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Essay

Kazi Nazrul Islam: Bringing the Ghazal Home

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri explores how Nazrul transformed a Persian musical form into a distinctly Bengali expression of love, devotion and cultural coexistence

Nazrul (1899-1976) teaching Nazrul Sangeet. From Public Domain

The journey of the ghazal into Bengal is, in many ways, the story of India itself: a form travelling across languages, faiths, courts and cultures, losing something of itself at every crossing and acquiring something new in return. Born in Arabic poetry, refined in Persian, transformed in the Hindustani world and eventually absorbed into several Indian languages, the ghazal was never a form that remained untouched by the cultures through which it passed.

In Bengal, its most remarkable transformation came through Kazi Nazrul Islam.

Nazrul did not merely introduce the ghazal into Bengali. He made it feel as though it had always belonged there. That achievement becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that Bengali already possessed a rich and deeply individual musical-literary tradition. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had produced the great poet-composers who came to be remembered collectively as the Panchakabis[1]: Dwijendralal Roy, Rajanikanta Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Atulprasad Sen and, the youngest of them, Nazrul. They wrote their own lyrics and generally composed their own melodies, creating a modern Bengali song tradition that combined literary sophistication with music. Unlike the privileged urban backgrounds of most of his predecessors, however, Nazrul came from poverty and rural Bengal. His childhood and youth exposed him to worlds that the emerging Bengali middle class often experienced as separate: Islamic learning, Persian literature, Hindu mythology, Vaishnava poetry, folk theatre and the songs of rural Bengal. This plurality was not an intellectual position Nazrul adopted later in life. It was the atmosphere in which his imagination was formed.

The ghazal itself had already travelled an extraordinary distance before reaching him. Its origins lay in Arabic poetry, but it acquired much of its classical identity in Persian literature. Persian poets such as Hafiz, Rumi and Saadi gave the form its characteristic world of desire, intoxication, separation, beauty and mystical longing. When the ghazal entered the Indian Subcontinent, it encountered local languages and traditions and changed again. Amir Khusrau and, later, Wali Daccani were among those who helped transform the Persian form into something increasingly Hindustani. In India, the ghazal acquired new vocabularies, new images and new musical possibilities.

At its simplest, the ghazal consists of a series of couplets, each capable of standing independently while being held together by a common metre, rhyme and refrain. Yet the formal structure is only half the story. The real unity of the ghazal is emotional. Its verses circle around longing, often without resolving it. The beloved may be a woman, a man, God, beauty itself, an absent homeland or an impossible ideal. In the Sufi imagination, earthly and divine love can become indistinguishable.

That ambiguity was perfectly suited to Nazrul.

Bengal had experimented with the form before him. Atulprasad Sen is generally credited with the first substantial Bengali experiments with the ghazal. But Nazrul took the experiment much further, turning it into a popular musical form. He did not approach the ghazal merely as a literary structure to be reproduced in another language. He understood that it had to be made to breathe in Bengali.

His preparation for this was unusually rich. He learnt Urdu from his uncle Bazle Kareem and encountered Persian more deeply during his years with the Bengal Regiment in Karachi, where he studied the language with a Punjabi maulavi. He read Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Hafiz, and the attraction was immediate. The Persian poets gave him a vocabulary of intoxication, rebellion, sensuality and mystical desire that seemed to correspond naturally with his own temperament. In the early 1920s, he translated and adapted Persian and Urdu material into Bengali. But it was towards the end of the decade, with greater maturity as both poet and composer, that he began creating original Bengali ghazals in earnest. These compositions were published with musical notation and eventually travelled through gramophone records and radio.

That technological development is important. The Bengali ghazal might have remained an interesting literary experiment had it been confined to printed pages. Gramophone and radio changed its destiny. Nazrul’s songs entered homes, tea shops, theatre halls and public gatherings. A form associated with the Persian and Urdu world could now be heard in Bengali by listeners who might never have encountered its literary ancestry. The ghazal became something to sing and listen to before it became something to analyse.

Nazrul’s great innovation was to make the Persian inheritance sound Bengali without stripping it of its Persian character. Listen to the vocabulary of his songs. Words such as ishq, dil, mahfil, gulshan, bulbuli and gulbahar enter the Bengali lyric naturally. They do not sit there like foreign ornaments. They become part of the emotional vocabulary of the song. The Persian garden begins to coexist with the Bengali landscape.

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of Nazrul’s ghazals. He could summon the rose garden of Persian poetry and, almost in the same breath, evoke Bengal’s rivers, spring winds, flowering trees and muddy pathways. The imported image does not erase the local one. They inhabit the same poem. Consider the rose and the nightingale, perhaps the most familiar pair in Persian and Sufi poetry. Nazrul gives them an intimacy that is unmistakably his:

Mohammad naam jopchhili bulbuli tui aage,
Tai kire tor konthe aaji emon modhur raage.
Ore golap niribili, bujhi Nobir kodom chhuye chhili,
Tai tar kodomer khoshbu aajo tor atore jaage.

*

O nightingale, surely you once whispered the name of Muhammad
Is that why such sweetness dwells within your song?
O rose, perhaps, in secret, you once touched the Prophet’s feet;
That is why, even today, the fragrance of his footsteps lingers in your attar.

The rose and nightingale are ancient Persian symbols. But Nazrul does something wonderfully intimate with them. The Prophet is not invoked through theological abstraction. His presence survives as fragrance, birdsong and touch. Devotion becomes sensory. The sacred enters the ordinary world through things one can smell and hear. This ability to make different traditions converse is at the heart of Nazrul’s art.

Nazrul was writing at a time when Bengal’s cultural life was being increasingly marked by communal anxieties. The Bengali Muslim community, despite its demographic importance, often found itself culturally marginalised within a literary establishment shaped substantially by the Hindu bhadralok[2]. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals offered Bengali Muslims a literary and musical vocabulary drawn from their own Islamic and Persian inheritance while simultaneously keeping them within the larger Bengali cultural world. That is why his Persianised diction matters. It was not merely decorative exoticism. It helped create a cultural space in which Bengali Muslim listeners could hear themselves without having to abandon Bengali identity.

At the same time, Nazrul was introducing the Hindu listener to an Islamic world that Bengali literature had often treated as something outside the mainstream of its cultural imagination. His ghazals therefore worked in both directions. They gave Bengali Muslims a sense of cultural recognition while inviting Bengali Hindus into an unfamiliar but deeply embedded part of Bengal’s history.

The scholar Dr Pushpita Mitra identifies three broad tendencies in Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals, and this distinction helps us understand the extraordinary range of his achievement. In some compositions, he brought Urdu words and phrases directly into Bengali, creating an idiom that consciously mediated between the two languages. In a second group, he used Persian imagery – gulbahar, gulbagicha, bulbuli, gardens, flowers, seasons – to evoke the landscape of Persian poetry while allowing it to overlap with Bengali nature. In a later phase, his ghazals became less dependent on obviously Persian or North Indian vocabulary and forms and increasingly absorbed his own mature musical and lyrical personality.

One of the most delightful examples of the first tendency is a song that moves between Bengali and Hindustani with a playful sensuality:

Alga koro go khopar bandhan
Dil wahin mera phans gayi
Binod benir zareen fitay
andha ishq mera kas gayi.
Tomar kesher gandho kokhon
Lukaiye ashilo lobhi amar mon,
Behosh hokar gir pari haath mein,
Baaju-band mein bas gayi.

*

Undo the knot of your hair
My heart is caught there still.
In the golden ribbon of your braid,
My blind love has tightened its hold.
When did the fragrance of your hair
Slip secretly into my heart?
Before I knew it, drunk and helpless,
I fell into your hands
And made my home in your armlet.

What makes the song so charming is not simply its sensuality. It is the linguistic play. Bengali and Hindustani rub against each other, creating something that sounds at once theatrical, folkish and unmistakably Nazrul. The Persian vocabulary is not being displayed; it is being lived.

The second tendency in his ghazals is equally revealing, as Dr Mitra points out. Consider his evocation of spring:

Phul phaguner elo morshum,
Boney boney laaglo dol,
Kusum shokhin dokhino haaway
Chitto geeto-uttorol.

The poem begins in the Bengali spring – the season of phagun, flowers, southern winds and the stirring of the heart – but Persian imagery soon enters the frame:

Gulbaharer uttori kaar jauraalo toru-lotaay,
Muhu-muhu daakey kuhu, tandra-alosh daar khol.

*

Spring has come, the season of flowers,
And every grove is suddenly awake.
The southern breeze moves through the blossoms,
And the heart begins to sing and dance.
The rose-garden spills its colours
Over the branches and vines;
The cuckoo calls from somewhere within,
And sleep and languor open their doors.

The Persian garden has entered Bengal, but Bengal has not been Persianised. The two landscapes overlap. That is perhaps the most important thing Nazrul achieved with the ghazal: he did not translate one culture into another. He allowed them to meet.

