Chapter 2of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne,has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click hereto read.
A Tiny Piece of Homeland, an autobiographical narrative by Kallol Lahiri in Bengali, has been translated by V. Ramaswamy. Click here to read.
Walking Together, a poem, has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click hereto read.
Swopno (Dream), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
We have started feeling the impact of climate change with a bevy of natural disasters this August. Glacial ice melts, peat fires, haze, rising seas, more storms, warmer climes and fires wiping out greenery are just a few that come to the mind. But, long ago, our ancestors — without the support of technology — survived climate events. Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), an ancient human settlement, more than 11,000 years ago was lush and green. People moved as it turned arid. Humankind was nomadic then. They moved with shifting riverbeds. In Europe, humans survived the last glacial age, about 20,000 years ago. Then, now when we are faced with the reality of climate change, why is it we tremble with trepidation? We even have technology in hand. Ideators and writers like Asimov found solutions. In Caves of Steel (1954), Isaac Asimov had humanity move underground to survive unfriendly surface conditions. He created a huge city underground for humanity while some moved into other planets. Perhaps, the time has come for us to think out of the box. And that is what we hope all of you will join to do in Borderless.
September has thrown up varied content. We have non-fiction which reflects on how changes are a part of human lore and how diverse cultures can co-exist to enrich each other. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri dwells on this idea while talking of Nazrul’s approach to the Persian Ghazal. He writes, the poet through his adaptation of this form “showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before.” And perhaps from that largeness of thought will emerge a one-world community — that Yatish Kumar S espouses. Maybe from people who think beyond borders, we will find the solution to tackling and adapting to climate change. We have an essay from Charudutta Panigrahi where he attempts to arouse the survival instinct in humans. Young Shruti Keskar writes of how she finds a new lease to life by accepting and adapting to changes while Farouk Guslara philosophises on living and possessions. We have Meredith Stephens adding to the vivacity of non-fiction with a recount of her sailing adventures with wonderful photographs by Alan Noble. And Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in sardonic humour with his piece on art and artists.
A story-poem by Tagore, Swopno (Dream), has also been brought to us in English. An interesting memoir by Kallol Lahiri centring around his childhood in Bengal has been translated by V Ramaswamy. Translations offer fiction from Isa Kamari. He has transcribed in English the second chapter of his Malay novel, The Throne. The novel focussing on psychological torment is being serialised in Borderless.
Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a rare book-centric memoir by Shanta Gokhale. He tells us, “Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Booksis an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books.” Meenakshi Malhotra has discussed the renowned historian Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being, a book that reflects not only her own journey but the freedom and outreach that privilege and capability can bestow on women in South Asia. On the other hand, Mudassar Javed Baryar refers to the plight of birongonas, war time widows during the 1971 conflict that birthed Bangladesh, while discussing Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines. He reflects: “Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their ‘humanity, resilience and heart’, depicting them as ‘architects of family and community’.” Somdatta Mandal has praised Omair Ahmad’s novel, Homecoming.
We have also featured Kanuprya Dhingra, who has written a book on a unique book bazaar. In a candid exchange, she tells us her non-fiction, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, “is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible…the book is for everyone.” It’s an interesting read almost inviting you to stroll into the serendipitous democratic reading space full of local colour and stories.
We would like to thank not only Dhingra but all our contributors for their wonderful work. Huge thanks to the fabulous Borderless team for their input and to Sohana Manzoor for her artwork. Thank you all — without all of you and our wonderful readers, it would be difficult to have a journal. In the spirit of ubuntu, heartfelt thanks.
Do pause by our September content’s page. And let’s look forward to the hope for happier climes and times.
A love letter to a species that forgot how tall it is by Charudutta Panigrahi
Sistine Chapel. From Public Domain
Somewhere between the first fire and the latest headline, we became the only species that brews its own storm and then complains about the weather.
Look at us. We are astonishing. We split the atom and, with equal aplomb, the family. We decode genomes and each other’s silences. We send a whisper across an ocean in less time than it takes a sigh to leave the chest. And yet, with the very hands that composed the Gita, the sonnets, and the Sistine ceiling, we stir — daily, diligently, almost devotionally — a cauldron of our own making: wars nobody’s grandmother asked for, greed that eats its own children, corruptions dressed as cleverness and efficiencies, cruelties small enough to fit in a comment box and large enough to empty a city. We stoke it. We season it. We simmer in it. And then we tilt our faces to the heavens and ask why life tastes bitter. The other alternative is also given to us, the one to grow vertical to the depth of the spirits, but we prove ‘small’ for that.
The heavens, one imagines, are sorely tempted to echo: taste what you cooked.
Consider the arithmetic of our existence. Stars had to die to donate calcium to our bones; the iron in our blood was forged in the furnace of a supernova; fourteen billion years of cosmic labour conspired to produce this morning’s cup of tea and the warm hand that holds it. Every breath we draw is a loan from a forest. Every heartbeat is an unearned instalment of wonder — roughly a hundred thousand of them a day, delivered free, no invoice attached. Such is the scale of endowment. Life was not achieved by us. It was bestowed upon us, wrapped in dawn, ribboned with birdsong, and signed by something far larger than our petty and fiendish squabbles.
And what do we do with the bestowal? We belittle it. This is our quietest crime. We shrink the miracle until it fits our mood. We measure our irreplaceable days against a neighbour’s car or her flat. We scroll past sunrises to study the grievances of strangers. We audit our blessings for defects, wear cynicism as if it were sophistication, and treat wonder as something to be outgrown, like milk teeth. The modern mind has become a connoisseur of complaint — exquisite palate, terrible diet. Ingratitude, practised daily, hardens into a philosophy; and a philosophy of ingratitude is just despair wearing reading glasses.
So the cauldron is not made of crimes alone. It is made of shrugs, of eye-rolls, of the ten thousand small refusals to be amazed — more than refusals, obstinate boorishness and appalling stupidity. But here is the thing about cauldrons, the clause the fine print forgot: they have no lids. Nothing seals us in but habit. The exit has always been vertical. The pressure cooker too releases vertical.
