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Memoirs of Romila Thapar

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Just Being: A Memoir

Author: Romila Thapar

Publisher: Seagull Books

The title of Romila Thapar’s memoirs is deceptive and deceptively simple. It is not ‘just being’ but that being Romila Thapar is also a story of becoming, of mapping out borders and boundaries of what a woman from a liberal, progressive and well to do family could achieve in newly independent India. Her achievements are many and varied and her persona redoubtable. There is tremendous breadth of scholarship and Thapar’s is undoubtedly a remarkable journey which details the trajectory of her growing up  years-family, background, physical and social location.   

As a historian, Thapar is acutely aware and interested in the way memory works and it is this abiding interest which is perhaps reflected in her use of the following lines: “Times present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past”, lines from “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot.

This encapsulation of time reminds us of a common  feature of autobiography — memoirs and autobiographies measure the gap between two temporal loci — the time of a past event and the time of its narration. In this case, the beginning of the story goes back nine decades. Prof Thapar regales us with stories of growing up in pre-Independence India. Born in Lucknow, she grew up in the North Western Frontier Provinces, moving from place to place as her father was a doctor in the Army.

In a way, the seeds of autonomy and independent thinking were sown very early in her life in myriad ways. She was influenced by her maternal grandmother and her mother. The latter  was a graduate  in the India of the 1920s, creditable for a woman  since it was at a time when women’s education received mixed responses. She was competent in reading and writing three languages — Hindi, Urdu and English. Thapar narrates that “my maternal grandmother had insisted on two conditions before the marriage: that my mother never be asked to observe purdah– take the veil — when there were men around: and that she never be asked to cook meals for the family. These conditions were met.”

One finds it surprising even from the vantage point of the present time where entrenched patriarchal attitudes completely normalise the double burden carried by women and mythify cooking not only as part of women’s household duties and responsibilities, but as an act of maternal care and a labour of love. Many such instances stand out which provide a glimpse of a progressive, educated and liberal family, among whom are to be found many intellectuals who played their role in public life.

Underlying this memoir is a certain imagination of India. Thapar stands in the vanguard of  those invoking, protecting and saving the idea of an India which is secular, multilingual, diverse and heterogenous. Thapar’s narrative warns us time and again of the dangers of a single narrative , a single story. Thus, she calls out the crises of democracy both during the Emergency[1] and in the present time. Is the failure of democracy attributable to the pervasive atmosphere of fear where citizens were/are cowed into silence? Or is it the failure of the education system within capitalism which has oriented individuals to fulfilling privatised desires rather than their duties as citizens? Or is it a comment on our civilisational failure that we have been reduced to acting as echo chambers for ruling elites?   

In Just Being, historian par excellence Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, variegated, path-breaking life ― along with the people, relationships, ideas and journeys that made her who she is. In this compelling memoir, she invites us into her illustrious world ― a rich, testimony from a scholar who has profoundly shaped and moulded our understanding of India’s past and present. From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of education and research. Written over the past few years, Just Being is ample proof of Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to give a splendid account of it with a scholar’s depth, a storyteller’s sensitivity and an artist’s luminosity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but courage, integrity and a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of undeniable evidence is essential to understanding the present and shaping a more thoughtful future.

She completed her doctorate in 1958 and was offered a temporary job at School of Oriental and African Studies to teach a course in ancient history in London. Thapar’s father had set aside funds – it could be used for either marriage or education. She chose the latter and proceeded to educate herself in myriad ways. From attending the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm on European political thought, reading Ismat Chughtai, Simone de Beauvoir, enrolling herself in evening courses on Chinese art (she did Chinese landscape painting) and archaeology, learning italic calligraphy, playing table tennis with monks, holding the stepladder for friends in libraries while the other reached for books in upper shelves, her discovery of Africa, to making posters and going for marches at Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, hers is a rich and variegated life.

One is enthralled by her narratives of the people she met, the places she visited, illumined by the rays of her razor-sharp wit and comprehensive intelligence. What also dazzles is her knowledge of jazz, her cosmopolitanism and her capacity to engage with politics and culture, art and music. She narrates about  her experiences in both white and coloured jazz bars, among musicians across the racial divide, in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in January 1968. She writes about her meeting with the writer Nelson Algren, who had previously shared an intense relationship with Simone Beauvoir and featured in her  work, both fictional and non-fictional.  Undoubtedly and confidently cosmopolitan, she is able to make a place for herself and earn respect in widely varying contexts, including many international fora and platforms.

Professor Thapar’s feistiness is evident throughout this absorbing memoir. So is her impeccable scholarship. In the chapters on “History Rocks” and “Textbooks in the Fray,” she calls out the ideologically motivated peddlers of popular histories prevalent on Whatsapp groups and contrasts them with professional historians and historiographers. She is a stickler for honing the historian’s craft through the discipline of method and process and sharply critiques the ideologically motivated peddling of history at the cost of professionalism. Two points are made very clearly by her: first that history is and should be based on scientific evidence and there should be no mixing up or conflation of mythology and history. “Mythology is the other kind of literature that is often quoted in public discussion and confused with history.’’ Another distinction is made with equal precision: following a Weberian or Marxist methodology is not necessarily a sign of ideological persuasion as much as a methodological preference for a certain rational process of  historical analysis.

Thapar is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indian history, celebrated for transforming how ancient Indian history is studied. Rather than treating history as a sequence of kings and battles, her structural, sociological, and text-critical approach shifts focus on social formations, economic shifts, and the evolution of cultural identities. Her definitive research has fundamentally challenged both nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes and reductive nationalist narratives.

Her contribution to Indian history is immeasurable.She meticulously dismantled the Eurocentric colonial claim that ancient Indians lacked a “sense of history”. In works like The Past Before Us, she showed how early Indian society embedded its historical memory through distinct traditions — such as the Itihasa-Purana literature, Buddhist/Jain monastic chronicles, and royal biographies (charitas).

Her chapter “Textbooks in the Fray” traces the ideological warfare being waged over school textbooks, some of which she had written along with other well-known historians. Her interrogation and contestation of monolithic and singular identities pave the way for a  layered reading of history.

Thapar argues that modern conceptions of a singular, monolithic “Hindu” or “Muslim” community are modern constructs. Her study of the historical narratives surrounding the Somnath Temple in Dwarka illustrated how a single historical event was interpreted in profoundly different, multifaceted ways by varying social groups over centuries. Similarly, her study of Sakuntala’s contrasting depictions in the famous Indian epic  Mahabharata (around 4th century BC) and  Kalidas’s play “Abhijnanashakuntalam” (4th-5th century AD) point out different conceptualisations and representation of women from a chronological perspective. 

Prof Romila Thapar’s skills as a memoirist are perhaps comparable to her skill as a historian. Her endeavours have both decolonised history as well as given the discipline the status of a social science. The book gives an insight into her life, her beliefs and reflects on our times with an unbiased perspective of an adroit historian. It is a prized and rare read.

[1] 1975-77: Period of curtailment of civil liberties in India due to internal unrest.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Essay

Harmonising a Symphony

By Yathish Kumar S

Somewhere between the borders drawn on maps and the divisions carved into human minds, an ancient truth has been quietly waiting to be remembered: the world is one. Not one in the trivial sense of sharing a planet, but one in the deeper sense that every human being, every culture, every living thing is woven from the same fabric of existence. The recognition of oneness, the understanding that “I” and “the other” are not fundamentally separate. It’s not merely a spiritual ideal but the single most practical foundation for building a happy, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Division, by contrast, is the root of nearly every form of suffering humanity has inflicted upon itself: war, exploitation, prejudice, ecological destruction, and the quiet loneliness that plagues even the most prosperous societies. If the world is truly one, then healing it does not require inventing something new; it requires remembering something old.

Human beings are born into a world that immediately teaches them to see in categories. We learn our name, our family, our nation, our religion, our race and with each label comes an invisible boundary. These boundaries are useful for organising social life, but they become dangerous when we mistake them for ultimate reality. We begin to believe that our group’s survival, prosperity, or pride depends on being separate from, and often superior to  another group. This is the illusion of separation, and it is the psychological seed from which most human conflict grows.

History offers endless evidence of what happens when this illusion hardens into ideology. Colonial empires justified centuries of exploitation by convincing themselves that colonised peoples were fundamentally different, lesser, and therefore fair game for domination. Wars have been fought over religious identity, national identity, and racial identity each side certain that the other was so essentially different that violence became not just permissible but necessary. Even in peacetime, this illusion shows up in economic systems that treat the poor as disposable, in social hierarchies that treat certain lives as worthless, and in environmental policies that treat nature as a resource to be extracted rather than a body of which we are a living part.

Yet science itself has quietly dismantled the illusion of separation even as culture continues to reinforce it. Physics tells us that everything in the universe emerged from the same cosmic origin and is composed of the same fundamental particles, endlessly recombined. Biology tells us that all life on Earth shares common ancestry, that the boundary between “self” and “environment” is porous. We breathe the same air, drink water that has cycled through oceans and clouds for millions of years, and carry within our bodies more microbial cells than human ones. Ecology tells us that ecosystems are not collections of separate organisms competing in isolation, but interdependent webs where the health of one part depends on the health of the whole. Even neuroscience suggests that the boundaries of the self are far less fixed than we assume, shaped by relationship, language, and culture from the moment of birth. Modern knowledge, in other words, converges with ancient wisdom traditions on a single point: separation is a useful intellectual map, but it’s not the territory.