And the emotion was never confined to romantic love. Nazrul could move from sensuality to devotion, from devotion to rebellion, from rebellion to loneliness. His ghazals contain lovers, mystics, intoxicated wanderers, flowers, nightingales and gods. Their beloved is often deliberately elusive. Is it a woman? God? Memory? Death? Desire itself? The uncertainty is part of the pleasure. This is where Nazrul’s Islamic inheritance meets the Bengali Vaishnava tradition of biraha, the spiritualized ache of separation. In both traditions, absence can become more powerful than presence. The beloved’s physical absence intensifies his or her presence within the imagination. Nazrul understood this instinctively. His songs rarely hurry towards resolution. Longing is allowed to remain longing.

Consider this:

Bagichay, bulbuli tui phul shakhate disne aji dol,
Ajo tar phul-kolider ghum tuteni, tandraate bilol.
Ajo hay rikto shakhay uttori bay jhurche nishi-din,
Asheni dakhine hawa, ghazal-gawa moumachi bibhol.
Kobe se phul-kumari ghomta chiri, ashbe bahire re,
Shishirer sparsha-sukhe bhangbe re ghum, rangbe re kapol.
Phaguner mukul-jaga dukul-bhanga ashbe fulel ban,
Kurider ostho-pute lutbe hashi, phutbe gale dol.
Kobi tui gandhe bhule dubli jole, kul peline ar,
Phule tor buk bhorechis, ajke jole bhar re aankhir kol.

*

In the garden, O bulbul, do not set the flowers swaying on their branches today;
The buds still sleep, their slumber has not yet been broken from their drowsy dreams.
Alas, even now, the empty branches tremble day and night in the northern wind;
The southern breeze has not yet arrived, nor the honeybees, intoxicated with the ghazal of flowers.
When will she come, the flower-maiden, tearing apart her veil and stepping outside?
When will the touch of dew awaken her from sleep and paint her cheeks with colour?
When spring comes, when buds awaken and the banks overflow, a flood of flowers will arrive;
Laughter will spill from the little buds’ lips, and dimples will blossom upon their cheeks.
O poet, bewildered by fragrance, you have plunged into the waters and can find no shore;
You have filled your heart with flowers, but today, fill the hollows of your eyes with tears.

This ghazal unfolds as a delicate allegory of waiting, awakening and loss. At first, its world seems entirely pastoral: the garden, the bulbul, sleeping buds, empty branches, dew, the southern breeze and intoxicated bees. Yet beneath these images lies a deeply human longing. Spring has not arrived; the flowers remain asleep, the branches shiver in the cold northern wind, and even the bees that will eventually turn the garden into music are absent.

The ‘flower-maiden’ becomes the central image of this anticipated awakening. Her emergence from behind her veil, her cheeks coloured by dew, and the laughter and dimples appearing on the buds transform nature into a living feminine presence. Spring is imagined not merely as a season but as a moment of emotional and sensual renewal.

The final couplet dramatically changes the mood. The poet, intoxicated by fragrance, has plunged into the waters and lost the shore. The flowers that once represented joy now coexist with tears. This movement from expectation to intoxication and finally to sorrow gives the ghazal its poignancy. The poem’s greatest beauty lies in this tension: spring promises fullness, yet the poet discovers that beauty and grief are inseparable. The garden blooms outside while the heart fills with tears within.

In another ghazal, the poet says:

Bosiya bijone keno eka mone
Paniya bharone cholo lo gori
Cholo jole cholo kande banatal
Dake chholchhol jol-lahori.
Diba chale jay bolaka-pakhay
Bihoger buke bihogi lukay.
Kende chokha-chakhi magiche biday
Barowa-r sure jhure banshori.
Ogo be-dordi o ranga paye
Mala hoye ke go gelo joraye.
Tobo sathe kobi porilo daye,
Paye rakhi tare na gole pori.

*

Sitting alone in solitude,
Why do you linger there by yourself?
Come, fair one, come to fetch the water;
Come, let us go to the water.
The forest floor weeps;
the rippling waves call out to us.
The day slips away on the wings of the cranes;
within the bird’s breast the female bird hides.
The chokha-chakhi, the loving pair, weeps and bids farewell;
To the plaintive strains of Barowa, the flute languishes.
O heartless one, at your red feet,
who has gone and entwined herself like a garland?
The poet, bound to you, is caught in a dilemma:
shall I place her at your feet, or wear her around my neck?

This lyric unfolds as a gradual movement from invitation to longing, and finally to surrender. Its opening image, a young woman sitting alone and being invited to fetch water, places desire within the familiar pastoral world of Bengali song. Water becomes both a literal destination and an emotional metaphor: ‘come to the water’ suggests movement from solitude towards intimacy.

The second stanza deepens the mood through nature. Day departing on the wings of the balaka, birds seeking one another, and the chokha-chakhi bidding farewell create an atmosphere of separation. The mention of Barowa and the languishing flute introduces the classical-romantic vocabulary of Indian music, where melody itself becomes an expression of yearning.

The final stanza transforms pastoral romance into personal devotion. The mysterious figure who ‘entwines’ herself around the beloved’s red feet as a garland evokes both surrender and erotic attachment. The poet’s dilemma, whether to place the garland at her feet or wear it, is deliberately paradoxical. Love has erased the distinction between worship and possession. What begins as a simple invitation to the water thus becomes a meditation on desire, separation, devotion and the inability to decide whether love is an act of surrender or an act of embrace.

His later work makes this even more poignant. The death of his young son, the illness of his wife Pramila and the devastating illness that eventually silenced Nazrul himself cast a shadow over the later part of his creative life. The rebellious energy never entirely disappeared, but the songs increasingly turned towards loss, memory, mortality and mystical yearning.

One such lyric begins:

Bhoriya poran shunitechi gaan,
aashibey aaji bondhu mor.
Shaupono makhiya shonar paakhay,
aakhaashe udhao chitto-chokor.

*

My heart is full; I listen for a song
Perhaps today my beloved will come.
Dreams are folded into golden wings,
And some restless bird of the heart flies away into the sky.


The poem then moves towards the riverbank, the muddy path, the approaching beloved and the drifting scent of the wind. Who is coming? Nazrul never tells us. That is precisely its power. The beloved may be a lover remembered, a divine presence, an apparition from the past, even death itself. The song does not close the door on any possibility. It leaves us waiting on that riverbank.

This late Nazrul is very different from the young ‘Bidrohi Kobi’, the Rebel Poet who thundered against empire, oppression and communal divisions. Yet the two poets are not really different. The same refusal to accept boundaries lies beneath both. The poet who would not accept the separation of Hindu and Muslim traditions would not accept the separation of love from devotion, the sensual from the spiritual, or beauty from sorrow.

This is also why his use of Hindu and Islamic imagery could be so radical without being merely provocative. Nazrul could write of Krishna, Shiva, Kali and Durga with the same intensity with which he invoked Islamic devotional imagery. His Hindu devotional songs, particularly his Shyamasangeet, became an important part of Bengal’s musical heritage. His ghazals, meanwhile, brought Persian and Islamic imagery into Bengali popular music. His artistic universe was not a collection of separate compartments; it was a single, restless landscape.

There were critics who found this troubling. Some conservative Muslims objected to his Hindu imagery; some Hindu critics were uncomfortable with his Persianised diction. Nazrul belonged fully to neither camp because he refused the premise on which both positions rested: that cultures preserve themselves by remaining apart. For him, Bengal had never been culturally pure. Its languages, music, metaphors and religious traditions had been meeting one another for centuries. The Bengali ghazal is perhaps the most beautiful evidence of that history.

What Nazrul finally created was not a Bengali imitation of an Urdu form. Nor was it Persian poetry dressed in Bengali clothes. It was something new: a musical-literary language in which Persian imagery, Arabic devotional vocabulary, Bengali lyricism, folk symbolism, Vaishnava emotionalism and Hindustani musical traditions could exist together without apologising for one another.

And this is where his importance extends beyond the history of the ghazal. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals were part of a larger cultural intervention. In the Bengal of the 1920s and 1930s, when communal identities were hardening and the colonial political order was encouraging competing claims of belonging, he offered another possibility. A culture could be Muslim and Bengali. It could draw from Persia without ceasing to be Bengali. It could invoke Krishna and Muhammad without treating the two as mutually exclusive. It could be modern without severing itself from folk memory.

The political message was sometimes explicit in Nazrul’s journalism and poetry. In the ghazals it was often quieter. It resided in the very sound of the songs – in their vocabulary, their imagery, their musical forms and their refusal to remain inside a single cultural enclosure. The effect could be political without the song ever becoming a political slogan. Perhaps this is why Nazrul’s ghazals continue to feel so alive. Nearly a century later, his Bengali ghazals remain part of the musical lives of Bengal and Bangladesh. They continue to be sung, recorded and reinterpreted. Their survival is testimony not simply to the durability of Nazrul’s melodies but to the emotional generosity of the world he imagined.