The East has known this forever and pressed it into a single flower. The lotus does not rise despite the mud; it rises because of it. The muck is not its shame but its syllabus — every rotting thing at the bottom of the pond becomes fuel for the bloom at the top. The lotus performs, each morning, the most subversive act in nature: it converts filth into fragrance and never once looks embarrassed about its address. The mud, it turns out, was never meant to be a destiny.
And nature, patient teacher that she is, keeps modelling the ascent for us, hoping we will finally take notes. The dawn does not sulk about the night; it simply outgrows it. The monsoon rises from the very sea it once fell into, and returns as a blessing to the fields. Sap climbs a hundred feet of deodar against gravity’s explicit objection. So does the pepper on coffee in Araku. The lark does not check the news before singing. Even the humble kite — that poor man’s aircraft dancing over our terraces — knows the secret: it soars highest when the wind is against it, and only because a faithful string holds it to the earth — rootedness below, audacity above. Everything alive is quietly voting for altitude. Everything, that is, except its most gifted resident — who was engineered for it most of all. Remember your own architecture. The spine was our first cathedral, raised vertebra by vertebra over millennia, from crawl to stride to stargaze. The eyes were installed near the crown, not the heels; the anatomical memo could not be clearer. We look up to pray, up when we hope, up when we love. Rumi wondered why we crawl through life when we were born with wings; one suspects the answer is that crawling asks nothing of us, while wings come with a terrifying clause — use them.
Let us be precise, though, about what rising means, for it is not escape. Rising above the cauldron is not fleeing the kitchen; it is refusing to let the broth name you. It is the widow who plants a garden in her grief. It is the clerk who will not sign the crooked file though the crooked file pays better. It is the child in a torn uniform walking six kilometres to school, carrying the entire future of her village in a second-hand bag. It is choosing, in an age that monetises outrage, the unfashionable luxuries of forgiveness, patience, and awe. History confirms the pattern with almost monotonous kindness: after every darkness we brewed, something great happened. After every collapsed empire, a mother somewhere rebuild her world with two hands and a hymn. Falling is our habit; rising is our signature. We are, for all our sins, the species of the second chance.
And rising is contagious — this is its loveliest property. One person standing tall makes it easier for the next spine to remember itself. Courage, like fragrance, cannot be contained by the flower that made it. A single lamp does not curse the darkness of the whole room; it simply makes the darkness irrelevant, one radius at a time. Behaviour becomes practice, practice becomes culture, culture becomes civilisation. The road from one lifted chin to a lifted age is shorter than we think. It is walkable. It begins at the neck.
So rise. Rise, you magnificent mess of stardust and stubbornness. Rise above the grudge you have been marinating like a family heirloom. Rise above the pettiness that fits so comfortably it feels like a personality. Rise above the cruelty you scroll past, the corruption you call “the system,” the cynicism you call “realism,” the smallness you call “just how I am.” Rise above the cauldron — not around it, not in polite denial of it, but clean above it, the way the lotus files its daily appeal against the mud and wins, every single morning, without a lawyer.
This life — improbable, unrepeatable, outrageously beautiful — was not bestowed upon us to be belittled in instalments. The stars paid for your bones in full. The least we owe them is posture.
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Charudutta Panigrahi is a thinker and an author. He is a lifelong seeker mapping the ascent of the human spirit through word and work.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Charudutta Panigrahi introduces us to to the eighteenth century literary giant, Upendra Bhanja, who gave up his crown for the love of words. Click here to read.
Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan highlights the contemporariness of Sangam Literature with discussion about a narrative based on trust and power politics. Click hereto read.
There are poets who are born, poets who are made, and then there is the rare being who is handed a crown and quietly sets it down to pick up a stylus instead. Upendra Bhanja (c. 1670–1740) belongs to that almost mythic third category. Born into the ruling Bhanja house of Ghumsar — a princely state in the hills of southern Odisha, near the town that today bears the dynasty’s name, Bhanjanagar — he was a prince by blood and an emperor by acclamation. But the empire he chose to rule was not made of land, revenue, or armies. It was made of language. Posterity remembered the choice by giving him a title no battlefield could confer: Kabi Samrata, the Emperor of Poets.
The Bhanjas of Ghumsar were not strangers to the muse. Upendra’s grandfather, King Dhananjaya Bhanja, was himself a poet of distinction who composed a Raghunatha Bilasa[1] and the romance Ratna Manjari[2], leaving the boy a literary inheritance as real as any treasury. Yet where Dhananjaya wore both crowns — ruler and writer — Upendra made a decision that defines him. Born into a royal family, he never reached for the throne. He gave his entire life to poetry rather than to governing a kingdom.
Read that again, because it is the hinge on which his greatness turns. In an age when kingship was the highest ambition a man could hold, when wars were waged for a few miles of forest, a prince looked at the apparatus of power and found it smaller than a perfectly turned verse. This is not eccentricity. It is a radical reordering of values — a man declaring that the imagination outranks the sceptre. He even signed his early work not as a king but as Birabara, “the brave one”, the courage in question being aesthetic rather than military. The maverick was visible from the first line he ever wrote.
What separates a fine poet from a phenomenon is not feeling alone — feeling is the common inheritance of all poets. What separates Upendra Bhanja is the sheer, audacious engineering of his art. He belonged to the Riti Yuga, the ornate age of Odia literature, but he did not merely participate in it; he became its summit, so completely that the period is sometimes simply called the Bhanja Juga, the Age of Bhanja.
Consider his masterpiece, the Baidehisha Bilasa, his retelling of the Ramayana. The entire epic is composed under a self-imposed law of staggering difficulty: every single line begins with the syllable “ba.” The work is divided into fifty-two cantos, and even the verse-counts of those cantos are chosen so they carry the “ba” sound — bais (twenty-two), batisi (thirty-two), and so on. An entire sacred epic, hundreds upon hundreds of lines, marching to a single phonetic drumbeat without once stumbling into nonsense or losing its emotional fire.