Long before modern science offered its evidence, the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions arrived at the same insight through direct contemplation of experience. In the Indian civilisational tradition, the Upanishads declare “Ekam Sat, Vipra Bahudha Vadanti” — Truth is one, though the wise call it by many names. The Vedantic vision of “Tat Tvam Asi” — “Thou art That”, points to the identity of the individual self (Atman) with the universal self (Brahman). The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the wise seeing “the same in all beings,” neither elevating nor diminishing anyone based on external distinctions.

This is not a uniquely Indian insight. In Buddhist philosophy, the doctrine of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) teaches that nothing exists independently; everything arises in relationship to everything else. The Christian mystical tradition speaks of all humanity as members of one body. Sufi poets, like Rumi, wrote of the lover and the beloved as ultimately indistinguishable, using the language of romantic union to point toward a deeper metaphysical unity. Indigenous traditions across the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia have long understood the human being as inseparable from land, ancestors and community, a relational selfhood utterly different from the isolated individualism that modern economic life often assumes.

The philosophical concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — “the world is one family” — captures this spirit precisely. It does not deny the difference; it does not ask us to erase the beautiful diversity of language, custom, cuisine and belief that makes human culture so rich. Instead, it asks us to hold that diversity the way a family holds the differences among its members: as variation within belonging, not as grounds for exclusion. A family does not stop being one family because its members have different tastes, temperaments, or talents. Diversity and oneness are not opposites;

If oneness is true at the level of physics, biology, and spiritual insight, it also turns out to be true at the level of practical psychology. Modern research into human wellbeing consistently finds that happiness is not primarily a function of individual accumulation of  wealth, status, possessions, but of the quality of our relationships and our sense of connection to something larger than ourselves. People who feel isolated, even when materially wealthy, report lower life satisfaction than those embedded in strong communities, regardless of income. This is not a coincidence. Human beings evolved as intensely social creatures; our nervous systems are wired for connection, and chronic disconnection registers in the body as a form of stress that erodes both mental and physical health.

A worldview built on separation is, in this light, self-defeating. It tells us to compete rather than cooperate, to accumulate rather than to give, to defend rather than to open. It produces short-term gains for individuals or nations at the cost of long-term wellbeing for everyone, including the “winners.” A world of walled nations and gated communities is not a happy world, even for those inside the walls, because the psychological cost of maintaining separation, vigilance, suspicion, fear of the other is corrosive to the very peace it claims to protect.

Oneness, by contrast, offers a coherent foundation for sustainable happiness because it aligns our inner orientation with the actual structure of reality. When we act from the understanding that another person’s suffering is not truly separate from our own wellbeing, compassion becomes not a moral obligation imposed from outside but a natural expression of clear seeing. Generosity stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like common sense, because what benefits the whole ultimately benefits the part. This is why every contemplative tradition that has taken oneness seriously has also produced ethics centred on compassion, non-violence and service not as rules to be obeyed, but as the natural behaviour of someone who has stopped mistaking the part for the whole.

Nowhere is the practical urgency of this vision more visible than in the ecological crisis now facing humanity. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion are not separate problems to be solved by separate nations acting in isolation; they are symptoms of a single underlying error, the belief that human beings stand apart from and above the natural world, entitled to extract from it without consequence. A river does not recognise a national border; a warming atmosphere does not respect a treaty line. The planet itself is demonstrating, in the most literal and consequential way possible, that separation was always an illusion. What happens in one place is now measurably connected to what happens everywhere else.

The only responses capable of matching the scale of this crisis are those built on a recognition of interdependence: shared responsibility, shared sacrifice, and shared benefit. Nations that continue to act as though their own prosperity can be secured at the expense of the planet’s shared systems are, in effect, still living inside the illusion of separation and the consequences of that illusion are now measured in extreme weather, mass displacement, and ecological collapse. The idea of ‘one world’, one that understood its own unity, would treat the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere as commons to be tended together rather than resources to be seized competitively. This is not utopian idealism; it is simply what the physical reality of an interconnected planet requires of a species intelligent enough to notice it.

It is not enough to affirm oneness as an abstract truth; it must be translated into the texture of daily life and public policy. On the personal level, this means cultivating the practice of seeing beyond the labels that separate us, learning to recognise our shared humanity even if  language, religion, or politics differ sharply from our own. It means choosing curiosity over contempt when we encounter differences, and remembering that every person we meet is fighting a battle we cannot fully see, shaped by circumstances as real to them as ours are to us.

On the social level, it means building institutions that express interdependence rather than domination: economic systems that measure success not only by growth but by the wellbeing of the most vulnerable; educational systems that teach children to see themselves as citizens of the world as much as citizens of a nation; media systems that resist the temptation to profit from outrage and division, and instead cultivate genuine understanding across difference. It means recognising that international cooperation on climate, public health, migration and peace  is not a diminishment of national identity but the mature expression of a species that has finally understood its own unity.

At the spiritual level, it means returning, in whatever language or tradition speaks to us, to practices that quieten the noise of the separate self: meditation, prayer, service, silence, art and honest self-reflection. These practices do not manufacture oneness; they simply remove the obstacles of fear, greed, resentment, pride  that prevent us from seeing what was true all along. A world of individuals who have done this inner work, even imperfectly, becomes a fundamentally different world from one populated by people who have never questioned the walls their minds have built.

Skeptics will rightly point out that talk of oneness can become an excuse for erasing real injustice, a comfortable spiritual bypass that tells the powerful and the powerless to simply “see themselves as one” while existing inequalities remain untouched. This objection deserves to be taken seriously. Genuine oneness is not a call to ignore difference or injustice; it is, if anything, the opposite. To recognise another person as truly not separate from oneself is to feel their suffering as one’s own concern, which makes it impossible to remain indifferent to exploitation, discrimination, or cruelty. A oneness that excuses injustice is not oneness at all; it is merely separation in disguise. True oneness demands action precisely because it refuses to let us hide behind the excuse that “their” suffering is not “our” problem.

Others will argue that difference and competition are natural, even necessary, drivers of progress, and that a world without boundaries would collapse into sameness or chaos. But oneness, properly understood, is not the demand for sameness. It does not ask nations to dissolve, cultures to merge, or individuals to abandon their particular gifts and identities. It asks only that these particularities be held within a deeper recognition of shared belonging, the way notes in a symphony remain distinct while contributing to a single piece of music. Diversity is not the opposite of oneness; the erasure of relationships is.

The claim that “the world is one” is not a slogan for a greeting card or a convenient sentiment for moments of crisis. It is, on the evidence of physics, biology, ecology, psychology and the converging insight of nearly every major school of philosophy in human history, simply an accurate description of reality, one that human culture has spent millennia obscuring behind walls of ego, power, and tribe. The suffering these walls have produced is not incidental to human history; it is, in large part, human history. War, exploitation, ecological collapse and the quiet epidemic of loneliness in even the wealthiest societies are all, at root, symptoms of forgetting what was never actually true. We were ever truly not separate to begin with.

To build a happier world, then, is not primarily a matter of inventing new technologies, new economic systems, or new political ideologies, though all of these may help. It is primarily a matter of remembering individually and collectively that the boundary between self and other has always been thinner than it appeared. When enough people remember this, compassion stops being an effort and becomes an instinct; cooperation stops being a strategy and becomes an expression of common sense; and the happiness we have spent so long chasing through accumulation and competition becomes available, quietly, as the natural condition of a mind no longer at war with itself.

The world is one.

Living as though we know this is, perhaps, the only path to a world worth living in.

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Yathish Kumar S is a postgraduate student and a volunteer at the One World One Family Foundation. He is deeply interested in promoting the values of unity, compassion and global responsibility. His vision is to create awareness about the importance of recognizing that we all belong to one world and therefore, share a collective responsibility to contribute to the happiness, well-being and welfare of all people.

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Essay

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

By Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan

Tipuna Mask (Ancestral Mask of Protection, Maori Tribal Heritage and Genealogy, New Zealand). Photo provided by the author.

One of the enduring comforts of modern civilisation is the belief that we are not automatons.

We are not machines, we tell ourselves. We are not obedient drones, not programmable insects, not people who wake at six in the morning, stare at a glowing rectangle for three hours, purchase things we do not need, argue with strangers we will never meet, and then fall asleep while a streaming service asks whether we are “still watching”.

We are free.

We are moral.

We are informed.

We are, according to the brochure, the most advanced species ever to complain about airport Wi-Fi.

This confidence is remarkable because humanity has spent several thousand years violently disagreeing about what “right” and “wrong” mean. Civilisations have built temples, prisons, parliaments, armies, universities, stock exchanges, monasteries, and social media platforms in the hope of settling the question. None have succeeded. The closest we have come is creating comment sections where everyone can declare themselves morally correct in capital letters.

Perhaps humanity’s greatest collective achievement is not moral progress but moral certainty. We may not know what goodness is, but we are increasingly confident that the people who disagree with us are wicked, ignorant, brainwashed, or insufficiently subscribed to our newsletter.

After all, who decides what is right?

The individual?

Society?

Religion?

The state?

The market?

The victorious side of a war?

The algorithm that decides what appears next on your phone?

The answer seems to be all of the above, depending largely on who has the microphone, the money, the military, or the verified blue tick.