A rose can belong to Persia and Bengal at the same time. A nightingale can sing the name of Muhammad in a Bengali song. A river boat can carry an Islamic prayer. A spring garden can be simultaneously gulbahar and Bengal. A lover can be human, divine or simply remembered. Nazrul understood that these were not contradictions. They were the truth of Bengal. And perhaps that is his greatest gift to the Bengali ghazal: he did not merely give Bengal a new musical form. He showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before. The ghazal arrived in Bengal as an inheritance from elsewhere. Nazrul brought it home.

[1] Panchakabis: Five poets

[2] Bhadralok: Gentlemen

(First published in https://shantanuraychaudhuri.com/2026/08/29/kazi-nazrul-islam-bringing-the-ghazal-home/)

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).

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Review

The Unseen Branches

Book Review by Mudassar Javed Baryar

Title: The First Jasmines

Author: Saima Begum

Publisher: Hajar Press

In the literary cartography of the Global South, fiction has often been pressed into the service of nation-narration. From Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, canonised as the novelistic metonym for India’s tumultuous post-independence history, to Tahmima Anam’s celebrated Bengal trilogy, received as a fictional appraisal of Bangladesh’s birth pangs, critics have persistently sought foundational texts that can emblematise emergent nation-states. Bangladesh, a nation forged in the crucible of a 1971 war that violently severed the geographic and ideological construct of Pakistan, occupies a distinctive position within this literary ecology. Its fiction emerges from a fractured genealogy of linguistic and political resistance, one that inherently unsettles monolithic, linear narratives of statehood.

Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines provides not as a supplement to a pre-existing history, but as an epistemological correction. It radicalises the project of narrating the nation by relocating the locus of meaning from the birth of a state to the structural, gendered violence its delivery both requires and represses. In doing so, the novel demands that we rethink the very relationship between fiction and national history, turning away from the monumental icon of the “tree” toward the unseen, divergent “branches” of women’s testimony.

The novel situates its inquiry not in the heroic theatre of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaigns, but in the circumscribed, carceral space of a military camp where women are held as spoils of a genocidal war. The protagonist, Lucky, is introduced as a figure of radical ordinariness, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband works in London, whose life is violently unmoored during a journey to visit her ailing mother. Abducted alongside her sister Jamila, she is thrust into a temporal and spatial parenthesis where historical time collapses into the cyclical horror of daily violation.

Begum’s masterful narrative choice is to dwell in this atemporal zone, resisting the teleological pull of rescue and nationhood. The novel insists that the truth of national formation is to be found not in the climax of independence, but in this interstitial, nine-month duration of captivity—a dark, inverted gestation of the state. The narrative voice meticulously records a reality where agency is atomized into the smallest of sensory perceptions: “A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight.” The prose transforms the scene into a spectral image of beauty and abjection, a visual field where the women are reduced to a single organic mass, their subjectivity merging with the material textures of their prison.

Begum’s aesthetic project hinges on her refusal of graphic spectacle. The violence is rendered not through an unveiling of the wounded body, but through an immersive phenomenology of trauma and a choreography of survival. A dialogic exchange between the two sisters becomes a profound meditation on the ontology of endurance. Jamila’s counsel, “Close your eyes… The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave…” and Lucky’s retort, “What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open…” stage a dialectic of memory and presence, of protective dissociation and sensory assault. When Jamila counters Lucky’s terror with the sacred identity of “A praying mother,” Begum constructs what can be termed a fragile counterforce; an affective and spiritual armature that stands against the physical machinery of the camp.

These whispered philosophies, born from the collective precarity of womanhood, elevate conversation into a mode of existential resistance. The female prisoners emerge not as silent victims but as vernacular philosophers whose dialogue constitutes a parallel archive of wisdom, a repository of insight into the patriarchal logics that subtend the spectacular violence of war.

The novel’s metaphorical architecture is anchored by the recurring, titular motif of jasmine, “a flower that blooms at night, alluding to the possibility of survival and beauty in darkness.” This is not a simple consolatory figure. The jasmine operates as an olfactory and mnemonic counter-symbol to the visual regimes of state power and historiographic documentation. It is a scent that persists where light, the Enlightenment metaphor for knowledge and liberation, fails. In the novel’s most formally striking passage, the dehumanising violence is refracted through a complex simile of capture: the soldier grabs Zoleyka’s braid “like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.” The comparison is devastating in its precision, momentarily stripping the character of human subjecthood to figure her as catch, as non-human resource within a predatory political economy of bodies.

Yet, the meticulous catalogue of her braids, “Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid”, preceding this act of violation is a testament to a life of self-care and cultural practice. The text thus inscribes violence not as an isolated event but as a systemic logic that weaponises what women have tended with love. Begum’s narrative eye, however, is unremittingly dialectical, and in a chillingly audacious shift, she turns the omniscient gaze onto the hyper-sensory paranoia of the soldiers: “Tasted sugar when they bit into the flesh of bloodied girls.” This perspectival haunting refuses a Manichean simplicity, exposing the perpetrators’ psyche as a landscape corroded by superstition and a barbarity that recoils upon the self. It suggests a war that consumes both the captured and the captor, albeit along radically asymmetrical axes of consequence.

This bifocal vision culminates in the novel’s central epistemic maxim: “God must’ve given us different eyeballs, men and women, they only seem to see the tree and never the direction of its branches.” The folk aphorism articulates a gendered scopic regime. The masculinist, state-centric gaze sees the singular, monumental “tree”—the nation, the war, the linear narrative of liberation—while women’s perception traces the divergent, lateral, and unseen “branches”: the capillaries of care, the trajectories of trauma, the lived experiences that the grand narrative cannot integrate.

The novel’s own form embodies this branched perception. It intersperses harrowing depictions of suffering with moments of startling levity born from collective wit: “Never marry a man who needs to make a mistake to learn.” “Look at your mother-in-law’s hair.” This rhythmic oscillation between the visceral and the light is not a tonal inconsistency but a profound formal mimesis of the survival strategies of the captive women. Humour and gossip become technologies of selfhood, momentarily reassembling a world of intimate sociality within the zone of annihilation, proving that the unsayable can only be approached through a dance between testimony and the sustaining grace of the mundane.

The final act of the novel delivers a liberation that is no liberation at all, structurally executing a terminal critique of the nation-form. The Mukti Bahini liberates the camp; the state, in a gesture of political commemoration, confers the title of ‘birangona’ (war heroine) upon the violated women. Yet, as Begum’s paratextual note devastatingly clarifies, societal excommunication transmutes the honorific into its homophonic, pejorative other: ‘barangona’ (prostitute).

The state’s promised apparatus of care—rehabilitation, vocational training, social reintegration—evaporates, revealing a patriarchal compact that allows the nation to valorise the violated female body as a symbol of its own violated territory while violently disavowing that body’s living, breathing claim to dignity. This post-war abandonment constitutes a second, more insidious violence, a form of slow death by social prescription that exposes the nation-state’s liberation as a gendered event, incomplete by design. The women are granted a symbolic place in the national epic while being denied a livable place in the nation’s society, a schism that The First Jasmines identifies as the founding lie of the postcolonial settlement.

Published at a critical historical conjuncture, as Bangladesh navigates a new landscape of political turmoil following the 2024 mass uprising and the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, The First Jasmines performs an urgent act of archival retrieval. It excavates the foundational, suppressed memory of gendered violence as the unspoken condition of the nation’s emergence, an inheritance that successive governments have refused to fully acknowledge or redress.

Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their “humanity, resilience and heart,” depicting them as “architects of family and community.” To return to the novel’s governing metaphor, Begum abandons the vertical, central stem of the “tree”, the official history of the nation-state, to follow the rhizomatic directions of the “branches.” In doing so, she reframes the project of national literature not as the celebration of a fait accompli, but as a witness to its hidden costs. The novel ultimately insists that the nation cannot be received as an uncomplicated patrimony. True liberation, like the late-blooming jasmine, is a fragrance that unfolds only in the darkness, a promise whose truth is recognised only when we find the courage to sit with its scent long after the fanfares of dawn have faded.

Mudassar Javed Baryar is a scholar at the University of Faisalabad, Pakistan.

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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.

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Essay

When Life gives us Lemons, make Lemonade!

By Farouk Gulsara

The year was 1816. On the 21st October, Reverend Robert Sparke Hutchings, as part of his life mission to civilise the natives, started an English School free from the interference of royalty and wealth. The Penang Free School was opened to all people of Penang who wanted to learn. Hutchings’ idea of a school was not for free, as in charity, but free for all children of different races and creeds to mingle.

That year, too, the modern world first realised how closely connected it was. This was long before the world had known the song ‘It’s a Small World after all!’ A year earlier, Mount Tambora  in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) expelled megatonnes of volcanic material into the skies. It was the world’s most explosive eruption in recorded history, and its effluents lingered in the atmosphere for a full year, giving the air a permanent, greyish, dirty tinge. As a result, the European winter in 1815 was extreme.