And this was not a one-time stunt. He did it again, and again, as if the impossible were merely a daily exercise. Subhadra Parinaya takes “sa” for its governing initial. Kala Koutuka takes “ka.” Damayanti Bilasa runs on “da,” Padmabati Parinaya on “pa,” Satisha Bilasa on “sa.” He treated the most punishing constraints in world literature the way a master musician treats a difficult raga — not as a cage but as the very source of beauty. This is lateral thinking in its purest poetic form: the discovery that limitation, deliberately embraced, can generate freedom and surprise rather than smother them. The French Oulipo movement of the twentieth century — Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and others — built an entire celebrated avant-garde around exactly this principle of “constrained writing.” Upendra Bhanja had been doing it, at epic scale and with devotional grandeur, three hundred years earlier, in a hill kingdom of eastern India.
If the syllabic constraints reveal his discipline, his Chitra Kavya[3] reveals his outright wizardry. Upendra Bhanja composed an entire treatise on it, the Chitra Kavya Bandhodaya, and laced examples through his other works. In this form — bandha, meaning “binding” or “design” — the poet arranges the letters of his verse so that, written out, they form a recognizable picture: a tree, a mace, a chariot, a serpent, a sheaf of arrows, a wheel. The astonishing part is the double burden the poet accepts. The letters must form the shape, and the same letters, read in their proper sequence, must form a poem that carries genuine meaning. Word and image are forced to be true to each other at once.
This is concrete poetry, pattern poetry, visual literature — the very thing that Western modernists would later treat as a daring twentieth-century experiment — accomplished in Odia centuries before, and not as decoration but as a recognised branch of high art. To do it once is clever. To codify it into a system and deploy serpents, chariots and wheels of living verse is the work of a mind operating on a plane the rest of us can only squint at.
His verbal play did not stop at shape. He was a master of shlesha, the art of double meaning, building lines and even whole passages capable of yielding more than one interpretation depending on how the syllables are parsed — a single string of sound concealing two stories. He commanded all nine rasas of classical aesthetic theory, weaving the erotic, the heroic, the compassionate and the serene through narratives like Lavanyabati and Koti Brahmanda Sundari, romances of princes and princesses whose love is rendered with a sensuous, jewelled intensity. And as if poetry were not enough, he is credited with compiling the Gita Abhidhana, regarded as the first dictionary in the Odia language — the poet doubling as the first systematic guardian of his tongue’s vocabulary. Tradition celebrates him for feats so extreme they sound like legend: epics shaped as palindromes, retellings managed under near-unthinkable phonetic restrictions. Whatever one accepts of the more dramatic claims, the documented body of work alone places him among the most technically dazzling poets in any language on earth.
The kind of mind that can run an epic on a single syllable, that can make letters stand up as chariots and still sing, that can fold two meanings into one breath of sound — that is a contribution to the universal record of human creativity. He sits naturally beside the most inventive formal artists the world has produced. For roughly two centuries his style was the gold standard against which elite Odia poetry measured itself, and his songs travelled into the very grammar of Odissi music. A labourer on a village road and a dancer in a royal courtyard could both carry his lines — a reach across class and circumstance that is the surest sign of a true national treasure.
He is revered, finally, not only for what he made but for what he refused. He refused the easier glory of the throne. He refused the lazy path of plain narration when the labyrinthine one was available. He insisted that the Odia language could do anything Sanskrit could, and then proved it. That insistence is an act of cultural self-respect that belongs to the whole country’s story of finding its voice.
Folio depicting scene from Lavanyavati by Upendra Bhanja by an unknown artist from the early 19th century in, now in Chazen Museum of Art, Madison. From Public Domain
A word, then, on the soil that produced this phenomenon. Ghumsar, the seat of the Bhanja kings, lay in the wooded uplands near present-day Bhanjanagar in Ganjam district. It is a place worth knowing for more than one reason — for it was also the site of one of the earliest and most stubborn armed resistances to British colonialism.
The story of “the first war of independence” is told in textbooks as beginning in 1857. Yet the hills of Ghumsar were already aflame against the East India Company a full century earlier. When the British asserted control over the region from the 1760s, they demanded heavy tribute from the Bhanja rulers, and the rulers — backed by the formidable Kondh tribal Paiks who regarded the Bhanja Rajas as their protectors — refused to be tamed. The resulting struggle was not a single revolt but a chain of uprisings sustained, by documented accounts, from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1860s. The most decisive flare-up, the “Goomsur Campaign” of 1835–36, saw the Madras Native Infantry deployed against the Kondhs and their chiefs before the state was finally annexed. Resistance did not die even then: leaders such as Dora Bissoi and, after him, Chakra Bissoi kept the cause of the Bhanja line alive against the colonial administration for decades more
To call it, without qualification, the first mutiny in all of India would overstate a contested record; rebellions flared in Bengal, Bihar, Banaras and the tribal Jungle Mahals across the same long century. But to say that Ghumsar was among the very earliest theatres of organised, sustained armed defiance of the Company is simple, documented fact. The land that gave India its Emperor of Poets also gave it some of its earliest rebels. There is a fitting symmetry in that: the same soil bred both the courage to resist an empire and the genius to build one out of nothing but words.
[1] Odiya retelling of Ramayana written in the seventeenth century
Summer, Dune in Zeeland by Piet Mondrain (1872 – 1944)
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941) by TS Eliot
If we look back in time, we have a better life than that of our ancestors. Though conflicts rage and climate change is a reality that we all dread, it can safely be said, we have progressed beyond the imagination of those who lived a hundred years ago. The fact that some books from the past still reverberate with echoes of what the present holds says much for the outliers or authors who could think out of the box. Despite this complex intermingling of ideas and times, perhaps the world will change more now than before. We do not know anything for sure though experts are always predicting a future that for most of us remains unknown. What we can present is our own estimate of what can be and a definite assertion of what is. Truth as such is a matter of perception. That complicates it further. However, one of the changes that is definitely here to stay is climate change and our changing environment. Given that this is the month that homes World Environment Day, we have a smattering of writings that revolve around nature and also the human spirit that defies age.
