwide homage for over two decades not granted to any other writer in the twentieth century; and then to have evanesced until he is barely more than a name. But seen from Bengal he looks very different. Before 1912, Rabindranath was rejected by many, perhaps the majority, of Bengalis as being a product of western influence; for the rest of his life he experienced a unique blend of vilification and homage; and only after he died in 1941 was he canonized as Bengal’s greatest creative artist and raised to the Olympian pedestal he now occupies. No writer, living or dead, is today more actively worshipped in Bengal than Rabindranath Tagore.
“From his own point of view, Tagore’s predicament was even more contradictory. As an idealist – which he remained to the last – he reserved his highest admiration for the humane spirit of the West he had first encountered in the liberalism of nineteenth-century English literature and politics. ‘Whatever may be the outward aspect of Europe’s power, I have no doubt that at its core is the power of the spirit’, he said before leaving Bengal in 1912.’ Like some other highly educated Bengalis of his time, until about 1920 Tagore believed British rule in India to be providential, necessary for the reform of a moribund, degenerate society. But as a patriot, particularly after 1900, he needed to believe in the persistence of ancient India’s spiritual values in contemporary India. In 1912, through his poems Gitanjali (Song Offerings), translated by himself, and through his personal presence in England – where people were even reminded of Christ – these two beliefs became harmonized in his mind.”

Dutta and Robinson are particularly successful in capturing the contradictions that defined Tagore’s personality. They portray him neither as an untouchable icon nor as a flawless sage, but as a deeply human figure marked by personal grief, spiritual searching, intellectual restlessness, and emotional complexity. His relationships with contemporaries such as Mahatma Gandhi, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Albert Einstein illuminate the extraordinary intellectual networks that shaped the modern world. The narrative also examines the fluctuating fortunes of Tagore’s international reputation, explaining why his global fame diminished in the decades following his death despite his enduring significance.

The prose, running into five hundred pages, is elegant and accessible without sacrificing scholarly rigour. Richly illustrated and supported by extensive archival research, the biography succeeds in weaving together historical events, literary criticism, and intimate personal details into a compelling narrative. Rather than overwhelming readers with chronology, the authors emphasise the ideas and experiences that shaped Tagore’s creative genius.

Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man stands as a definitive modern biography of India’s first Nobel laureate. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in literature, intellectual history, cultural modernity, or the life of a man whose vision of humanity continues to speak powerfully to an increasingly interconnected world.

Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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