By the following year, its effect became apparent. 1816 became the ‘Year without a Summer’. Global temperature plummeted as the sun’s rays were blocked by volcanic ash. Harvests across much of Europe and North America failed miserably. The change in global temperatures also disrupted the monsoon pattern in India. Famine ensued following a poor harvest. To add salt to the wound, the temperature change gave rise to a mutated form of cholera in Bengal. In Southern Europe, a typhus epidemic was seen. An event triggered in one corner of the planet had a devastating effect on the other side, thousands of miles away.

Food prices skyrocketed, sparking riots, arson and looting in Germany. The summer of 1816 in Europe was miserable. In Switzerland, it was cold and wet for many Europeans who wanted to spend the summer by the scenic lakes. The glacier took a long time to melt, resulting in ice jams where chunks of ice blocked river flow, causing rivers to overflow their banks and cause floods.

In that situation, Lord Byron hosted a group of friends at Lake Geneva for the summer. The inclement weather had left them homebound, and they decided to hold a writing competition. They were to write something scary after hearing someone read a ghost story. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, wrote a short story about Lord Ruthven, a charming, upper-class vampire. It was published later and evolved into a vampire figure associated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Mary Shelley recreated a scary dream she had the night before, which eventually led to the novel the world knows as Frankenstein.

An environmental disaster can indirectly give rise to the literary roots of a new genre: horror fiction.

Climate has long been blamed for many cataclysmic events on Earth . Because climate is so intertwined with vegetation, and thus with our food, its role cannot be brushed aside. Famines that result from crop failure invariably change ruling regimes. French peasants were not bemused when told to eat cakes; instead, they crushed the monarch, stormed the Bastille, and declared a Republic. The revolutionaries in the streets of Moscow brutally murdered the Romanov family and eventually placed a communist regime to rule over them. Many ancient Empires, including the Akkadian and Aztec civilisations, went extinct in the same way, through severe climate change and famine.

With modernisation, humans thought it was imperative to slash forests, denude vegetation, and create concrete jungles in place of a balanced environment where plants and animals lived in symbiotic harmony. This, in turn, had devastating effects on greenhouse gas emissions and increased global temperatures. The civil society noticed these subtle changes in our environment. As awareness was raised, people became more mindful of global warming caused by trapped heat. This phenomenon, later correctly termed climate change, became the buzzword of modern life. Climate change encompasses the heating of the planet, the melting of the Arctic ice caps, and the rise in sea level that could submerge many island nations.

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. Many advanced economies are imposing a carbon tax on every ton of carbon used by their citizens. Unfortunately, there is discordance in how these taxes are collected and dispersed. As shown during the 2005 Yellow Vest Riots in France, people protested rising fuel prices. The poor people from the countryside were taxed for using fossil fuels. This revenue was paradoxically used to subsidise green technology, benefiting affluent metropolitan dwellers, who least required assistance.

Green technology, an initiative that found its impetus after the Arab world held the rest of the world to ransom with the oil embargo way back in the 1970s, has been around for the longest time. More than half a century after its inception, the technology has not shown fantastic returns on investment. Germany, one of the pioneers in renewable energy, is still paying the highest electricity rate.

Some people subscribe to the idea that this whole scare about climate change is just scaremongering. They defend their conviction with research from climate scientists who present statistics that run counter to the mainstream understanding of the subject. These sceptics profess that global temperature trends merely mirror similar 80- to 90-year solar cycles in the solar system. They also question the 10- to 20-year lag in temperature rise after a burst of CO₂ production, such as during the Industrial Revolution or a world war.

Whether our weather change is man-made or a natural occurrence due to the restless tectonic plates that shape our planet, our climate will change the way we live. It will change our culture, maybe our food, our population migration demography, as the people gravitate towards a comfort zone, and probably change our leadership. If what the scientists say is correct, Mars and Venus once held water and an atmosphere. The way these planets appear today is a cautionary tale of what could happen when greenhouse gas accumulation goes overdrive. Oceans will evaporate, turning our planet into a wasteland.

Still, like Reverend Hutchings, who, despite the calamities associated with the ‘Year without a Summer’, decided that building a school was necessary, life had to go on amidst all the uncertainty surrounding climate change. The human race is stronger and has more plasticity than we think. We shall overcome. When life gives you lemons… make lemonade!

Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

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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Review

Historic Travelogue Reviewed by Aruna Chakravarti

Title: The Forest of Snow

Author: Swami Ramananda Bharati

Translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Just as the European Renaissance was a transformative intellectual movement marking a transition from the social and cultural stagnation of the Middle Ages to a new age of enlightenment, a similar movement found its genesis in Bengal and gradually spread to the rest of India. Known as the Bengal Renaissance, it is generally believed to have had its genesis towards the end of the 18th century and its culmination in the first decade of the 20th. Like the preceding one, it marked a period of intellectual and cultural awakening in various fields: literature, politics, music, art, society and religion. At its heart was a shift from rigid religious primitivism to an all-embracing humanism. It represented a transformative era in which traditional norms were questioned, and new ways of everyday living were explored. This movement, influenced by Western liberalism, threw up many great thinkers and scholars. Among them were Raja Rammohan Roy, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Swami Vivekananda. It gradually paved the way for another — the national movement which demanded the end of British rule in India.

But the Bengal Renaissance was not only a period of intellectual and cultural awakening. Like its European counterpart, it also sparked a desire to push boundaries and go in search of unknown spaces and climes. It was a time when travel became a means of self-expression. Travelogues and narratives from this period reflect the colonised Bengali intelligentsia’s desire to assert identity and seek self-definition. While Troilakyanath Mukherjee, Romeshchandra Dutt, Dwarkanath Tagore, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore are known names in the field of secular travel, there were also those who undertook hazardous journeys in search of a different kind of enlightenment.

Earlier, religious travel was limited to traditional pilgrim spots. To sacred sites like Varanasi, Vrindavan, Mathura and Puri. But now, travellers were filled with new confidence. They became more adventurous and undertook spiritual journeys into the hearts of deserts and mountains. Some crossed miles of icy desert to reach the cave temple of Hinglaj. Some trekked to Amarnath, the twin peaks of Badri and Narayan, to Mount Kailash and Mansarovar Lake in the heart of the Himalayas.

The book under review has been written in the form of a diary. It describes in detail the hazardous journey the author undertook to reach Mount Kailash, believed to be the abode of the Gods, and Mansarovar Lake, a dip in whose waters promises redemption from a hundred years of sin. The height at which these pilgrim spots are located, the rugged terrain and the excessive cold at all times of the year made this journey almost impossible to complete in those days. Reports of deaths by falls from dangerous precipices, of being blown away by blizzards and freezing to death, were far greater than of successful returns. Only supreme faith and dogged determination enabled a person from even thinking of undertaking such a perilous expedition.

One such brave heart was Ramananda Bharati. A Bengali scholar, reformer and ascetic, he set out on a trek to Kailash and Mansarovar lake in the summer of 1898. His travels across Tibet and the experiences he gathered forms the backbone of his book Himaranya aptly translated by the translator as The Forest of Snow. In Himaranya, Bharatichronicles his experience of crossing perilous mountain passes, snowbound peaks and glacial valleys to reach his destination. But he went, not only as a pilgrim seeking divine blessing but as an observant traveller eager to explore the lives of the people who lived in the bordering villages. He notes the clarity of thought and purity of heart in these people. Their patience, forbearance and hospitality despite the acute hardship of living in a snowbound region. This is a conversation he had with an old man in the village of Malhari.

“This country of yours is very cold…If this is your summertime how do you live during winter?”

“One cannot survive here in winter…all our houses will be under snow. No one will stay here.”

“Where do all of you stay in winter then?”

“Eighteen miles below Joshimath there is a place called Lalsangha. We go there.”

“Then it must be very difficult for you.”

“Sir what shall I tell you about our hardship. It is very difficult to travel with our children, cattle, sheep and goats every year.”

“Then why don’t you shift completely and live there?”

“If we lived below during summer, not only would we die, there would be no sign of our animals too.”

Passing through different landscapes, Bharati describes the scenery. This is a description of Donagiri mountain.

“The place was very pleasant. The grand path was in front of us, the cave was located above it. And the fast-flowing river was just below. On both banks of the river were sky-high mountains…at night thousands of bright lights can be seen over this mountain…if anyone climbed up to the top of this mountain, he would become dizzy with the smell of leaves and flowers.”

Bharati regales the reader with an account of the legend associated with this mountain. The Puranic name of Donagiri was Gandhamadan Parbat. When Lakshman fell unconscious during battle, he needed a special herb that only grew there. Hanuman went to Gandhamadan but, unable to locate the herb, he carried the whole mountain on his back and brought it to Lanka thereby saving Lakshman’s life. Bharati writes:

“Till this day there are signs of that. Donagiri doesn’t have a tall peak and looks as if someone has uprooted its peak. Different kinds of medicinal plants are found in Donagiri even today.”