We have featured a writer who revels in nature and is an ageless voice that bridges multiple cultures, Ruskin Bond. As he turned ninety-two last month, he published multiple new books. We have an excerpt from one of them, Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, a brilliant collection of snapshots of his interactions with nature over time — be it frogs, snakes or just trees. Some of the vignettes are humorous and some, as all classics are, thought provoking. Bond puts into words how he chose to work in Landour (a small town in Himalayas) and continued to write from there for sixty years. He talks of the spell the mountains cast on him, “I like to think that I have become a part of this Magic Mountain; that by living here for so long, I can claim a relationship with the trees, wild flowers, even the rocks that are an integral part of this landscape.” The other book excerpt is a contrast to Bond’s, a non-fiction called Burnout Highway by Anmol Diddan. It explores the collective suffering of stress at work where achievements distance humans from nature and a fulfilling life and urges readers to be open to changes.
In keeping with the theme of environment, Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Stephen Alter’s The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon. He tells us: “The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging… Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact…” While Rakhi Dalal expresses her delight with Shyam Manohar’s The Cold War of Sadanand Borse, a novella translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto, Meenakshi Malhotra revels in Giti Chandra’s debut book of poems, Setting Traps for Light.
In translations, Professor Fakrul Alam has captured the flavours of Nazrul’s Bengali lyrics, which also echo of the rainy season or monsoons. Isa Kamari brings to us more of his Malay poems in English and Ihlwha Choi shares a rendering of his Korean poem, ‘Dragonfly 2’, into English. One of Tagore’s poems from Balaka (Flight of the Cranes, 1916) has found its way into this issue after being translated. We also have a touching Balochi story around social gaps from the late Abdul Qayum Sarbazi, brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch.
Hughes has continued sharing his short fables, which are absurd but also, comical! A sensitive story about the natural world mingled with Maori concepts by Keiran Martin seems so much in sync with the oceans while Jeena R Papaadi has woven a strange narrative located in a land that only one man could visit. Plamen Vasilev shares a human-interest story set in Europe and Rabiya Rehman takes us to Lahore in quest of a missing destination! Naramsetti Umamaheswararao’s narrative takes us back to a village that opted for trees, thus enriching the environmental lore in this issue.
We have a real life heart rending story from a young girl in our Pandies Corner, written and related by Deeksha Vats, based on the story told by a victim of familial violations and violence.
Our non-fiction section homes Larry Su’s essay on how his life took him from a rural mud cave in Shaanxi province to the glamour of Chicago. Reflecting on the changes he has experienced on his rare visits to his original homeland, Su muses on the cultural and socio-economic gaps he has observed between the two places. Charudutta Panigrahi – as if in direct opposition — shares similarities between two diverse geographies.
Suzanne Kamata explores a custom which may not be that eco-friendly in her column from Japan. Jun A. Alindogan brings home the impact of climate disasters while dwelling on blessings with his narrative about a narrow escape from the Typhoon Ondoy (2009). While Meredith Stephen writes of sailing to Timor Sea with photographs by Alan Noble, Farouk Gulsara takes us on a cycling adventure around the mountains of Titiwangsa. In another musing, he also explores the idea of good and evil in a sardonic tone while Sai Abhinay Penna dwells on the grandeur and vastness of the universe over his morning jog. Gowher Bhat writes of a man for whom age seems to be just a number as he publishes his debut book at 93! One wonders at the frequency of such occurrences — we have writings about two authors above ninety in the June issue. In contrast, Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in mortal fears while writing of visiting doctors with a soupçon of humour – some of it directed at himself.
Perhaps, laughter is really the best medicine to keep well! Ruskin Bond makes us laugh and writes of nature in a way that touches hearts and makes us forget the contrasting glitzy world, where we suffer stress and burnout. Our environment makes a difference, doesn’t it?
With that we wrap up our June issue. Huge thanks to our fabulous team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. To all our contributors, heartfelt thanks — we are because you are. And gratitude to our readers who make it worth our while to write and publish here.
We will next meet you during the monsoon months of South Asia though, near the equator, it rains almost every day and, in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be peak winter!
There is a cartographic trick that India plays on the careless observer. Place a finger on Goa, cradled in the lap of the Western Ghats where the Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. Now drag that finger clean across the peninsula — past the Deccan plateau, past the red laterite and the black cotton soil — until it arrives at Odisha, where the Mahanadi fans into the Bay of Bengal. The distance is vast. The terrain changes several times over. And yet, when you finally arrive, you feel, inexplicably, that you have not travelled at all. You have merely walked from one room of the same house into another.
Goa and Odisha are India’s fraternal twins, stationed like sentinels on opposite coasts, facing outward toward different oceans but turning inward toward an almost identical soul. They share no border, no common neighbour, no obvious historical corridor. And yet their resemblances are so startling, so layered, that they make a quiet mockery of the assumption that east and west shall never meet. In this country, at least, they have been meeting all along.
The Plate That Speaks First
Begin where all honest cultural inquiry must begin — at the table. In both Goa and Odisha, the grammar of a meal is written in two words: rice and fish. The xitt-kodi of a Goan Catholic household — rice with fish curry — is a mirror image of the bhata-machha that anchors every Odia thali. The curry leaves may change, the tamarind may yield to kokum, but the fundamental covenant between grain and sea remains unbroken.
Both states worship the coconut with equal fervour. It thickens their gravies, sweetens their desserts, oils their hair, and thatches their roofs. And in both places, the humble samosa — that deep-fried triangle of spiced potato — enjoys a curious and disproportionate celebrity, sold at every bus stand, every temple gate, every rain-drenched evening stall, as if it were the official snack of the coastline itself.