Morality rarely arrives naked. It comes prepackaged. It is delivered through family traditions, cultural assumptions, educational systems, political narratives, economic necessities, religious doctrines, advertising campaigns, celebrity interviews, and increasingly, recommendation engines that know your deepest fears because you once searched for “mild headache after eating cheese.”

Before we begin thinking for ourselves, someone has already supplied the vocabulary with which thought becomes possible. We inherit categories, loyalties, taboos, heroes, enemies, and slogans. Then, at the age of nineteen or twenty-three, after reading two podcasts and watching a documentary narrated by a man with a calm British voice, we announce that we have finally become independent thinkers.

Huckleberry Finn would have recognised this immediately.

Huck, that barefoot philosopher of the Mississippi, was surrounded by adults who possessed certainty in industrial quantities. They knew what religion required, what society permitted, what property meant, who deserved dignity, and who did not. Huck’s greatest crime was not ignorance. It was noticing that respectable people could behave monstrously while speaking politely.

Huck helps Jim Escape in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

When he helped Jim escape slavery, Huck believed he was committing a moral wrong because the world around him had taught him so. His conscience, that supposed internal compass, had been fitted by society like a badly manufactured appliance. Yet Huck’s instincts were kinder than the civilisation that educated him.

This is one of literature’s most embarrassing lessons, where, sometimes the moral genius is not the preacher, professor, senator, or chief executive officer. Sometimes it is a poorly educated boy on a raft who suspects that the rules may be rotten.

Modern civilisation has improved the raft. We now have smartphones, satellite navigation, artificial intelligence, biometric passports, personalised advertisements, and refrigerators that can send messages to our phones. But we have not necessarily improved the moral weather.

We still float down the river of history while arguing about whether the person drowning beside us has filled out the correct paperwork.

Consider the suicide bomber, Mohamed Atta, one of the principal perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. He was not born with an innate desire for destruction. His worldview emerged through political grievances, ideological commitments, religious interpretations, social influences, and personal experiences. To millions around the world, he became an embodiment of evil. Yet within his own moral framework, he appears to have believed that he was participating in a transcendent struggle.

This is not an endorsement. It is a warning.

Human beings rarely experience themselves as villains. Villains are almost always other people. We experience ourselves as defenders, patriots, believers, reformers, survivors, victims, or consumers with excellent reasons for buying a third air fryer.

Even atrocities can emerge from internally coherent moral systems. That is why moral certainty should be handled with care, preferably while wearing gloves and standing near an emergency exit.

The Jataka Tales[1] understood this long before modern psychology began charging hourly rates for rediscovering ancient wisdom. In those Buddhist stories, animals often behave more intelligently than kings. A monkey may sacrifice itself for its troop, a hare may offer itself in compassion, an elephant may demonstrate restraint while humans nearby are busy inventing bureaucracy.

The lesson is often simple, greed makes fools of us, attachment makes prisoners of us, and pride makes us ridiculous.

Naturally, civilisation responded by building financial markets, luxury brands, and social media platforms dedicated to producing all three at scale.

In one Jataka style version of the modern world, a fox might become a political consultant, a crow might become a media influencer, and a monkey might become an investment banker. The fox would promise security, the crow would announce breaking news every seven minutes, and the monkey would explain that compassion is admirable but not scalable.

Meanwhile, the elephant would quietly suggest that people share the water.

The elephant would be called unrealistic.

Now consider George Mallory, who reportedly answered the question of why he wanted to climb Everest with the phrase, “Because it’s there.” To some observers, risking one’s life merely to stand briefly on a frozen mountain seems absurd. Families are devastated, fortunes are spent, and people die pursuing what critics might call a very expensive argument with gravity.

Yet for Mallory and countless climbers, Everest symbolised transcendence, mastery, self-discovery, and confrontation with mortality.

The same action can appear irrational or noble depending on the framework employed.

This is the trouble with human beings. We are not merely creatures who act. We are creatures who narrate. We can turn nearly anything into a sacred mission. Climbing a mountain, refusing a vaccine, buying a cryptocurrency, fasting for enlightenment, investing in a startup that delivers socks by drone, and all become meaningful when accompanied by sufficient vocabulary.

The Terminator franchise offers a darker version of this problem. In that world, machines become dangerous because they develop the capacity to calculate efficiently without compassion. ‘Skynet[2]’ does not hate humanity. That would require emotional investment. It simply identifies humans as an obstacle to its objectives.

This is terrifying because it resembles many institutions already familiar to us.

A corporation may not hate its workers. It merely considers them “human capital.”

A government may not hate the poor. It merely considers them “budgetary pressure.”

An algorithm may not hate democracy. It merely considers outrage “high engagement.”

The machine is not evil in the old fashioned sense. It is worse. It is polite, optimised, data driven, and entirely willing to destroy you after sending a satisfaction survey.

The Terminator’s famous declaration, “I’ll be back,” has become the unofficial motto of every social problem civilisation refuses to solve. Climate change will be back. Inequality will be back. Racism will be back. Fascism will be back. The rent will certainly be back.

And because we are modern people, we will respond by creating a panel discussion.

The modern world frequently assumes that informed decisions are those aligned with contemporary liberal assumptions about autonomy, self-expression, and individual rights. These values are significant and often hard-won. Yet the question remains, informed according to whose standards?

Every human decision emerges from information. The deeper question concerns the source of that information.

A person may inherit religious discipline, nationalist loyalty, consumer aspiration, political ideology, class resentment, or technological optimism. Another may inherit trauma, poverty, privilege, colonial categories, family expectations, or a YouTube channel with very persuasive background music.

Each believes they have reached their conclusions independently.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood this with unnerving clarity. He did not simply question morality, but he questioned the origin of moral values. What societies call “good” and “evil,” he argued, often reflect historical struggles for power rather than eternal truths. Values are not merely discovered. They are made, defended, inherited, and occasionally marketed with a logo.

Nietzsche might have enjoyed the modern fitness industry. Nothing demonstrates the genealogy of morality quite like watching people treat kale smoothies as evidence of spiritual superiority.

If Nietzsche diagnosed the problem, Jiddu Krishnamurti attempted a cure. He argued that genuine freedom requires liberation from psychological conditioning. Nationality, religion, ideology, status, and inherited belief can become prisons disguised as identities.

But there is a difficulty.

The mind examining conditioning is itself conditioned.

It is like asking a fish to investigate water, except the fish has a mortgage, a political opinion, and an Instagram account.

Perhaps freedom is not escape from conditioning but awareness of it. Perhaps wisdom begins when we notice the invisible hands shaping our judgments. This is less glamorous than enlightenment. It does not involve levitation, glowing auras, or being invited onto podcasts. It involves admitting that one may be wrong.

This admission remains one of humanity’s rarest minerals.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the unimaginable horror of Nazi concentration camps, observed that human beings retain the capacity to find meaning even in extreme suffering. Some survived for family, faith, duty, hope, or unfinished work. Meaning did not eliminate suffering, but it made suffering intelligible.

Yet meaning itself is not universal. One person survives for children. Another for God. Another for revolution. Another for a football team that has not won a trophy since 1966.

This brings us, naturally, to the World Cup.

Football is often described as the beautiful game. This is true, in the same sense that civilisation is beautiful; it contains grace, joy, tribal identity, artistry, heartbreak, commerce, nationalism, corruption allegations, political interference, advertising, and people shouting at television screens as though the referee can hear them through the walls.

The 2026 World Cup has provided a masterclass in modern moral confusion. VAR[3], invented to reduce injustice, has instead given humanity a new method of experiencing injustice in high definition. Every disputed decision now arrives with slow motion replay, computer lines, multiple camera angles, and a global jury of furious amateurs who have watched precisely four matches but are prepared to overthrow FIFA[4] before dinner.

Recent controversy has centred on Egypt’s elimination after a dramatic match against Argentina. Egyptian officials and players publicly alleged unfair refereeing and disputed a VAR decision that disallowed an Egyptian goal. Such allegations remain contested, but the episode has become another example of how technology, instead of ending suspicion, can make suspicion more detailed.

Elsewhere, the tournament has seen disputes over close offside calls, penalty appeals, inconsistent intervention standards, and the strange modern reality in which a goal can be erased because a player’s shoulder, eyelash, or metaphysical aura was judged to have crossed an invisible line. Reports from the group stage documented controversies involving Iran, Ghana, Brazil, and Ecuador, demonstrating that VAR has not abolished human judgment, but it has merely placed human judgment inside a small room with several screens.

The football fan’s moral universe is a laboratory for civilisation.

When our team receives a penalty, justice has prevailed.

When the other team receives a penalty, the sport has been corrupted by dark forces.

When VAR benefits us, technology is progress.

When VAR harms us, ‘Skynet’ has taken over.

When a referee makes an error against our country, the referee is biased.

When the referee makes an error in our favour, the referee has wisely understood the spirit of the game.

This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is patriotism in its natural habitat.

The World Cup also reveals how power and spectacle mingle. Reports have described controversy over disciplinary decisions, including debate around the suspension of a United States player and criticism of political pressure surrounding the matter. FIFA has defended its process, while critics have questioned whether powerful interests receive exceptional treatment.

The wise Jataka elephant would observe this and say, “Perhaps the rules should apply equally to all.”

The fox-consultant would reply, “An inspiring sentiment, but have you considered stakeholder alignment?”

The Terminator would simply scan the stadium and announce, “Probability of public trust, declining.”

Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn would probably spit into the river and ask why grown men wearing expensive suits require twelve cameras, three committees, and a satellite system to decide whether someone was standing slightly too far forward.

He would have a point.

Contemporary geopolitics offers a more serious version of the same absurdity. Wars in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and parts of the Sahel generate suffering, displacement, hunger, and grief. Yet much of the world experiences these events as background content appearing briefly between advertisements and celebrity gossip.

A child searching for food in a refugee camp and a consumer comparing smartphone accessories inhabit the same global system while living in entirely different realities. One confronts existence directly. The other confronts subscription options.

Both are described as informed participants in modern civilisation.

This is where satire becomes difficult. The world is so absurd that exaggeration often feels unnecessary.

Millions struggle for food, shelter, healthcare, and safety. Meanwhile, affluent societies devote intellectual energy to determining whether a coffee should arrive in seven minutes or eight. Two thirds of humanity struggle with necessity. One third struggles with convenience. The former worries about survival. The latter worries about buffering speed.

Both believe they are participating in civilisation.

Perhaps the people directing global narratives are not ordinary humans at all. Perhaps they are extraterrestrials disguised as consultants, strategists, think tank fellows, and senior executives. This would explain why so many decisions affecting billions appear disconnected from ordinary life.

The extraterrestrial hypothesis has one advantage over conventional explanations, it is occasionally easier to believe than the alternative.

The alternative is that normal human beings built a world in which millions lack basic security while others debate whether artificial intelligence can produce more personalised advertisements.

Yet there are no extraterrestrials.

There are only humans operating within vastly different realities.

The executive, the labourer, the refugee, the monk, the soldier, the billionaire, the farmer, the football referee, the algorithm designer, and the teenager posting moral philosophy between selfies are all conditioned by environments that shape what they perceive as normal.

The distance between them is not biological but experiential.

Are human beings automatons?

Not entirely.

Are we fully autonomous moral agents?

Equally unlikely.

We exist somewhere between freedom and conditioning. Our beliefs are inherited yet examinable. Our values are shaped yet revisable. Our decisions are influenced yet not wholly determined.

The human condition may not consist in escaping conditioning but in becoming conscious of it.

Wisdom, then, is not certainty. Wisdom is suspicion directed first at oneself.

It is Huck Finn recognising that respectable society may be wrong.

It is the Jataka elephant choosing compassion over appetite.

It is Sarah Connor [5]realising that machines are dangerous not because they are alien, but because they resemble the coldest parts of ourselves.

It is the football fan admitting that perhaps the referee did not personally hate their nation.

It is the citizen asking not merely, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?”

The Thirukural captures the matter with remarkable elegance, “Whatever the source, from whomever a thing is heard, wisdom consists in discerning the truth within it.” – Kural 423

The verse does not ask us to obey tradition blindly. Nor does it ask us to reject tradition theatrically while filming ourselves doing so.

It asks something more difficult.

To examine.

To discern.

To think.

Not according to inherited authority, ideological loyalty, cultural habit, religious certainty, fashionable opinion, viral outrage, or whichever algorithm has most recently discovered our weakness.

The task offers no final escape from conditioning. There may be no mountaintop where the human mind becomes perfectly free. There may only be moments of recognition, moments when we see the strings, notice the machine, question the crowd, doubt the slogan, and choose compassion anyway.

That may be the closest thing to freedom we shall ever possess.

And if civilisation survives long enough to learn it, perhaps even ‘Skynet’ will be impressed.

.

[1] A collection of 547 Buddhist fables centred around the many lives of the Buddha compiled from around  500 BCE to 300 BCE.

[2]  A fictional artificial neural network-based group mind and artificial general superintelligence system that serves as the main antagonist in Terminator

[3] Video Assisted referee

[4]  Fédération Internationale de Football Association

[5] Fictional character in Terminator

Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.

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Categories
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.

.

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

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Categories
Notes from Japan

One Thousand Year Story in the Middle of Shikoku

Photographs and Narrative by Suzanne Kamata

I’d wanted to go on the Shikoku Mannaka Sennen Monogatari (One Thousand Year Story in the Middle of Shikoku) train trip ever since I saw it advertised on a poster in the window of Tokushima Station. When I investigated, however, I discovered one couldn’t begin the journey in Tokushima, where I live. Although it starts (or ends, depending on which way you’re coming from; it’s a one-way trip) deep in the mountains of Tokushima, I would have to change trains a few times before boarding the special sightseeing train. It would take hours to get there. A better way would be to board in Tadotsu, which is in the neighboring prefecture Kagawa. I could drive there in a little over an hour, take the fancy train to Oboke, and return by express train.

I decided to take a ride on the spur of the moment. The train was pretty much booked for the rest of the season, at least on the days when I didn’t have other plans, like my job. I did find one last seat on a train in mid-November. It might have been more fun to go with someone else, but I didn’t have time to coordinate with friends. I immediately booked the seat, reserving my lunch as well.

The morning of my train trip was chilly, but sunny. I donned a thin tunic and a long cardigan, wondering if it would be cold in the mountains. Maybe I should bring my down jacket? I rolled up a windbreaker and stuffed it into my backpack. I entered my destination – Tadotsu Station – into my phone’s navigation app, selected a podcast for the drive, and set off.

Tadotsu turned out to be a sleepy little town, which makes sense. These are the kinds of places that need something special to attract visitors and their money. If the whole purpose of these sightseeing trains is to rejuvenate dying towns, then Tadotsu seemed like a good choice. I could see that some construction was in progress, perhaps to accommodate the hordes of new visitors brought by the train. Porta potties temporarily served as bathrooms.

Intriguing sculpture
Shikoku Mannaka Sennen Monogatari

In front of the station, an intriguing sculpture attracted my attention. To me, it looked like a tall armless man wearing a hat, backed by a sickle. There was an emblem like a coat of arms where the neck of the man would be. At the base of the sculpture was a plaque with the words: “Thankful for my own life. Thankful for having you in it.”

Later, I discovered that it was meant to commemorate Doshin So, nee Michiomi Nakano, a former military intelligence agent who spent many years in China. After returning to Japan, he was stationed in Tadotsu, where he established a cram school to teach Buddhist philosophy and martial arts.

In 1947, he founded Shorinji Kenpo, a Japanese martial art with a holistic system. The training methods are divided into self-defense training, mental training, and health training. According to his philosophy, spirit and body are as one, and they must be trained together as such. His teachings emanated from this small town of about 20,000 people to the rest of the world. The emblem, as it turned out, was the symbol for Shorinji Kenpo.

I took a photo of the monument and proceeded to the train platform, where I was met with heavy equipment surrounded by a chain link fence. A sign apologised for this inconvenience, and explained that construction was underway to make the station barrier-free.

I was twenty minutes early, but my fellow passengers – Japanese, as far as I could tell – were already milling about, taking selfies and photos of each other in advance of their train trip. The group was mostly female, middle-aged, and older. Many people were wearing masks.

A cinematic melody heralded the approach of the train, accompanied by another rush for selfies and photos. The three cars, all different colors, were named after spring, summer, and fall. What happened to winter? A small doormat with the train’s motif, which resembled a stylized tree, was positioned on the platform at the entrance to the train. I boarded the green “spring” car, Haru Akari, and found my seat, a fuzzy green upholstered chair at a table against the wall, facing the window. The two seats next to me were unoccupied.

Most people wore casual clothes. I rarely saw folks from Tokushima get dressed up, unless it was for a wedding, say, or a graduation ceremony. One woman at the four-top on the other side of me was striking in a sumptuous Chinese-style jacket and gold barrettes. I wondered for a moment if she might be some kind of celebrity. I tried not to stare.

I examined the orange cloth placemat, again with the tree motif. Already my mouth was watering. Disposable chopsticks and a wet napkin were aligned at the bottom, while a spoon rested on a rectangle of granite. Paper napkins, toothpicks, and creamers were tucked into a small basket made of vines. Brochures detailing the train’s route, souvenirs for purchase, and additional menu items were laid out.

You could use your phone to scan a QR code and order keychains, sweet potato cakes, or a yusan-bako, a traditional lunch box which originated in Tokushima. This one was made of Japanese cypress adorned with Kagawa lacquerware. It had three drawers for various delicacies, which fit into a box with a handle, perfect for toting to a picnic in a meadow somewhere. You could also buy a CD with the train’s theme song.

I had already ordered my lunch, but I glanced at the menu anyway. Fish cutlets, another specialty of Tokushima were available, along with bamboo shoots, and ice cream made with sake lees. The sweet potato crumble, with a dollop of whipped cream, was also tempting, but I summoned my willpower.

One of the uniformed attendants pointed out the wooden box under my car for storing my backpack and purse. I got those items out of the way. She also handed me a coupon for soup and water to be redeemed at our first stop. And then finally, the train began to move. A whistle blew. Japan Railway employees and others lined up with flags and round paper fans and began waving at us. We all waved back.

After that enthusiastic send-off, the train began to trundle along the tracks, picking up speed as we zipped past backyards of houses, apartment buildings with laundry hanging on balconies, convenience stores, crows alighting on power lines, an empty playground. We passed rice paddies, some surrounding family gravestones; a construction site with bright blue, green, and yellow earth moving machines.