Somdatta’s translation is faithful and apt at the same time. Though the original is written in a Bengali that may sound archaic to the ears of today’s readers the translation flows smoothly. Kudos to her for bringing an almost forgotten but compelling record of Himalayan travel to those who love reading travelogues.

Aruna Chakravarti has been principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with eighteen published books on record. They comprise five novels, two books of short stories, two academic works and nine volumes of translation.
Her first novel, The Inheritors (published by Penguin Random House), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her second, Jorasanko, received critical acclaim and became a bestseller. Daughters of Jorasanko, a sequel to Jorasanko, has sold widely and received rave reviews. Her novel Suralakshmi Villa was adjudged ‘Novel of the year (India 2020)’ by Indian Bibliography published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature U.K. Her other well-known works include The Mendicant Prince which has been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and Through a Looking Glass: Stories. Her translated works include an anthology of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitaan, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, First Light and Primal Woman: Stories. Her most recent work is titled Rising from the Dust.
Among the various awards she has received are Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar.

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Click here to read an excerpt

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Essay

Tagore’s Dance-Dramas in Translation

Somdatta Mandal explores six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali and Brajbuli by Indrani Haldar

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1841) watching a performance of his nritya natya or dance drama: From Public Domain

The translation of different genres of Rabindranath Tagore’s works into English remains unabated till date. The translations of his novels, short stories, poems, non-fiction, and travelogues have been coming out at regular intervals, and multiple translations of some texts by different people, both professional and amateur, justify his popularity among all classes of readers, scholarly or mundane. Interestingly enough, compared to the other genres, drama happens to be a slightly neglected area in the world of Tagore translation and readership.

Throughout his life, Tagore experimented with different forms of plays – allegorical, symbolic, historical, comedies, and a kind of comic and witty plays known as ‘hasyakoutuk’. Again, there are some plays that focus more on dialogue than be dramatic enough to be enacted on stage. Apart from the various forms of plays that Tagore wrote and experimented with in his lifetime, there is another sort of play which does not have any antecedents, where the three aspects of acting, songs and dance have developed into a local form of opera. In plays like Mayar Khela, Shapmochon, Shyama, Chitrangada, Chandalika or Kalmrigoya and Tasher Desh [1](these last two plays of course have prose and songs in the dialogue), Tagore uses dialogue through the use of songs. The power that these plays generate as plays per se can be an interesting area of discussion, but these latter operatic types of plays, except for Bengali speaking readers, are hard to find and be appreciated by a pan-Indian or non-Bengali readership. 

This is where a present set of six very aesthetically produced slim volumes (published in 2024 and 2025) all of them beautifully translated into English by Indrani Haldar, a retired professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, gains significance. The very first book in this translated series is entitled Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali [2] and Rabindranath had composed the lyrics as a young writer only sixteen years old under the pseudonym of Bhanusingha Thakur. Dedicated to the memory of his sister-in-law Kadambari Debi who was his one-time playmate and companion, the twenty-one lyrics presented in the book are written in the Vaishnava Padabali tradition initiated by the Maithili poet Vidyapati in the 15th century and which gained impetus in the 16th century in Bengal under the cultural and religious influence of Shree Chaitanya Deva’s revival of Vaishnavism.  Built around the love-legend of Radha and Krishna in both material and mystical forms, these lyrics are composed in brajabuli, (a mixture of Maithili and Bengali and Sanskrit) and the language in which the early padabalis had been written. Later in life, Rabindranath was not enthusiastic about these songs and spoke about them as being somewhat enclosed within the limits of a particular thought-system. The bilingual version of this volume, also becomes the books USP.

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

The second book in this series is titled Free Waterfall. It is a translation of Muktodhara. Written in 1922, it is a sombre and singularly focused play, perhaps the most powerful of Rabindranath’s dramatic output. The background of the play is of course the nation-wide Non-Cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi and the political backdrop of this can hardly be ignored. This symbolical and allegorical play has two prominent figures namely, Dhanajay Bairagi and the Crown Prince, Abhijit. Despite their appeal to the masses, both are misunderstood and persecuted figures, pursuing their ideals and visions alone and of choice. Both are determined and steadfast in their stand while rejecting violent options. The ideals pursued and values inculcated include a disapproval of machines misused by humans to enhance political power, to dominate the powerless and increase their suffering, and to harm and destroy the forces of nature which shape a beneficient environment. Though the play ends with the tragic death of the prince, as most often in Rabindranath’s creative work, hope, love, courage and compassion are attainable at the end of the dark tunnel.

The third book published in this series is Tasher Desh, titled The Kingdom of Cards. Written in 1933, and dedicating it to Subhas Chandra Bose, while remembering that he had “taken up the sacred task of inspiring new life and soul” of India, Tasher Desh is a complex play resisting any straight-jacketed or single interpretation, thus necessitating a multi-dimensional approach. Tagore’s travels to Europe and the United States in the early 1930s were necessarily reflected in his creative work. It is interesting to surmise that the state-sponsored regimentation that the sensitive poet must have been aware of on his European tour, especially in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the half-suppressed state of fear prevailing, and the claustrophobic atmosphere stifling creativity, has found expression in this play.  In the play, the Prince, in search of new world, lands up after his shipwreck, in a country where people have been flattened geometrically into mindless cards, unable either to think or act, leave alone create, on their own, a condition of mindless subservience. The play of course ends in a paean to new life, a freedom from fear, a ‘breaking open’ of all closed doors. Tagore therefore stresses the importance of eternal human values which he hopes will return to a world hell-bent on losing them.

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

The two dance-dramas Chitrangada and Shyama, though creatively separated by three decades, are the most popular of Tagore’s works, and present his continuous quest for and questioning of the multi-dimensional character of love. Both the women protagonists in these plays are strong characters, outstripping their male counterparts in impact. Chitrangada (1891) an early verse-play, is based on a subsidiary story gleaned from Mahabharata. In the play both Arjun and Chitrangada progress from sensual attraction to a realisation of the innate substantial qualities of love, from romantic obsession to a deeper relationship between lover and beloved. Shyama, on the other hand, has antecedents in a Buddhist tale from the Jatakas. Revised and perfected by Tagore in the final decade of his creative life, the approach is more paradoxical and ambiguous. Though as strong a character as Chitrangada, Shyama is self-centeredly willing, even eager, to compromise basic human values like compassion or sympathy in her sudden all-consuming passion for Bajrasen. According to the translator, the rationale for bringing together these two remarkable plays under a single cover is because in all his explorations into the manifestations and vicissitudes of human love, the poet has been able to emphasise its inherently paradoxical nature.

Balmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Balmiki) and Kalmrigaya (The Fatal Hunt), two early plays by the youthful, newly West-returned Tagore were written as experiments in fusing music with theatre as in the Western operating tradition and the Indian usage of kathakata[3]. They initiated the trail of musical plays which weave themselves into the writer’s creative work though the poet was to admit later, in Jibonsmriti (Reminiscenses), that he was never again to experience as much enthusiasm as he did in writing these two plays. The story in Balmiki Pratibha was culled from the Ramayana, as was Kalmrigaya, though the former play has a more elaborate storyline and involves several ideological constructs, some shared with the latter. Human emotions, like anger or compassion found a more dramatic expression when coupled with music, the poet-dramatist felt. According to the translator, these two musical plays should be considered together for the similarities they reveal in both technical and thematic aspects.

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

The sixth and the latest volume in this translation series contains three plays, Mayar Khela, Shapmochan and Chandalika. This trio of plays offer insights into the entire range of Rabindranath Tagore’s creative work at the centre of which rules love, sensual or spiritual, transformational and divine, or of the earth, earthy. The three plays in this anthology, separated from each other by decades, present an epic range of emotions, from desire to sacrifice and compassion, and are a testament to the writer’s analytical and ideological concerns and actually complement each other. Mayar Khela, the earliest of these romantic verse-plays, follows Tagore’s early experiments in fusing music and theatricality. Presenting a multitude of characters, each exhibiting an aspect at variance with the others, they move around in interweaving circles, ranging from calm, sacrificing acceptance to erratic detachment.  In Shapmochan, a clear viewpoint is presented in the emphasis laid on a love that transcends physicality to reach beyond appearances. In the final geetinatya[4], Chandalika, the love of an untouchable woman for the Buddhist monk, Ananda, transforms her entire world. Here Rabindranath depicts not just the impulsive force of love but also its ability to transform and transcend mere physicality.

As mentioned earlier, this series of translations brings fresh light on Tagore’s works, and we expectantly wait for many more such productions in the near future.