Weavers of Light
If food is the first language, cloth is the second. Odisha’s handloom tradition is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Sambalpuri ikat, with its geometric precision born of a tie-and-dye technique older than memory, is a textile that calculates like mathematics and sings like poetry. The Bomkai of Ganjam, the Kotpad of Koraput — each weave carries a district’s autobiography in its warp and weft.
Goa’s handloom heritage is no less poignant. The Kunbi saree, woven by the indigenous Kunbi community in checks of red and maroon, is a garment of earthy defiance — a refusal to vanish beneath the weight of colonial and commercial textile culture. In both states, the handloom is not an industry. It is an act of inheritance.
The handicraft traditions run parallel with uncanny symmetry. Odisha’s Pattachitra — those luminous scroll paintings rendered on cloth with pigments drawn from stone, earth, and lamp-black — find a philosophical cousin in Goa’s azulejos-inspired tile art and the painted terracotta work of its hinterlands. Odisha’s silver filigree from Cuttack, those impossibly intricate webs of metal that seem to have been spun by patient spiders, speak the same aesthetic dialect as the filigree and brass work of Goan artisans.
Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse
Both states are drenched in divinity. Odisha shelters the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose Rath Yatra rolls through the world’s imagination every year, and the Konark Sun Temple, a stone chariot frozen mid-gallop toward the dawn. The Lingaraj Temple of Bhubaneswar presides over a city that was once a forest of a thousand shrines. Goa, often misread as merely a beach destination, guards some of the oldest Hindu temples in western India — the Mangeshi Temple, the Shanta Durga Temple, the Mahalasa Narayani, the Tambdi Surla — alongside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in baroque silence. In both states, the sacred is not a Sunday affair. It is the air.
And then there is the pace. Both Goa and Odisha move at a tempo that the hyperventilating metros of India find baffling. The Goan susegad — that philosophy of contented ease — is a first cousin of the unhurried dignity with which Odisha conducts its daily life. Long before the global “slow living” movement became a wellness-industry buzzword, these two states had been practising it for centuries, not as aspiration but as instinct.
Songs in Different Scales
The musical traditions reveal yet another layer of kinship. Odisha gave the world Odissi — both the dance and the music — a classical tradition of astonishing fluidity, shaped by poets like Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda remains one of the supreme lyric achievements in any language. The folk traditions — Dalkhai, Gotipua, the tribal Dhemsa — pulse with a rhythmic vitality that no concert hall can contain.
Goa’s musical soul lives in the Mando, a slow, swaying ballad of love and longing born from the encounter between Konkani sensibility and Portuguese fado. The Dulpod, faster and more festive, is its playful sibling. And beneath the tourist-facing trance and EDM, Goa’s folk traditions — Fugdi, Dhalo, Dekhni — carry the same rooted, communal energy that Odisha’s village squares have known for generations.
Goa’s Tiatr and Odisha’s Jatra are born of the same impulse — raucous, deeply local theatre traditions that turn village squares into stages, blend music with social satire, and have for generations served as the people’s newspaper, courtroom, and concert hall rolled into one.
The Literary Mirror
The literary parallels are quietly profound. Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia literature, wrote Chha Mana Atha Guntha — a searing, ironic novella about land, power, and peasant dispossession — in the 1890s. Across the map, Goa’s literary tradition in Konkani, shaped by figures like Bakibab Borkar (the poet-laureate of Konkani verse), Ravindra Kelekar, and Damodar Mauzo, has grappled with similar themes of identity, colonial memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Odisha’s Pratibha Ray and Goa’s Mauzo — both Jnanpith laureates — wrote in languages the literary mainstream often overlooks, yet carved from Odia and Konkani respectively a body of work so luminous that the nation’s highest literary honour had no choice but to find its way to their doors. Both literatures are enormous in depth and criminally under-read outside their states.
Even the economies rhyme. Both states sit on vast mineral wealth — iron ore in Goa, iron ore, bauxite and coal in Odisha — and both have built significant chapters of their economic story on extraction. Mining has been, for decades, a genuine engine of revenue and employment. But prosperity extracted from the earth exacts its own price. Both states have watched hills reshaped and rivers thickened with slurry, and both have grappled with the same difficult question that every resource-rich society must eventually face: where does sustainable use end and irreversible damage begin? The Dongria Kondh resistance in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills and Goa’s prolonged civic movement against unregulated mining are stories of communities recognising that the wealth beneath their feet should not come at the cost of the world above it. In both states, the mandate is the same: to mine responsibly, restore what can be restored, and find an economic imagination that honours both the ledger and the landscape.
Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging
The buildings of Goa and Odisha could not, at first glance, look more different. Odisha’s architectural glory resides in the Kalinga style of temple building — a tradition that flowered between the sixth and thirteenth centuries and produced some of the most breathtaking sacred structures on the subcontinent. The Rekha Deula, with its curvilinear tower soaring heavenward, the Pidha Deula, with its stepped pyramid, and the barrel-vaulted Khakhara Deula — each is a masterclass in proportion, carved from sandstone and laterite without a drop of mortar, held together by iron dowels and the sheer precision of stone cut to stone. The Lingaraj Temple rises a hundred and eighty feet; the Sun Temple at Konark was conceived as a stone chariot for Surya himself.
Goa’s architectural signature, meanwhile, is the Indo-Portuguese house — the balcão-fronted villa with its oyster-shell windows, its Baroque churches, its colour-washed facades in ochre and cerulean and terracotta. Where Odisha built upward in devotion, Goa built outward in conviviality.