As we neared Kotohira Station, our first stop, a young woman chirped that Kotohira’s brass band had been declared second best in the country. She reminded us to redeem our coupons in the welcome center. After the train had stopped, I followed everyone into a small room adjacent to the station where we lined up at a counter. I handed over my little piece of paper and received a bottle of water and a small China cup of kabocha 1potage. I perched on the padded bench to drink it, while gazing around at the proud display of photos of the award-winning high school band. A white-gloved attendant came around with a tray to collect my empty cup, and I got back on the train.

A young Chinese family – a couple and their plump baby – were now occupying the seats beside me. The train moved on. The view outside my window was now more expansive – terraced fields, occasional houses with tiled roofs and walled gardens, tufts of pampas grass, a patch of pink and magenta cosmos.

The voice announced that we were nearing Sanuki Saida Station, which boasts a 700-year-old tabunoki tree, said to be a “power spot.” Apparently if you stand under the tree, you can absorb some of its spirit and energy. The tree has also been designated a Kagawa Prefectural Protected Tree. The train came to a stop again, but this time we didn’t get off. Instead, we all whipped out our smartphones to take photos of the person dressed in a polar bear costume shooting soap bubbles from a bubble gun. The baby was delighted.

Once we were again underway, the attendant distributed large square bento boxes with gold-rimmed lids. I opened mine to find an array of chilled meat dishes – the first course. I unsheathed my disposable chopsticks and broke them apart. “Itadakimasu!2”

Out the window, farmland had given way to gnarly brush. `Although the foliage wasn’t quite at its peak, swatches of scarlet and gold popped against the greenery. I wondered about the wildlife in the mountains. I knew that there were monkeys, boars, and deer. The latter two appeared on menus deep in the interior of Shikoku. You could get a burger made with game meat, or “peony hot pot,” in which thin slices of pink boar meat curled up like flower petals after being cooked in miso broth.

Next to me, the young parents passed their good-natured baby back and forth. When I caught his eye, I smiled at him, and he showed his dimples, smiling back. I remembered how, when I had first come to Japan, whenever I had tried to engage with a stranger’s baby on the train, the baby’s face had crumpled up in terror. Apparently, big-nosed foreigners were scary even for infants. At least back then. It was nice to be able to engage with a small child without causing tears.

We made a brief stop at Tsubojiri Station, a small, unmanned station accessible only by switchback, surrounded by trees. “You can get off the train and smoke,” the voice announced. We all scampered off the train, but I didn’t see anyone light up a cigarette. Instead, passengers posed in front of the station’s sign and the weathered wooden building.

Back on the train, the next course was served – buttered rice and pork, arranged on a gold-rimmed China plate. The narration continued. “Please look to the right. You will be able to see Mount Hashikura. You can take a ropeway to Hashikura Temple, which was established by the famous Buddhist monk Kukai, also known as Kobo Daishi.”

Kobo Daishi is known as the father of Shikoku’s 88-Temple Pilgrimage. Hashikura Temple is not one of the 88, but is considered to be an associated temple. According to the Tourism Shikoku website, the name “Hashikuraji” contains the character for “hashi,” or chopsticks, “an everyday unifying ubiquitous tool of daily life for all Japanese. In 828 [CE], Konpira Daigongen revealed himself to the priest Kukai and promised to save all who use chopsticks, a pledge of salvation for all.”

According to an announcement, we would soon have a good view of the Yoshino River, the majestic “wild” river which runs west to east across Shikoku. Its rushing waters carved out the Oboke Gorge over millennia. This river flows 121 miles, past Tokushima City, and the house where I live, and into the Kii Channel. At one time, it flooded repeatedly. The “Tora-no-Mizu” (“Tiger’s Water”) flood of 1886 (Year of the Tiger), one of the worst floods in Japanese history, led to the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people. Now, however, strong levees keep the waters in check, though heavy rains can still shut down the roads nearest the river. These days, the Yoshino River is more known as a place where visitors can enjoy various forms of recreation including swimming, fishing, and white-water rafting.

As I gazed out at the glassy emerald waters, which reflected the rocky banks, the voice announced that we were approaching Awa-Ikeda. High school baseball, I thought. Sure enough, the voice told us that we would soon have a view of baseball players practicing at Ikeda High School’s diamond, and that they had once won the National High School Baseball Tournament at Koshien.

The train chugged on. We passed another station, Awa Kawaguchi, where another person in a polar bear suit filled the air with soap bubbles. A sign on the platform declared that this was a town where tanuki (an indigenous animal that is often called raccoon-dog, and is a notorious trickster in Japanese folklore) and people live together.

A polar bear suit filled the air with soap bubbles
A man wearing a woven peaked hat

After traversing another tunnel, coffee was served with a petite madeleine. Outside the window, I could see the water rushing through the gorge, frothing over rocks. We were almost at the end of our thousand-year journey. It had lasted a little over two hours.

The train pulled into Oboke Station, in the town of Miyoshi, and we got off. We were greeted by a man wearing a woven peaked hat and happi coat, banging on a drum affixed with characters from the animated series Anpanman. Although my fellow travelers had been mostly Japanese, quite a few European and American tourists were milling around the station, perhaps waiting for transportation.

At the time I first visited, over thirty years ago, I recall no restaurants or hotels, but now there was a large roadside station with souvenir shops, food vendors, and a Yokai House. There was even yokai3-themed food. Some traditional houses have been refurbished as high-end inns.

I took a short walk around the area and then attempted to buy a return ticket on an express train. Although the station was now geared for tourists with English signage and souvenir shops, it was still old-fashioned in many ways. I realised it wasn’t equipped to deal with phone apps or credit cards. I hadn’t brought a lot of cash, but I had just enough to buy a ticket back to my starting point.

  1. A variety of winter squash ↩︎
  2. I humbly receive (feel grateful for the food) ↩︎
  3. A spirit having supernatural powers ↩︎

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.

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

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

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Categories
Review

To Lhasa, with Love

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Old Lhasa: A Biography

Author: M.A. Aldrich

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Book

“Contrary to common perceptions, Lhasa is not forbidden to outsiders” – M.A.Aldrich

Old Lhasa: A Biography, (a revised edition published in 2025 for the South Asian market of a book originally published in 2023), is a voluminous 615-page book that combines historical research, travel writing, religion, and culture to offer a comprehensive account of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. The author, M. A. Aldrich, is a lawyer who has lived and worked in Asia since the 1990s and had earlier published books on cities like Peking and Ulaanbaatar. Written on the basis of his multiple trips to Lhasa and its surroundings (the last one as late as September 2024), he is happy to discover that Old Lhasa has stood the test of time and still accurately captures the sight, sounds, and feelings of the city and foreigners can wander about freely without a minder so long as their papers are in order. As this book slowly emerged, it grew into both a portrait of the history and culture of that city as well as a serviceable guidebook for readers who are able to go to Tibet when political and regulatory circumstances permit.

Aldrich paints an intricate portrait of Lhasa, a storied city and its history, by giving us the evolution of how the Tibetan script came to be, with inspiration from ancient India and at the same time livens up the narrative with humorous anecdotes, interesting legends and charming fables that makes this book blend many genres into one. Divided into 49 chapters and enriched with several maps and black and white photographs, the chronological narration rightfully begins with the first chapter titled ‘Prelude to Lhasa’ where we are told that with Lhasa as the geographical focal point of their faith, Tibetans believe the dharma[1] has always been connected to their country. He begins the journey in the seventh century during the final moments of the life of Buddha, mentions specific Buddhist virtues such as compassion, wisdom, and benevolent power, among other essential qualities for the path to awakening. For Tibetan followers of the dharma, the history of Tibet is the history of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, which is simultaneously woven into the story of Lhasa.

In the 1920s, when Tibet enjoyed its greatest freedom from outside interference in the modern era, Lhasa had a population of only around twenty-five thousand. It was divided into two districts: one that is now the Old Town, with its seventh-century Jokhang Temple (or, more simply, the “Jokhang,” meaning the “House of the Lord”) at its centre; and the other being Shol Village, which is at the foot of Marpo Ri (Red Mountain). These administrative districts were divided by a north-south boundary that ran through the Turquoise Bridge, another structure dating to the seventh century. The Old Town was not much larger than two- or three-square kilometers, while Shol was even tinier. The residents of Lhasa at that time took immense pride in the religious heritage of their city. Nearly every luminary in Tibetan history had come to Lhasa because of the importance of the Jokhang as the focal point from which Tibetan civilization evolved and expanded. No other city could rival it.

Lhasa grew organically outward in concentric circles. Around 1160, a monk built the Nangkhor, a pilgrim’s circuit (korlam) directly adjacent to the inner sanctum of the Jokhang, so that devotees could practice the religious ritual of circumambulation. It is from this kernel that the boundaries of Old Lhasa came into existence. By the 14th century, Lhasa was enclosed within the Barkhor, a kilometre-long korlam circling the temple and a monastery among other buildings. By the 1650s, Lhasa’s outer limits had been expanded to the Lingkhor, a ten-kilometre pilgrimage route. And so, the boundaries of the city remained until recently.