[1] Mayar Khela – The Game of Illusion: Shapmochan – The Breaking of a Curse: Kalmrigoya –The Fatal Hunt: Tasher Desh—The Kindom of Cards. Shyama and Chitrangada are named after the protagonists.

[2] Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali – The verses of Bhanusingha Thakur

[3] Art of religious and mythological storytelling rooted in folklore.

[4] Translates to song-play … what we refer to as dance-dramas too.

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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Essay

A Prince Who Opted for Poetry over a Crown

By Charudutta Panigrahi

Upendra Bhanja. From Public Domain

There are poets who are born, poets who are made, and then there is the rare being who is handed a crown and quietly sets it down to pick up a stylus instead. Upendra Bhanja (c. 1670–1740) belongs to that almost mythic third category. Born into the ruling Bhanja house of Ghumsar — a princely state in the hills of southern Odisha, near the town that today bears the dynasty’s name, Bhanjanagar — he was a prince by blood and an emperor by acclamation. But the empire he chose to rule was not made of land, revenue, or armies. It was made of language. Posterity remembered the choice by giving him a title no battlefield could confer: Kabi Samrata, the Emperor of Poets.

The Bhanjas of Ghumsar were not strangers to the muse. Upendra’s grandfather, King Dhananjaya Bhanja, was himself a poet of distinction who composed a Raghunatha Bilasa[1] and the romance Ratna Manjari[2], leaving the boy a literary inheritance as real as any treasury. Yet where Dhananjaya wore both crowns — ruler and writer — Upendra made a decision that defines him. Born into a royal family, he never reached for the throne. He gave his entire life to poetry rather than to governing a kingdom.

Read that again, because it is the hinge on which his greatness turns. In an age when kingship was the highest ambition a man could hold, when wars were waged for a few miles of forest, a prince looked at the apparatus of power and found it smaller than a perfectly turned verse. This is not eccentricity. It is a radical reordering of values — a man declaring that the imagination outranks the sceptre. He even signed his early work not as a king but as Birabara, “the brave one”, the courage in question being aesthetic rather than military. The maverick was visible from the first line he ever wrote.

What separates a fine poet from a phenomenon is not feeling alone — feeling is the common inheritance of all poets. What separates Upendra Bhanja is the sheer, audacious engineering of his art. He belonged to the Riti Yuga, the ornate age of Odia literature, but he did not merely participate in it; he became its summit, so completely that the period is sometimes simply called the Bhanja Juga, the Age of Bhanja.

Consider his masterpiece, the Baidehisha Bilasa, his retelling of the Ramayana. The entire epic is composed under a self-imposed law of staggering difficulty: every single line begins with the syllable “ba.” The work is divided into fifty-two cantos, and even the verse-counts of those cantos are chosen so they carry the “ba” sound — bais (twenty-two), batisi (thirty-two), and so on. An entire sacred epic, hundreds upon hundreds of lines, marching to a single phonetic drumbeat without once stumbling into nonsense or losing its emotional fire.

And this was not a one-time stunt. He did it again, and again, as if the impossible were merely a daily exercise. Subhadra Parinaya takes “sa” for its governing initial. Kala Koutuka takes “ka.” Damayanti Bilasa runs on “da,” Padmabati Parinaya on “pa,” Satisha Bilasa on “sa.” He treated the most punishing constraints in world literature the way a master musician treats a difficult raga — not as a cage but as the very source of beauty. This is lateral thinking in its purest poetic form: the discovery that limitation, deliberately embraced, can generate freedom and surprise rather than smother them. The French Oulipo movement of the twentieth century — Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and others — built an entire celebrated avant-garde around exactly this principle of “constrained writing.” Upendra Bhanja had been doing it, at epic scale and with devotional grandeur, three hundred years earlier, in a hill kingdom of eastern India.

If the syllabic constraints reveal his discipline, his Chitra Kavya[3] reveals his outright wizardry. Upendra Bhanja composed an entire treatise on it, the Chitra Kavya Bandhodaya, and laced examples through his other works. In this form — bandha, meaning “binding” or “design” — the poet arranges the letters of his verse so that, written out, they form a recognizable picture: a tree, a mace, a chariot, a serpent, a sheaf of arrows, a wheel. The astonishing part is the double burden the poet accepts. The letters must form the shape, and the same letters, read in their proper sequence, must form a poem that carries genuine meaning. Word and image are forced to be true to each other at once.

This is concrete poetry, pattern poetry, visual literature — the very thing that Western modernists would later treat as a daring twentieth-century experiment — accomplished in Odia centuries before, and not as decoration but as a recognised branch of high art. To do it once is clever. To codify it into a system and deploy serpents, chariots and wheels of living verse is the work of a mind operating on a plane the rest of us can only squint at.

His verbal play did not stop at shape. He was a master of shlesha, the art of double meaning, building lines and even whole passages capable of yielding more than one interpretation depending on how the syllables are parsed — a single string of sound concealing two stories. He commanded all nine rasas of classical aesthetic theory, weaving the erotic, the heroic, the compassionate and the serene through narratives like Lavanyabati and Koti Brahmanda Sundari, romances of princes and princesses whose love is rendered with a sensuous, jewelled intensity. And as if poetry were not enough, he is credited with compiling the Gita Abhidhana, regarded as the first dictionary in the Odia language — the poet doubling as the first systematic guardian of his tongue’s vocabulary. Tradition celebrates him for feats so extreme they sound like legend: epics shaped as palindromes, retellings managed under near-unthinkable phonetic restrictions. Whatever one accepts of the more dramatic claims, the documented body of work alone places him among the most technically dazzling poets in any language on earth.

The kind of mind that can run an epic on a single syllable, that can make letters stand up as chariots and still sing, that can fold two meanings into one breath of sound — that is a contribution to the universal record of human creativity. He sits naturally beside the most inventive formal artists the world has produced. For roughly two centuries his style was the gold standard against which elite Odia poetry measured itself, and his songs travelled into the very grammar of Odissi music. A labourer on a village road and a dancer in a royal courtyard could both carry his lines — a reach across class and circumstance that is the surest sign of a true national treasure.

He is revered, finally, not only for what he made but for what he refused. He refused the easier glory of the throne. He refused the lazy path of plain narration when the labyrinthine one was available. He insisted that the Odia language could do anything Sanskrit could, and then proved it. That insistence is an act of cultural self-respect that belongs to the whole country’s story of finding its voice.


Folio depicting scene from Lavanyavati by Upendra Bhanja by an unknown artist from the early 19th century in, now in Chazen Museum of Art, Madison. From Public Domain

A word, then, on the soil that produced this phenomenon. Ghumsar, the seat of the Bhanja kings, lay in the wooded uplands near present-day Bhanjanagar in Ganjam district. It is a place worth knowing for more than one reason — for it was also the site of one of the earliest and most stubborn armed resistances to British colonialism.

The story of “the first war of independence” is told in textbooks as beginning in 1857. Yet the hills of Ghumsar were already aflame against the East India Company a full century earlier. When the British asserted control over the region from the 1760s, they demanded heavy tribute from the Bhanja rulers, and the rulers — backed by the formidable Kondh tribal Paiks who regarded the Bhanja Rajas as their protectors — refused to be tamed. The resulting struggle was not a single revolt but a chain of uprisings sustained, by documented accounts, from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1860s. The most decisive flare-up, the “Goomsur Campaign” of 1835–36, saw the Madras Native Infantry deployed against the Kondhs and their chiefs before the state was finally annexed. Resistance did not die even then: leaders such as Dora Bissoi and, after him, Chakra Bissoi kept the cause of the Bhanja line alive against the colonial administration for decades more

To call it, without qualification, the first mutiny in all of India would overstate a contested record; rebellions flared in Bengal, Bihar, Banaras and the tribal Jungle Mahals across the same long century. But to say that Ghumsar was among the very earliest theatres of organised, sustained armed defiance of the Company is simple, documented fact. The land that gave India its Emperor of Poets also gave it some of its earliest rebels. There is a fitting symmetry in that: the same soil bred both the courage to resist an empire and the genius to build one out of nothing but words.

[1] Odiya retelling of Ramayana written in the seventeenth century

[2] One of the first Odiya romances

[3] Picture poetry

Charudutta Panigrahi writes on culture, history, and the quiet connections that books forget to mention.

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Categories
Nazrul Translations

Sunless by Kazi Nazrul Islam

Robihara (Sunless) was written by Nazrul on the occasion of Rabindranath Tagore’s death in 1941. Both the poets were friends despite the large age-gap. The poem has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam.