And yet the kinship runs deeper than surface style. Both traditions are rooted in laterite — that rust-red, iron-rich stone quarried from the earth itself — and in an instinctive dialogue between structure and climate. Goan houses, whether Hindu or Catholic, were designed around the monsoon: thick laterite walls to absorb the heat, sloping roofs of Mangalore tile to shed the deluge, courtyards to channel light and air. The traditional Hindu house in Goa, with its rajangan (courtyard) and its Tulasi Vrindavan (holy basil) at its centre, is an inward-looking sanctuary not unlike the courtyard homes of rural Odisha, where domestic life orbits an open-air heart and thatched or tiled roofs slope against the same seasonal fury. In both states, the house is not merely shelter. It is a cosmology — oriented by Vastu[1], shaped by rain, and built from the very ground on which it stands.
The Sacred as Daily Bread
Spirituality in Goa and Odisha is not a compartment of life; it is the wallpaper. In Odisha, they say Bara Masa re Tera Parba — thirteen festivals in twelve months — and this is not hyperbole but arithmetic. From Rath Yatra to Raja Parba, from Nuakhai to Kumar Purnima, the Odia calendar is a procession of devotion, agriculture, and communal joy so tightly woven that one cannot tell where worship ends and daily life begins. The festivals are tied to the rice cycle — seeding, sowing, harvesting — so that the act of farming itself becomes a prayer. Odisha is a land where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have coexisted and cross-pollinated for millennia, leaving behind the cave monasteries of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, the Buddhist stupas of Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri, and the Shakti temples that dot the landscape like exclamation marks of feminine divinity.
Goa answers with its own brand of sacred pluralism. Here, Hindus light candles at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Catholics offer prayers at the Shantadurga temple at Fatorpa. The feast of Our Lady of Miracles gathers both communities under the same roof, exchanging oil and candles between church and temple as naturally as neighbours exchange sugar. The Zagor celebrations and the Shigmo festival are not Hindu events attended by Christians out of politeness; they are Goan events, full stop. In both states, religion is not a doctrine to be debated but a rhythm to be lived — embedded in the morning’s first lamp, the evening’s last bell, and every meal served between.
The Farmer and the Monsoon
Rice is not merely the staple food of Goa and Odisha; it is the organising principle of their rural civilisations. In Odisha, paddy covers nearly seventy per cent of cultivated land, and the entire social calendar revolves around its seasons — Akshaya Tritiya marks the seeding, Raja Sankranti the completion of sowing, Nuakhai the first tasting of the new harvest. The traditional beushening method — broadcasting seed and then tilling post-emergence — speaks of a farming intelligence shaped by centuries of reading the monsoon, the soil, and the floodplain.
In Goa, the ingenuity takes another form: the Khazan system, an ancient network of bunds and sluice gates that reclaim low-lying coastal land from the tides, allowing farmers to cultivate salt-tolerant rice varieties and rear fish and prawns in the same fields. It is an act of ecological engineering so elegant that modern agronomists study it as a model of sustainable land use.
Both states grow coconut, cashew, and areca nut alongside their paddy. Both rely overwhelmingly on the monsoon — Odisha’s irrigation covers barely a third of its cultivable land, and much of Goa’s paddy is rainfed. Both are lands of small and marginal farmers, where the average holding is modest and the relationship between cultivator and earth is intimate, personal, and unmediated by large-scale mechanisation. And in both states, a quiet revolution is underway: Odisha’s Millets Mission and Goa’s growing organic farming movement are attempts to reclaim indigenous crop diversity from the grip of high-yield monoculture — to remember that the land, like the people, thrives best when it is allowed its full vocabulary.
The Playing Field
In a nation drunk on cricket, Goa and Odisha are the two states that have had the audacity to fall in love with other sports. Goa is India’s football heartland. The game arrived with an Irish priest in 1883 and never left. Clubs like Salgaocar, Dempo, and Churchill Brothers have won national titles; six Goans have captained the Indian football team. During the FIFA World Cup, Goan streets erupt into a carnival of flags and giant screens, and the village tournament — barefoot boys on a laterite pitch — remains as sacred as Sunday Mass. Football in Goa is not a sport. It is an identity.
Odisha’s sporting soul beats to a different drum — the hockey stick. The state has produced legends like Dilip Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Sunita Lakra, and Deep Grace Ekka, and became the first state government in India to sponsor the national hockey team. The Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, which hosted the 2023 World Cup, is a monument to Odisha’s commitment. But what unites both states is not the particular sport but the underlying defiance: a refusal to accept cricket’s monopoly on the Indian sporting imagination.
Both states also share a love for traditional and community games — Kho Kho and Kabaddi[2] are played at village festivals in both, and both have ISL football franchises (FC Goa and Odisha FC) that draw passionate, roaring crowds. The playing field, it turns out, is yet another room in the same house.
Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology
The ecological parallels between these two states are no less striking. Both are coastal, riverine, and monsoon-fed. Both shelter significant mangrove ecosystems — the Khazan mangroves along Goa’s estuaries and the Bhitarkanika mangrove forests of Odisha, one of the largest in India. Both are biodiversity hotspots: Goa’s Western Ghats forests are a UNESCO heritage site, while Odisha’s Simlipal and Satkosia reserves harbour tiger, elephant, and crocodile populations of national importance. The Olive Ridley sea turtles that nest on Odisha’s Gahirmatha beach have cousins that occasionally visit Goa’s Morjim. Both states understand, in their bones, that the sea is not merely a border but a livelihood, a deity, and a defining force — and that the mangrove, the estuary, and the fishing village are not the periphery of civilisation but its very foundation.
And then there is the matter of diaspora. Both Goa and Odisha are states whose people have scattered across the world yet remain fiercely tethered to home. The Goan communities of Bombay, the Gulf, the UK and Lisbon mirror the Odia communities of US, Europe, Surat, Hyderabad, and beyond. In both cases, the expatriate carries the cuisine, the festival calendar, and the mother tongue like a portable homeland — and returns, without fail, for the annual feast or the harvest celebration, as though the umbilical cord to the village were made not of flesh but of something altogether more durable.