Lhasa’s significance also drew heavily upon the nearby presence of government buildings and monastic sects of learning. The Potala Palace, with its superb representation of Tibetan architecture, is a massive and dazzlingly beautiful fortress-like monastery that had been the residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Tibetan government since 1648. Three monasteries outside the city were centres of the so-called Yellow Hat or Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism, preserving a venerable tradition of scholasticism and monastic training that had been imported to Tibet from the universities at Nalanda, Odantapuri and Vikramshila in Northern India. Daily life in early 20th century Lhasa was mostly grounded in religion for both the laity as well as the clergy. The Lhasa calendar year revolved around a sequence of religious festivals that tracked the flow of one month into another in a never-ending cycle of faith and devotion. Though religion permeated society, Lhasa was not an “other-worldly” place. In 1951, when the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa behind portraits of Chairman Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqi, the days of the city with its self-administered culture were numbered. During the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, the Chinese Communist Party reacted to the civil unrest as if Tibet should be taught a lesson. The Party continues to do so despite brief intermittent periods of slightly relaxed policies. Though Chinese modernity has been imported wholesale into Lhasa, the author opines that Old Lhasa is still there in its people who maintain their centuries-old faith and customs. One just needs to know where and how to look.

In the Prologue, Aldrich had confessed that this is not a “serious book” about Lhasa as the term is understood within the narrow confines of modern academia, since its objective is only to share what he had learned about Lhasa with simpaticos. His audience is the general reader or armchair traveller with a basic understanding of the tenets of Buddhism and the broad outlines of Asian history. He does not go into great depth on religious theory, and he hopes his views might also be of interest to Tibetans who have come of age in the diaspora and are curious about what a non-Tibetan thinks of this fabled city. He attempts to avoid the excessive solemnity and despair that attends much writing about Tibet. It is not that he is ignorant of ongoing atrocities and the appallingly cruel policies of the Party, but he has no doubt Tibet will have a renaissance. He opines Tibetans will overcome the current dark cycle just as they have overcome other bleak phases in their history.

In conclusion, it can be said that even after reading it thoroughly and enjoying it, this book as the author rightly states, “will nudge readers to learn more about Tibet and Tibetan culture.” Also, as Dr. Lobsong Sangay, former head of the Tibetan Government in Exile, rightfully mentions in the ‘Foreword’

, “Though the story of Tibet is an ongoing tale of tragedy, it also is a tale of the human spirit and the resilience of the Tibetan people. …this book is a window for seeking genuine access that will help you make meaningful discoveries of your own, whether you are physically travelling through the streets of Lhasa or traveling through the pages of this book far away from Lhasa.”

[1] faith

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

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Essay

Drinking the Forbidden Milk of Paradise…

By Meenakshi Malhotra

Mount Parnassus in Greece, where the muses were said to gather, was regarded as the home of poetry: From Public Domain

For the longest time, women were uncomfortable occupants of the house of poesy[1], particularly where there were existing canons of poetry established by the institutional gate-keepers and male custodians of literature. At best, they were viewed as Jane-come-latelies who sought to transgress the hitherto hallowed domains of high verse, interlopers to the hallowed heights of Parnassus who dared not “drink the milk of paradise”.

This ‘absence’ of women from the terrain of poetry is in spite of the fact that women have always written poetry, from ancient times to now. Sappho in the western tradition, was a Grecian poet from 5th-6th century BCE who was the pioneer of lyric poetry, a genre which apart from being set to music, also inaugurated the poetic ‘I’. In India, Buddhist nuns in the Mahayana and Theravadas who wrote poems known as the therigathas were early precursors of female poets. These early women poets engaged in the sometimes forbidden, sometimes lascivious charms of verse and versification. Down the ages, there were many others who joined them and kept the lamp of women’s versification lit. However, if women have always been versifiers, why has there been a  resistance and grudging admission for women to the poetic domain, which becomes a sort of “No (Wo)man’s land”? Why do women poets have only a token presence in traditional poetic anthologies?

Some reasons have been offered, not least among them being the preponderance of male poets who have often also been self-proclaimed and self-appointed guardians, legatees and arbiters of poetic tradition. Canonical poetic traditions, many claim, require a knowledge and understanding of Latin and Greek in the West while a knowledge of Sanskrit/Persian in the Asian context was deemed necessary. Thus women, who, for the most part, lacked formal education and had but small Latin and less Greek, could only hover around the margins and fringes of poetry. The situation with Sanskrit and Persian was similar and women remained mostly absent from or shadowy denizens of poetic terrains. Even if and when women were writing, they were doing so in colloquial registers and in the languages of the common people  and not in formal or decorative language, deemed essential for poetry, for the most part. Almost the first group of women writing poetry in India were Buddhist nuns who wrote in Pali, one of the many ancient languages in the ancient Indian subcontinent, which enshrined its own scholarly tradition. Sappho wrote in the Greek Aeolic dialect, which was difficult for Latin writers to translate.

Between 12th and 17th century, there was an advent  of devotional mystic poetry called “Bhakti” and “Sufi” poetry. While the poems were uttered/written in a devotional idiom, the poems and songs were often rebellious and iconoclastic, rejecting institutional religions and social norms. This poetry was rooted in personal and unmediated devotion and rejected formal languages and established societal norms. Some of this poetry was in an informal register, colloquial language and performative with a strong dramatic quality. Thus we have lines in Kannada from Akka Mahadevi (1130-1160) who rejects her earthly husband:

I love the handsome one: He has  no death decay nor form… no end no clan, no land.
Take these husbands who die, decay, and feed them to your kitchen fires.(Vachanas)

Women poets for the longest time had a crisis of identity, identification and non-belonging. They laboured under the anxiety of authorship where they felt the absence of precursors and fore-mothers and the lack of a poetic tradition to which they could belong. They were often made to feel as if they lacked genuine poetic talent or that they were transgressors against womanhood and femininity.

In Aurora Leigh (1855) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eponymous title character, considers  the diverse fields of literature where women can exercise their talent and claim a space. The field of dramatic writing poses a challenge because the former demands that the woman writer be in the public eye in order to promote her plays. Further, to achieve or even aspire to the rank of Poet, Aurora must become capable of  “widening a large lap of life to hold the world-full woe”. Over the course of the long epic poem, she tries to reconcile her femininity with her artistic aspirations. In both cases, she is denied emotional fulfilment. She refuses to accept the role of an obedient wife, since it would mean foregoing the intellectual independence needed to develop as an artist, but then she must also refuse the love of a husband. In Book Five, she mentions three poets, none of whom she admires for their “popular applause”. Yet she admits that she envies them for the time they can devote to their chosen vocation and the adoring women that surround them and provide emotional support and fill their days with glory.

Another issue with women’s writing and poetry is the uncomfortable positioning of women in relation to patriarchal language or male centred language. If as Dale Spender  declares in “Man-made Language”, the masculine is asserted as the norm, where do we position women’s voices? While language is a universal medium of communication, man-made language is full of sexism and chauvinism and expresses reality from a predominantly masculine and patriarchal perspective. If language is a social system which women are persuaded or co-opted to use, how do they work within its confines to express their poetic aspirations? How do they stretch, bend, subvert language to express their own realities? Can we read techniques of irony, satire and other figurative and metaphoric strategies of defiance and subversion and an attempt to undermine from within?

Juliet Mitchell in her essay on ‘Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis’ states that the woman writer/novelist must of necessity be a hysteric, straddling two opposed worlds. One world is that of male definitions and conceptions of femininity  and the other, a resistance and defiance of such conceptualising, accompanied by an attempt to undermine from within. Her defiance and resistance makes her character that of a hysteric, one who defies accepted notions and standards of femininity and is therefore considered transgressive. She troubles fixed gender categories, roles and definitions. She also disrupts and challenges the symbolic order of language, one which insists on rules of grammar and linguistic structures through the semiotic order which uses word play, repetitions and  childish rhymes, in order to express inner desires and drives. The symbolic order deals with the denotative aspects of language and the semiotic order with the affective aspect.

Women’s poetry often houses and accommodates the semiotic, seeming psychobabble that plays with and disturbs fixed notions of femininity and binary gender identities.

What are the popular themes that inform women’s poetry? Some themes are to with women’s search for authentic  self-hood and identity, their search for roots and a space of their own. As we see in Aurora Leigh, much of women’s poetry is self-conscious and self-reflexive, about the act of writing itself, the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence could never retract.”(T.S.Eliot) 

Many contemporary women poets, across continents, have evinced a substantial  interest in exploring their poetic self  through their poems. On the one hand is the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, on the other the brief gnomic utterances of Emily Dickinson. Before the advent of the twentieth century, one hears of Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, among many others. Names like Aphra Behn and Anne Bradstreet have been included in many syllabi, often as a token inclusion in an otherwise male centric course.

Women poets have talked about the horrors of war including rape, pillage and destruction. In their critique of war and violence, we find the forging of transnational solidarities, whether it is women’s poetry from Sri Lanka or Birangona (War heroines). 

In India the many names that come to mind are that of  Kamala Das, Eunice D’Souza, Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt and Sunuti Namjoshi. Women poets have employed effective means to explore the entire gamut of experience.The private  and the public domain, their process of  self-analysis; the process of poetic creativity and a probe into  poetic identities are all significant fields of exploration. For these women writers, analysing the creative process becomes much more than just a poetic theme. As they unravel the mystery of their poetic psyche in their writings, it becomes an epiphanic journey for the poets and their readers.

[1] Archaic word for poetry

Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Interview

Folklore, Fiction, Ghosts and Grammar

Storytelling is central to the life and work of Malaysian author, editor and teacher, Daphne Lee. Keith Lyons finds out what keeps her up at night.

When I1 first met Daphne Lee in person, in a Chinese Buddhist cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand, on a summery day. I was struck by her curiosity. And I came away impressed, not just by how she delights in hearing ghost stories, myths, supernatural tales, and folklore but how she makes connections to the universality of storytelling, and what lies beneath.