Kazi Nazrul Islam
Statue of Nazrul
From Public Domain 

The afternoon sun sags, collapsing on the roadway,
Sravan’s dark monsoonal clouds swarm in,
Darkening the day,
And shrouding the entire sky,
Since you, Bengal’s heart,
India’s bard, and the world’s sun,
Have passed away!
Did you not hear at all the lament of Mother Earth?
Was that why you feigned illness and kept your eyes shut?
This day the pulse of Bengal has begun to throb with pain
O poet!— seas, rivers, forests— all cry out for you in vain!
Vedantic knowledge was yours, forever on the tip of your tongue
Your writings had Saraswati’s blessings, full of learning and rhyme.
In your meditations, Shiva, God of everything auspicious, resided
In your heart Sri Krishna, the one who had even smitten Love, dallied!
Durga, consort of Shiva, and source of all joy, would with you converse.
How could they, deities so powerful, not feel the extent of our loss?
How could they snatch away what they had given so sympathetically?
After all, you were Bengal’s beacon of hope, lighting us up eternally!
We took pride in your glory; you made us feel earth was our only need.
You made us forget our afflictions—timidity, hunger, misery, and ruin!
You shone over our heads every day—like your namesake--the sun!
You made us proud; you made us feel we would never be undone!
You’ve bestowed much love on this land—on India and Bengal,
How have we offended to have made you thus leave us all?
Tell me—who else is there to bless those who dare to blaze?
Who else can protect the pride of the ones that are frail?
Behold, the whole of Bengal laments, unfurling its tresses.
See in this lunar fortnight the distressed moon hiding itself!
Screened by Shravan’s rain cloud, the sun weeps in the horizon.
In house after house men and women cry out, “O poet, return!”
Alas, India’s fate blazes on a pyre, the body no longer visible.
This day, the vermilion marking Bengal’s beauties too is invisible!
Today Saraswati’s lyre and Bengal’s poetic soul know only silence
And funeral flames have scorched even the moon’s radiance!
Till now none knew how close you had become to everyone.
All roads now hold millions of people—all with grief overcome!
After you return to the rasa-filled realm from which you had come
To give us delight, won’t you miss us and lament your earthly home?
Your lyrical messages had made you this land’s dearest soul
But it was not merely its loveliness-- you loved all of Bengal!

Assure us, O poet dearest to our heart, responding to our love
You will return once more to your people from up above.
Full of the rasas, you cried out soulfully for our suffering race
Why did you enamour us so? Now we’ll rue forever your loss!
I believe that if the sun is put out, the entire solar system will go.
Bengal’s sun set forever today; what we’ve lost, only we will know!
No one besides Bengalis will feel the extent of their deprivation
Nowhere outside Bengal will be heard such loud lamentation!
The sun that shone over us has left, leaving us all benighted
In Bengal’s heart the one light still to be seen is that on your funeral pyre!
The rest of India envied Bengalis their good fortune and wondered
How had the sun on Bengal’s thatched huts deigned to descend?
Will Bengal get such a great, world-conquering superman again?
Can this poor land ever again dream of the kind of happiness
You gave us? And so, Kobi guru, our beloved muse-teacher,
We grieve, finding no consolation, no solace whatsoever!
We had thought of you as God’s blessing given to us eternally
Let not death’s torpor make us forget forever heaven’s bounty.
As you depart from us let us plant on your feet farewell kisses
No matter where you are keep this ill-fated people in your wishes
From Public Domain

Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was known as the  Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs. 

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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Categories
Stories

Ephemeral Tears

By Abhik Ganguly

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” blared from the speakers of the Museum precinct. Two sanitation workers, minding their own business, walked down the hallway. In front of them, stood a giant plasma screen. Flashing dots of electronic lights, with the label under it curiously marked as ‘Humans, Earth-616’.

The Ancient Antiquities of Maldamore was winding down for the evening, its holographic exhibits dimming as the automated systems prepared for closure. The older sanitation worker glanced at the young recruit, curiosity softening her weathered features. “How will you get home on your first day?” she asked. The younger worker replied with a confident smile, “I’ll catch the inverted monorail at six.” After a brief, awkward pause, she extended her hand and added, “I’m Zendo. How long have you been here?” Renda chuckled softly, her eyes reflecting years of memories etched into the museum’s hallways. “Thirty Maldamorian years,” she said, her face tinted with a bit of pride and weariness.

Both of them chit-chatted for a while before wrapping up. The twin suns of Glasterboros crept above the horizon, painting the cityscape of Maldamore in shades of lilac crimson and molten gold. Towers of crystallised ferroglass caught the light, scattering brilliant rainbows that danced across the airways. The High Council in a rare moment of unity had passed bill on universal healthcare six Maldamorian years ago. Since then, Maldamorians live up to 250 years of age, an extension of average lifespan by at least a hundred years. However, beneath such reforms the Maldamorians were stuck in a never-ending cycle of consumption and labour.

The colossal plasma display pulsed with unending streams of shifting dots—two distinct panels, one radiating red light, the other one radiating blue. The lights seemed busy – lost in their own dance, sometimes, drawing closer as if attracted to each other, only to repel because of an inherent tension. The museum had witnessed generations of visitors, young awestruck schoolchildren, astronauts delivering keynote addresses, and on non-busy days, couples strolling hand in hand lost in their own orbits.

Once while working, Zendo asked Renda, “What are these dots of lights flashing? Who were these aliens called hoomans?”

Renda burst out laughing and corrected her, “Humans! Those were humans, you didn’t hear stories about their extinction?”

A quite frightened Zendo shook her head. “Let’s head over to the canteen in break time.” Both of them sipped their herbal syrups.

Renda began her tale, her voice laced with a mix of fascination and disbelief. “There was once a planet called Earth—now designated Earth-616. Life once thrived there, or so the archives claim. It existed in a galaxy far removed from ours and was home to a species known as humans. Unlike our unified society, their planet was fractured—divided into countless races and ethnicities, perpetually at odds with one another. Greed consumed them,” she continued, her tone growing somber. “Can you imagine? Those so-called doctors of science say they exploited their own mother planet to the brink of ruin. They tore apart the very world that gave them life.”

“And…. what about those lights? What exactly do they mean?” a visibly shook Zendo asked. “Well, legend has it,” continued Renda, who felt like an academic don now, “that our astronauts reached about a Maldamorian millennia later after the Earth-616 had perished. The astronauts only found a couple of capsules with recordings in the dead parched lands which looked like as if it had bled a thousand times. Though I must admit, they found escape launch-sites too, so maybe some of those humans might have survived. Who knows?”

Zendo, shifting uneasily, asked, “So… what are those lights?”

Renda, her voice tinged with a mixture of pride and reverence, replied, “We couldn’t decipher their language, couldn’t comprehend their words. So, our scientists transmuted their essence into electronic lights, hoping that someday we might finally understand their message. Those lights are, in essence, the ‘After-Lives’ of those aliens—every memory, every fragment of pain, suffering, and joy, preserved and immortalised. They’ve achieved a kind of eternity, encoded in light. How many of us can claim to be that fortunate, don’t you think?”

The bell signaled the end of their break, and they returned to the endless cycle of what is often called ‘life.’

Abhik Ganguly is a poet, writer, and scholar-practitioner. He’s from Santiniketan, Bengal. Currently, he’s a Junior Research Fellow pursuing his PhD at the University of Delhi.

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Categories
Interview Review

Aruna Chakravarti Converses about her Ghost Stories

An introduction to Aruna Chakravarti’s Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories, published by Penguin India, along with a discussion with the author.

Ghosts are evocative of a past… of history one could say. Then who could be a better storyteller of the past than an author steeped in colours of historical fiction — Aruna Chakravarti! In the past she not only translated novels set in colonial India but evoked the Bengal Renaissance to perfection in her two Jorasanko novels and details of a court hearing in her retelling of the Bhawal prince! This time the diva of historical fiction brings to us a book of spine chilling, ghost stories, Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories.  It is her third collection of short stories.

Aruna Chakravarti
Published in 2026

The narratives are so vivid and visual that they could be worthy of being made into films. They are distinctive in that she has mostly created her own very horrific ghouls – not the traditional ones. They pop up and frighten the reader with their bizarreness and terrifying presences which linger even when you try to sleep at night! She has given us thirteen stories — a spooky number in itself — spread across multiple communities in Asia.

Some of the narratives evoke the past, starting from the 1800s. ‘The House of Flowers’ is set in China partly and partly in Kolkata, where there is now a thriving Chinatown known as “Tangra” and a Kali temple that serves ‘noodles’ as its prasad or offering. The story has echoes of Pearl S Buck’s China interestingly. What comes as a surprise is the fluency with which she has woven in the influences that impact a community of migrants!  

Chakravarti has used her skills as a writer of historical fiction in some of the stories like, ‘The Road to Karimganj’, in which a spook takes us back to undivided Bengal, when passports were not needed as in the story of the migrant Chinese. Hovering around history are more narratives like ‘Possessed’, where a courtesan who performs with the legendary Girish Ghosh1 of the nineteenth century Kolkata undergoes, along with the audience, a strange spooky experience!