Goa and Odisha do not need a bridge between them. They already are the bridge — two ends of a single cultural arc that bends across the Indian landmass, proving that civilisational kinship does not require geographical proximity. They are proof that identity in India is not merely a function of latitude and longitude but of something deeper: a shared covenant with the sea, with rice, with the loom, with the slow and sacred act of living.
If India is a house with many rooms, these two states are the twin balconies — one facing the sunset, the other the sunrise — built from the same stone, painted in the same light, listening to the same tide.
East and West do not merely meet here. They embrace.
[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne…
The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) by Chaucer, Prologue
This is the month Asia hosts sprays of new years across multiple regions. Many of these celebrate the fecundity of Earth, spring and the departure of bleak winter months. Each new year is filled with hope for the coming year. The vibrant colours of varied cultures celebrate spring in different ways, but it is a welcome for the new-born year, a jubilation, a reaffirmation of the continuity of the circle of life. Will the wars, especially the shortages caused by them and felt deeply by many of us, affect these celebrations? Had they impacted the festivals that were celebrated earlier? These are questions to which we all seek answers. We can only try to gauge the suffering caused by war on those whose homes, hopes, families and assets have been affected other than trying to cope with the senselessness of such inane attacks. But, in keeping with TS Eliot’s observations on Prufrock, most of us continue our lives unperturbed and as usual.
Some of us think and try to dissent for peace and a world without borders with words – prose or poetry. To reinforce ideas of commonalities that bind overriding divides, we are excited to announce a poetry anthology mapping varied continents with content from Borderless Journal, Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems. We are hugely grateful to Hawakal Publishers for this opportunity and to Bitan Chakraborty for the fabulous cover design. We invite you all to browse on the anthology which is available in hardcopy across continents.
Our issue this month is a bumper issue with the translation of Tagore’s Roktokorobi (Red Oleanders) by Professor Fakrul Alam. It’s the full-length play this time as earlier we had carried only an excerpt. The play is deeply relevant to our times as is Somdatta Mandal’s English rendition of his story, ‘Daliya’, set in Arakan. We also have also translated Tagore’s response to the idea of mortal fame and deification in poetry. Kallol Lahiri’s poignant Bengali story about the resilience of an ageing actress has been brought to us in English by V Ramaswamy. Isa Kamari brings us translations of his Malay poems exploring spirituality through nature.
But what really grips are the fables that Hughes will be sharing with us over four months. He calls them Rhysop Fables, after the ancient ones from Aesop’s with the ancient author himself being mentioned in one of the short absurdist narratives this time. In fiction, our regular fable writer, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao explores a modern-day dilemma, that of social media intruding into the development of children. Jonathon B Ferrini glances at resilience and mental disability while, Sangeetha G looks into societal attitudes that still plague her part of the world. Oindrila Ghosal gives a story set in Kashmir.
From Kashmir, Gower Bhat shares a heartfelt musing on being a first time father. Mohul Bhowmick writes of Eid in Hydearbad (Hari Raya in Southeast Asia) — echoing themes from Kamari’s poems — and Anupriya Pandey ponders over the quiet acceptance of mundane life that emphasises social inequities. Jun A. Alindogan brings home issues from Phillipines. While we have stories about Vietnam from Meredith Stephens, Suzanne Kamata muses about Phnom Penh, mesmerised by Cambodian dancers.
Farouk Gulsara writes of his cycling trip from Jaipur to Udaipur bringing to life dichotomies of values and showing that age can be just a number. Chetan Poduri reinforces gaps created by technology as does Charudutta Panigrah, a theme that reverberates from poetry to fiction to non-fiction and much of it with a light touch. Devraj Singh Kalsi sprinkles humour with his strange tale about hiring a bodyguard.
Keith Lyons has brought in Keith Westwaters, a soldier-turned-poet who seems to find his muse mainly in New Zealand. We have also featured an author who overrides borders of continents, Marzia Pasini. Her book, Leonie’s Leap, has a protagonist of mixed origin and her characters are drawn out of Russia, India, Bulgaria and many other places.
This rounds up our April issue. Do visit our content’s page and explore the journal further.
Huge thanks to the wonderful team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her art. They help bring together the colours of the world to our pages. Huge thanks to contributors who make each issue evolve a personality of its own. And heartfelt thanks to readers who make it worth our while to write.
We are the most connected generation in human history. Is this why does leaving feel so utterly weightless?
There was a ritual. I still remember it distinctly. You probably remember it, or your parents do. The last morning of a visit — to a grandparent’s house, a village cousin’s home, an uncle’s rambling bungalow where the ceiling fans whirred through long afternoons — had a particular texture. Trunks or suitcases were latched. Strolleys hadn’t arrived yet or were on their early novelty days. Bags were piled by the door. And then, invariably, someone wept.
Not a little polite sniffle. Real tears. The kind that came from a grandmother pressing your face into her sari one more time, or an aunt who had spent a week feeding you as though you might never eat again, standing at the gate long after the rickshaw (autorickshaws were not common) or the personal car (Ambassador or Fiat[1] depending on the size of the family mostly) had turned the corner. You waved until you could no longer see her. She stood there until she could no longer see you. That was the goodbye.
Try to find that scene today. Go ahead. You won’t.
Today, the goodbye is punctuated not by tears but by the brisk choreography of the in numerous selfies.
Phones are raised, filters applied in real time, expressions arranged for maximum glow. The image is uploaded before the car has reversed out of the driveway. The caption reads: Such a beautiful time with family. So blessed. Heart emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji and a few ummahs thrown in. Thirty-seven likes in the first eight minutes. Nobody cried. Nobody needed to. You’re already on a group chat together.
The old goodbye made sense in its economic context. Distance, in those decades, was not merely geographical — it was temporal. A cousin who lived two states away or a city even in the same state was, in practical terms, a person you saw once a year, twice if there was a wedding or a funeral nudging the universe into action. Letters arrived weeks after they were written, sometimes smelling faintly of the sender’s home. Trunk calls were events, scheduled and anxious and too expensive to linger over. When you left, you genuinely did not know when you would next sit in the same room.