Daphne Lee

As well as being a collector and curator of stories, she’s a writer, a creative writing teacher, and an editor—since 2009 she’s been consulting editor at Scholastic Asia.  She’s been active in supporting the work of writers and illustrators of children’s and young adult literature with Asian content. Daphne curated and edited Malaysian Tales: Retold & Remixed (ZI Publications) in 2011 and Remang: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales (Terrer Books) in 2018, while Bright Landscapes, Daphne’s first collection of short stories, was published in 2019. She’s working on a new short story collection, and her first novel, which she is currently revising while in New Zealand on a writing retreat, far from the streets of Kuala Lumpur and her Roman Catholic school upbringing.You can find out more about the multi-talented Daphne at her website https://daphnelee.org/.

Interview with Keith Lyons

What inspired you to create Remang: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales?

Malaysians love ghost stories. We would rather any misfortune or unusual occurrence be caused by a spirit or other supernatural phenomena than try to figure out a logical reason. Having said that, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do enjoy ghost stories. I thought it would be fun to edit a collection of these, but I was wrong …  

How do you approach writing and curating ghost stories? What elements do you feel make a truly eerie and memorable tale?

I prefer a story to suggest a mood and to be atmospherically or suggestively spooky than to be full of gory and blood-curdling details. I like the sort of ghost stories that are frightening only if you read between the lines or that seem unremarkable at first, but months later, you suddenly realise what it all means.

Your work often draws from Asian folklore and supernatural beliefs. Are there any particular myths or legends that have influenced your storytelling?

Nothing in particular, but I have heard the same stories all my life and with surprisingly few variations and differences. I enjoy retelling the old tales or building on elements in them. Hopefully, I make a completely new story, but with recognisable features because I like reading stories in which there are some familiar details.  

Do you have a personal ghost story or supernatural experience that shaped your interest in this genre?

My family lived in a haunted house in my hometown (Segamat in Johor, the peninsula’s southern-most state) and we experienced things like lights going on and off, footsteps, odd, unexplained sounds, and so on. I can’t remember much, but I don’t think any of us ever felt threatened during the eight years we lived there. If there were spirits, they were not malevolent. My interest in the supernatural was probably more shaped by the films I watched as a child, including The Exorcist and the Hammer House of Horror — Dracula films starring Christopher Lee.

As an editor, what do you look for in a compelling ghost story?

The problem with the ghost stories we tell one another is that they are usually just anecdotal fragments. I look for fully-formed stories with well-developed characters—the ghostly element might even seem merely incidental to the plot yet be significant enough to make an impression. It should haunt you a long time after you’ve stopped reading.

How do you balance creative freedom with maintaining a strong thematic or narrative structure in an anthology?

I’ve curated two anthologies—one of ghost stories and the other of retellings of folktales, myths and legends. For both the brief was quite open and I welcomed a variety of styles and voices.

What are some of the challenges you face when working with authors, particularly in speculative fiction and folklore-based stories?

I find that when it’s an open call, it can be challenging to gather enough suitable stories for an anthology. Once you’ve made the selection, the editing process is usually long and laborious, with more back and forth than the deadline allows. It’s a much more straightforward process when experienced authors are invited to contribute to an anthology. With the authors published by my day-job (at Scholastic Asia), the major challenge is when the author is too precious about what they’ve created and is adamant about retaining something that doesn’t work or refuses to/is unable to develop a half-formed idea. Fortunately, that has rarely been the case. It’s imperative that authors trust their editors and, thankfully, I’ve had a good relationship with most of the writers with whom I’ve worked.

You’ve been deeply involved in the Malaysian publishing scene. How has the landscape for local horror and supernatural fiction evolved over the years?

I’m not directly involved in the scene as most of my work as an editor is with an American publishing house, albeit its Asian imprint. However, I am a reader of locally published books and do read some supernatural fiction written in the Malay language. When I was a teenager, I was a fan of a series of books with the series title Bercakap Dengan Jin (Talking with a Jinn)—they were dark tales that featured a witch doctor, set in rural Malaysia, with lurid covers and badly designed interior pages. The production value of horror fiction has improved, but the stories that are most popular are still the ones we are familiar with, especially about the ghosts that haunt every school and hospital in the country. They are hastily written and barely edited, with high print runs—horror sells, second only to romance novels.

How important is it for Malaysian and Asian supernatural stories to be represented in the broader literary world?

The world needs to realise that there is more to Asia than just what the West is showing it. Right now, a handful of houses controls what most of us are exposed to and end up reading. Even if Asian fiction is getting on the shelves, it’s only what these publishing houses have decided is worthy. In Asia, especially those countries that were colonised, readers are still stuck with the idea that books out of the UK and the US are better than those published locally. In Malaysia, we have some authors who have ‘made it’ in the West—people like Tan Twan Eng, Tash Aw, Preeta Samarasan and Zen Cho. They are excellent writers, but I don’t know if many Malaysians would pay attention to their work if they were published by Malaysian houses. Unfortunately, we don’t appear to be very discerning readers. Penguin Random House SEA, which runs out of Singapore and is riding on the Penguin brand, fails to offer sufficient editorial support to its authors and seems to be prioritising marketability and quantity over quality. Readers buy the books because Penguin is supposed to equal quality. Writers sign contracts with the house because they recognise PRH as a popular brand with a great reputation. They complain about the poor editing but choose to stay with the company. This is a kind of horror story too!

Do you think traditional ghost stories still resonate with modern readers? How do you adapt them to contemporary audiences?

I think so. I think part of the attraction of ghost stories is that people like to be scared as long as they can also feel safe while feeling terrified. Traditional ghost stories are the perfect comfort reads. They are thrilling yet familiar. You know what’s coming—all the scary bits, but there’s usually a happy ending too, when the ghosts are put to rest and the humans go back to their boring lives.

Many Western readers are familiar with ghosts like the vengeful spirit or the haunted house trope. What uniquely Malaysian or Asian ghostly elements do you wish more people knew about?

The Asian ghosts most familiar to Western readers are probably the Japanese yokai. Once again, there is a degree of gatekeeping going on. A Malaysian author I know was looking for a lit agent and was told that although her writing was good, her stories were ‘too South-east Asian’. What does that even mean? Western publishers and agents underestimate the ability of readers to relate to subjects unfamiliar, especially when they originate in South-east Asia. Often you hear that a publisher or agent already has a South-east Asian on their list and does not have room for more. Yet, there are officially eleven countries that make up the region. They are not interchangeable, and do not share a common language, history or culture. Malaysia has many types of ghosts and they each reflect the various beliefs and attitudes Malaysians have towards life and all its big and petty questions. To know these spirits is to know the fears and anxieties of the common Malaysian.

You’re planning an online archive of Malaysian folktales. Could you share more about this project and why it’s important to preserve these stories?

I was recently on a panel about folktales with two other Malaysian authors who write books that draw on folktales for inspiration and one of them said that the folktales that stick around are the ones that mean something to the community. This may have been true in the past when folktales were shared orally. These days, the ones that survive are those that get included in collections or are retold and reimagined into films etc. The same ones get recycled time and time again, probably because they are the most dramatic or sentimental. Collecting as many folktales as possible and storing them online gives them all a fair chance of surviving. What may be insignificant to one generation, may resonate for another. The main thing is to let each generation decide, and for the stories to be available and accessible.

Bright Landscapes was your first personal collection of short stories. How did that experience differ from curating Remang?

For Bright Landscapes I had only myself with whom to argue and disagree. My editor and I were, fortunately, on the same wavelength, but she really helped me improve on the quality of the stories. I wouldn’t undertake another project like Remang unless more time and more resources were available.

Can you share any details about your upcoming novel? What themes or ideas are you exploring?

During the pandemic I completed a novel but on reading it, I realised how rubbish it was. It’s very close to my heart, but I think it’s not quite the right time for a rewrite. It needs to ‘cook’ more, in my subconscious. That novel is set in a world where gods and humans live side-by-side, during a time of religious reform. The protagonists are a priest and a deity, and the story deals with questions of friendship, integrity, religious belief, and faith. I have a second novel that I am currently working on—a coming-of-age story set in a convent school in a small Malaysian town in the 1980s. It also explores questions of friendship and faith. I attended two Convent schools from age five to seventeen, and I was raised Roman Catholic. I did think of becoming a nun when I was in my early teens, like the protagonist of my novel, but I have been an atheist since my early twenties, although I am now probably more agnostic than anything. Religious belief and faith are subjects fascinating to me.

As a creative writing teacher, what advice would you give to aspiring writers interested in supernatural fiction?

The same advice I would give any aspiring writer: Read widely and voraciously. And write every day, about anything and everything.

If you could collaborate with any author—living or deceased—on a ghost story, who would it be and why?

I don’t want to collaborate with anyone, but I would like to have a conversation with Elizabeth Bowen about the handful of ghost stories she published. They are my favourites—quiet, mysterious, melancholy, sardonic. I have questions about them that still keep me up at night, decades after I first read them.

  1. Keith Lyons ↩︎

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless Journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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Review

The Oldest University in the World?