Traveling down the century, closer to our times, is the story that is perhaps one of the most bizarre and yet most relatable, ‘The Necklace’. Set in the Anglo-Indian community and the glamour of Park Street — where Wiccan writer, Rajorshi Patranabis, claimed to have met a colonial ghost awaiting her lover — Chakravarti’s narrative is of black magic and betrayal. The fiction is far more impactful and frightening than the factual narrative, which too was spine chilling! You realise what makes fiction so much more gripping than facts — anything can happen in fiction. Chakravarti is imaginative enough to make it as creepy and shadowy as any regular horror writer!

Holding on to that thought, the author holds the key to our experiences as she skillfully outlines two demons grown out of poverty in ‘A Winter Night’. The conclusion has a sense of irony and tragedy. ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction’ weaves in more of the diversity in the historic annals of Bengal. The story that starts the book, ‘The Caregivers of Gazipur’, has an unresolved ending, like some of her other narratives. Though there is a frightful resolution in ‘They Come Out After Dark’. The ghosts play spine chilling havoc with fears of the living while recalling the senseless violence of 1947. ‘There are More Things in Heaven and Earth’…takes us back to the atrocities committed during the Sikh riots of 1984 in Delhi. The mingling of fact and fiction to create weird a fantastical narrative is addressed during a conversation on the supernatural. And there is an exploration of the lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which probably is a touch of the academic as Chakravarti had a long tenure as the principal of a girl’s college in Delhi. It also defines the authorial stance in this story:

‘Don’t forget what Hamlet said to Horatio? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

What is unusual about these stories is the way she has created fictitious geographies and personas, evoking historic realities. They seem perfectly authentic to the reader, including the one set in China. There is a vast mingling of facts and fiction in these stories all to lead to spine-chilling ends with strange twists. 

‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ stands out in its rendition as the ghosts given out are part of the mythical lore of Bengal — stories that were related to most Bengali kids of the twentieth century. They have a touch of humour and dry wit, perhaps introducing a sense of comic relief among very dark and horrific stories that transport us into different worlds.

‘The Motorcycle Rider’, set in modern times, takes us into a university campus to shock us with horrific spooks born out of tragic deaths, while ‘Twenty-nine Years, Seven Months and Eleven Days’, merges a modern outlook with an unfathomable past, touching upon strange tantric yearnings. ‘Vendetta’ twirls nature and supernatural to give a frightening narrative of how nature takes its revenge… a theme that reiterates in writings addressing our current concerns with climate change.

The ease and fluidity with which she has switched from history and realism to horror and fantasy is amazing. Let’s find out more from her about this new persona that inhabits her writerly self…                                                           

Till now we have had translations, numerous novels—many of which can be called historical fiction—and realistic short stories with their base in history or contemporary life. What made you think of writing ghost stories?

After writing The Mendicant Prince which involved extensive research into the life and times of Prince Ramendranarayan Roy of Bhawal, I didn’t feel up to writing a historical novel again. The work had demanded delving into sociological texts, court records, letters, insurance papers and medical reports. Apart from research, historical fiction also demands a certain amount of field work.

Published in 2013
Published in 2016

Before writing the Jorasanko novels I visited the Tagore mansion thrice and while writing The Mendicant Prince, I went to Bangladesh to see the royal palace in Bhawal, renamed Gazipur. Though it has been totally neglected, with shopkeepers and squatters having overtaken most of the area, I was able to get some idea of the topography of the palace and its grounds. I saw the lake and the temple (which was locked) and was able to visualise where the halls and galleries and the apartments of the queens and princesses would have stood. All this work was exhausting. So, for a change, I decided to try my hand at short stories which emerge straight from the imagination. And while at it, I decided to break out of the mould of “historical fiction” writer in which I had trapped myself and try a completely new genre.

Published in 2022

I wrote the first one on an impulse and found myself quite enjoying the process. I didn’t even think of publishing at that time. The first story led to another and another. When eleven stories had been written I sent the manuscript to three publishers and was surprised when all three accepted it. It was then that I found out that ghost stories were the in-thing. That they were selling well and that publishers were looking out for them. I signed up with Penguin as you know. At one point my editor Moutushi Mukherjee suggested I write another two. Thirteen stories will make it even more spooky, she said.  So, I wrote another two.

Would you list these stories as fantasies or fantastical? Or are they stories of personal experience? Please elaborate.

No. They are not born out personal experience. I must confess that I have never seen a ghost in my life. I believe in sixth sense. As a matter of fact, I have acted on my sixth sense on occasions. I have had sudden impulses to do certain things and realised later that if I hadn’t yielded to the impulses, I would have regretted it. But I have had no brush with the supernatural. These stories were sparked off by sudden memories. Something I had read somewhere. Something somebody had told me years ago. A face I had seen in childhood which had stuck in my mind though whose I don’t remember. A conversation overheard which made no sense at the time but which, as an adult, seemed ridden with sinister nuances. A phrase from a book whose title and author’s name I had forgotten. In fact, I didn’t even remember the context from where the phrase had come.

Sudden flashes such as these triggered off the stories. But in the writing, they took on a life and soul of their own. I even feel, sometimes, that the pen took over and they were written by an invisible hand.

Your stories are set, sometimes in real landscapes and sometimes in fictional ones. What kind of research went into creating them? How do you make them so vivid and real?

There wasn’t any immediate research.  I needed to look up a few facts, now and then, mostly to be sure of their authenticity. But nothing truly back breaking. The landscapes, both physical and of the mind, were culled from my travels and my reading of both English and Bengali writers over the eight decades of my life. Much of it stayed with me tucked away in some unconscious part of the mind. Although I write in English, you will notice that almost all the stories are about Bengalis. Bengalis living in Delhi, Kolkata, Bihar and the small towns and villages of Bengal. There are Anglo-Indians, Punjabis and Chinese, too among my characters. But having lived in Bengal for generations, they have adopted Bengali customs and a quasi-Bengali way of living.  Many of the locales in which, they appear are fictional…gathered from my reading and observation of people from different strands of Bengali life.

You have a story set in China which also has the Chinatown of Kolkata in it. Have you been to China? What was the reason for the choice? Were you influenced by any Chinese writers? How did you visualise the Chinese migrants in Kolkata?

Yes, I have been to China. I visited the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing in 2004. Naturally, I have no personal experience of life as it was lived in the late 18th century which is the period covered in the story ‘The House of Flowers’. For this I had to rely totally on my reading of English authors writing about China like Pearl Buck and Amy Tan. Pearl Buck was a great influence on me while writing this story. It was from her books that I was able to catch the ambience of tea houses and brothels of the period. In depicting the Chinese family who lived in Calcutta in the early 20th century I had to rely on childhood experience, I knew some Chinese girls who had lived for several generations in Calcutta. And my imagination went into full play, of course.

In ‘Grandmother’s Bundle’ you have written about spooks from Bengal. It departs from your other stories in as much as it does not really introduce the supernatural except as a source of folklore. Do you feel it blends with the other narratives in your collection?

Well. It is different from my other stories in certain ways. Firstly, it is three stories rolled into one. Secondly, unlike the others, they are children’s stories. Thirdly, it is the only one that deals with ghosts and other supernatural beings with humour. Lastly, they have been drawn from folklore. I agree that it doesn’t quite blend with the others in this collection. But it is also true that each story in this collection is different from another. There are different time spans. Different locales. Different themes. Characters from different levels of society. That being the case, I think that this story lends variety and another flavour to the collection.

Your stories aren’t like the usual ghost stories one reads. The structure and content seem different. Your comments.

You are right. These stories do not belong to the gothic/horror genre. They are not about vampires, blood sucking bats, severed heads or violence heaped on violence. They are essentially human-interest stories with a supernatural twist at the end. I have taken my cue, you may say, from Coleridge’s demand for a willing suspension of disbelief  before reading his poetry. These stories have innocuous beginnings. Two friends sharing an apartment, a boy walking from his village to an unseen destination, a dinner party in an exclusive area of the capital, a marital spat or a telephone call at dawn. Then, a few paragraphs later a subtle hint is dropped startling  the reader into a realisation that it is not a simple story of human relationships. That it is headed in another, more sinister direction. Another hint is dropped and another. Then in the final sentence the bomb bursts. The last line is the most important line of the story. 

Which is your favourite story? And why?

Just as a mother loves all her children, I love all my stories. But mothers also have favourites and so do I. “The House of Flowers,” “Vendetta,” “Possessed” and “The Necklace” are my favourites. That’s because their themes are unusual and posed a greater challenge. And, perhaps, because I had to work harder on them than on the others.

Are you planning any new books? Exploring any new genres? Any new book we can expect soon?

I always think of a new book even when I am writing the current one. Yes, I am planning to explore yet another genre of writing. But my ideas are nebulous at the moment. Still in a fluid state That being the case I cannot share them with you. All I can say is that the work will be a challenging one and I’m not even sure I’ll be able to see it through. So, we must both wait for some more time

  1. Girish Ghosh (1844-1912) Actor and Director from Bengal ↩︎

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

.

Click here to read an excerpt from Creeping Shadows.

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