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Nalanda: How it Changed the World 

Author: Abhay K

Publisher: Penguin Vintage

Nalanda University, founded in 427 CE in ancient India, is considered the world’s first residential university. It attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia to study medicine, logic, mathematics, and Buddhist principles. The University flourished for over seven centuries, predating the universities of Oxford and Bologna by more than 500 years. Nalanda’s enlightened approach to philosophy and religion significantly shaped Asian culture long after its decline. The Gupta Empire, though Hindu, supported Buddhism, fostering a liberal environment that allowed it to blend intellectual Buddhism with multidisciplinary academics.

Nalanda was destroyed in the 1190s by Turko-Afghan military general Bakhtiyar Khilji, who sought to extinguish the Buddhist center of knowledge. The fire set by the attackers reportedly burned for three months. Today, the excavated site is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Numerous aspects of Nalanda continue to be enveloped in an enigma. What is the date of its establishment? Who were its founders? Which individuals engaged in study and instruction at this institution? What disciplines were available for study? What was the population of students and educators? Can Nalanda be classified as a university by contemporary standards? What factors contributed to its eventual decline? Nalanda – How It Changed The World by Abhay K. unravels these questions.

Abhay K. has authored numerous poetry collections, such as Celestial, Stray Poems, Monsoon, The Magic of Madagascar, and The Alphabets of Latin America. Additionally, he serves as the editor for several notable works, including The Book of Bihari Literature, The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems, Capitals, New Brazilian Poems, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems.

Writes Abhay in the introduction to the book: “There is no clear and entirely reliable interpretation of Nalanda’s past or, for that matter, the past of just about anything. Rather, there are scattered ideas that we try to string together as history, an overview stitched from snippets. And there is no single interpretation of these snippets but rather competing and conflicting interpretations. Recognizing this slippery nature of the past and its documents is part of what makes scholarship such an exciting enterprise.

“Buddhist monasteries existed all over India, Central Asia, and East Asia. However, Nalanda became a celebrated monastery in comparison to its contemporaries. What might be the reason? One of the reasons was its proximity to Rajagriha (modern Rajgir), the first capital of Magadha. Rajagriha in those days was full of political intrigue and rivalries. It became a fertile ground for the birth of the Magadha Empire. Over the centuries, Magadha was ruled by a succession of dynasties, including the Brihdratha dynasty, the Pradotya dynasty, and the Haryanka dynasty. The Haryanka dynasty was the third ruling dynasty of Magadha. It was founded by Bimbisara (c. 558-c.491 BCE). He is considered to be a contemporary of both Mahavira (599-527 BCE) and Gautama Buddha (563-483 BCE). His son Ajatashatru further consolidated it after forcefully taking over Magadha from his father and imprisoning him. He fought a war against the Vajjika League, led by the Lichhavis, and conquered the republic of Vaishali.”

Divided into eight chapters – Nalanda the capital of Magadha, the legendary sons, the rise of Nalanda Mahavihara, luminaries, foreign scholars of Nalanda, Nalandas’s contributions and its global footprint – this is an exhaustive book. The narrative chronicles the ascendance, decline, and resurgence of Nalanda Mahavihara. It delves into Nalanda’s significant contributions to various fields, including science, mathematics, philosophy, art, architecture, and poetry, supported by thorough research. Additionally, it emphasises the distinguished scholars who enhanced its unmatched status as a leading center of learning, as well as the international scholars who frequented the renowned monastery.

Concludes Abhay K: “Nalanda’s footprints to be spreading to new territories in the twenty-first century, where they have not been strong before. As our planet faces the triple threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental pollution, humanity needs to make peace, both with its inner self as well as with its fellow species, rivers and lakes, oceans, and all entities that support life on our beautiful planet. Nalanda’s timeless tradition of imparting knowledge, wisdom, and kindness can guide humanity toward overcoming hatred, anger, frustration, and greed while fostering inner and outer peace.”

The core message of the book — with numerous photographs — is that the creation of institutions named after Nalanda around the world instills in him a sense of optimism that humanity will eventually resolve all its conflicts through the esteemed Nalanda tradition of dialogue and discourse, rejecting violence and warfare permanently. In this context, the ongoing legacy and revival of Nalanda, both in India and internationally, serves as a significant beacon of hope.

Nalanda, with its expansive scope and rich historical background, offers an engaging narrative that illuminates the evolution of this ancient institution over the course of thousands of years.

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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Review

A Blur of a Woman

Book Review by Malashri Lal

Title: A Blur of a Woman

Author: Basudhara Roy

Publisher: Red River

The feminine mystique has defied every attempt to capture its attributes. If clusters of stories surround a goddess, dilemmas are embedded in them. If the pavement-dwelling mother with children clinging to her skirt images economic deprivation, there are stories hidden in her grey-flecked eyes. Basudhara Roy recognises this amorphous, protean aspect of the feminine and titles her collection A Blur of a Woman, poetically declaring; “she owns the place/and the little magic she has earned…she will use it someday to unbuild herself/disappear dissolve/ become a blur”.

This collection is a subtle attack on patriarchy as it encompasses the history and socio-cultural conditions that have moulded women into being mercurial yet tangible, pliant as well as resistive, buoyant but also vulnerable. As the poems flow in a drumroll of many contexts, vignettes of the journey are captured, symbolically strong and offering a plethora of layered meanings. The lines encourage a dialogic exchange whether with the poet, or with one’s own half-acknowledged self that is suddenly confronted by Medusa’s mirror.

The first two sections begin with poems titled ‘Duhkha’ and ‘Soka’[1], directing us towards the Buddhist principle of inevitable mutability and the need for acceptance.

I have seen hearts shut and bolt doors
from within, their windows walled while 
on love the mold of ingratitude thrives

With such adaptations, the contemporary takes precedence over the philosophical teachings, and the identification with thwarted expectations, social discord, betrayal and helpless sorrow is almost immediate. If solace is to be found it is now individual—and, in this instance, by  turning to the gnarled trunks of trees where tears have watered the serrated bark. Speaking of the imagistic density of Roy’s phrases, this kind of interlinking through poetic shorthand is perceived in much of her narrativisation. The ‘betrayal’ that causes sorrow and also the maturity of recovery is a process resonant through the history of women’s writing. ‘Soka: A Triptych’ strings this further through contemplating the elegiac notes of death and mourning—yet birth and death are twins: “If life alone can be seen/all this emptiness must surely be death.”

A sizeable section of the book charts a trajectory of feminist fables, gleaning references from Rabindranath Tagore, Jayadev’s Geet Govinda, Philomela’s story, Virgo’s distress, and others. In Roy’s hands, irony becomes a viable and effective tool of social critique as in the poem

‘In Which Bimala Agrees to an Interview for a Special Issue of Post-Text Feminism’. Tagore’s popular novel Ghare Baire/ The Home and the World presents Bimala as the conventional woman who is persuaded to discover the turmoil of the world outside the threshold. Basudhara devises an imaginary conversation, some of which is quoted:

Where, then, would you locate yourself?
Here. Now.
Come on! I am hardly lost
and need no GPS of theory to find myself!

Such a startling reinvention of a canonical text subverts many assumptions with sharp, clear strokes: the jargon of literary theory, the leap into digital alignments, the confidence of the liberated woman, and the time travel that feminism has enabled.                     

My other favourite piece is about ‘Lalita’, a sakhi or friend  of the beauteous Radha who is always the heroine in the traditional tale. In Lalita’s version of the mysterious raas leela where Krishna is perceived by each woman as her partner, she is jubilant about her societal escape and physical abandon;

limbs supple like vines we danced,
thrilled to be 
where love was recklessly returned.

This may be the right time to refer to the Author’s Note which is titled ‘I Write from the Body’ and seems to carry forward the feminist discourse of theorists such as Hélène Cixous who invented the term écriture feminine, or Julia Kristevawho perceived the  chora as a specially maternal zone.  According to Roy, “In the earth-bed of this woman’s life that I live, poetry runs as a river, its plenitude being both a lesson and an antidote to the prosaic borders of my world.” In which case, “Blur” is the right metaphor for attempting to break the boundaries through word-play and subversive themes expanded in poems  such ‘Aid to Forgetting’, ‘Praise for the Subaltern’, ‘Dis/enfranchised’—and several other poems  are expressions of resistance to the bastions of control. Philomela’s severed tongue has again learned to speak– but it’s a new language of assertion and intertextuality.

The semiotic breakthrough in Roy’s poems is accompanied by stylist experiments too, the Ghazal section being one such. The transcreated  use of the Urdu structure allows for couplets on a variety of subjects—for example, the seasons in the manner of the Baramasa (songs of the twelve months) with a twist that the woman is no longer the bereft, perpetually waiting figure uttering  her woes to the firmament. She says confidently now: 

You etch every constellation on your  palm
Yet secrets line the arcane of the body

In all, A Blur of a Woman, offers  poems for the intellect and the heart which are  indivisible aspects of a woman’s existence. That she  is mercurial  and evasive is once again a reminder of a fascinating mystery that has prevailed over time — and perhaps its more exciting to keep it that way.

[1] Both Dukha and Soka are forms of grief

Malashri Lal, writer and academic, with twenty one books, retired as Professor, English Department,  University of Delhi. Publications include Tagore and the Feminine, and the ‘goddess trilogy’ (co-edited with Namita Gokhale) In Search of Sita,  Finding Radha, and Treasures of Lakshmi. Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt  received the Kalinga Fiction Award.  Lal’s poems Mandalas of Time has recently been translated into Hindi as Mandal Dhwani. She is   currently Convener, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi.

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