So the tears made sense. They were a rational response to real absence. Grief, after all, is the tax we pay on love, and those goodbyes had genuine grief in them — not theatrical, not performed, not calibrated for an audience. Just the honest acknowledgement that a period of closeness was ending, and the ending mattered.
WhatsApp changed the mathematics of absence. So did video calls, Instagram, the entire chirping infrastructure of perpetual connectivity. Your cousin in Rayagada is now a voice note away. Your village relatives appear on your screen every Diwali whether you want them to or not. The emotional logic of the old goodbye has been quietly dismantled, brick by brick, by the algorithm’s promise that no one ever really has to leave.
But here is the uncomfortable question: has connection replaced closeness, or merely simulated it? The notifications keep flowing, but something in the texture of relationships has changed. We know more about each other’s lives — the holidays, the promotions, the new kitchen tiles — and feel, perhaps, less. The mystery that once made a reunion electric has been replaced by the tepid familiarity of a continuous feed. When you already know what someone had for breakfast, the surprise of seeing them in person is somewhat diminished.
And then there is the paradox of the modern public display of affection. We live in the golden age of the PDA. Couples announce their anniversaries with slide shows. Families post coordinated outfits for festivals. Friendships are commemorated with “appreciation posts” of baroque emotional intensity. The declarations have never been louder or more frequent. The relationships, statistically, have never been more fragile.
Divorce rates climb. Friendships dissolve over a single inflammatory tweet. Families splinter over WhatsApp forwards. The online performance of devotion seems almost inversely proportional to its durability offline. We have, it seems, confused documentation with feeling, reach with depth, and visibility with love.
There is something almost poignant about this — people posting tribute reels for relationships that are already, privately, ending. The Instagram caption lags behind the reality by about three months. The photograph preserves the illusion the way formaldehyde preserves a specimen: perfectly, and without life.
The old woman weeping at the gate was performing nothing. There was no camera to catch the angle of her grief, no audience to validate it, no metric by which to measure its impact. It existed purely because it was true. That is what made it unbearable and unforgettable in equal measure.
This is not, to be fair, entirely a story of decline. Connectivity has genuine gifts. The grandmother who once waited three weeks for a postcard now receives a video of her grandchild’s first steps within minutes. The cousin separated by continents is present — imperfectly, through a pixelated screen, but present — at the birthday party. Something real is preserved by these tools, even if something else is lost.
And it would be sentimental to pretend that all those old tears were purely authentic. Families are complicated. Some of those goodbyes mixed genuine love with relief. Some of the weeping aunts were also, frankly, exhausting. Nostalgia has a well-known tendency to airbrush the difficult parts.
But what does seem genuinely lost is the cultural permission to let a goodbye mean something. To stand at a gate and feel the weight of separation without reaching for a phone. To let the absence be real, just for a moment, before the notifications begin. The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar — it lives in proximity, in the particular smell of someone’s kitchen, in the specific quality of their silence at the dinner table.
The old goodbye taught us that love has a physical grammar. These things do not transmit over Wi-Fi.
Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is this: we have traded depth for frequency, and we are not entirely sure we got the better deal. The feed is always full. The gate is always empty. And somewhere between the two, a particular kind of tenderness — unrehearsed, unselfconscious, and completely without likes — has quietly slipped away.
No one posted about it. No one noticed it go. Gradual but sudden demise.
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[1] Popular brands of cars in India in the late 1900s and early 2000s
Charudutta Panigrahi is an author. He can be reached at charudutta403@gmail.com.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Six years ago, a few of us got together to bring out the first issue of Borderless Journal. We started as a daily blog and then congealed into a monthly journal offering content that transcends artificial borders to meet with the commonality of felt emotions, celebrating humanity and the Universe. Today as we complete six years of our existence in the clouds, we would like to celebrate with all writers and readers who made our existence a reality. We invite you to savour writings collected over the years that reflect and revel in transcending borders, touching hearts and some even make us laugh while exploring norms.
In this special issue. we can only offer a small sample of writings but you can access many more like these ones at our site…Without further ado, let us harmonise with words. We invite you to lose yourselves in a borderless world in these trying times.
Rebel or ‘Bidrohi’, Nazrul’s signature poem, ‘Bidrohi‘, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Manish Ghatak’s Aagun taader Praan (Fire is their Life) has been translated from Bengali by Indrayudh Sinha. Click here to read.
Tagore’s poem, Tomar Shonkho Dhulay Porey (your conch lies in the dust), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty as ‘The Conch Calls’. Click here to read.
Ihlwha Choi spent some time in Santiniketan and here are poems he wrote in reaction to his observations near the ‘home of R.Tagore’, as he names Santiniketan and the Kobiguru. Click here to read Nandini.
Rituals in the Garden: Marcelo Medone discusses motherhood, aging and loss in this poignant flash fiction from Argentina. Click here to read.
Navigational Error: Luke P.G. Draper explores the impact of pollution with a short compelling narrative. Click here to read.
Henrik’s Journey: Farah Ghuznavi follows a conglomerate of people on board a flight to address issues ranging from Rohingyas to race bias. Click hereto read.
The Magic Staff , a poignant short story about a Rohingya child by Shaheen Akhtar, translated from Bengali by Arifa Ghani Rahman. Click here to read.
A Cat Story : Sohana Manzoor leaves one wondering if the story is about felines or… Clickhere to read.
When West Meets East & Greatness Blooms: Debraj Mookerjee reflects on how syncretism impacts greats like Tagore,Tolstoy, Emerson, Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi and many more. Click here to read.
The Day Michael Jackson Died: A tribute by Julian Matthews to the great talented star who died amidst ignominy and controversy. Click here to read.
Potable Water Crisis & the Sunderbans: Camellia Biswas, a visitor to Sunderbans during the cyclone Alia, turns environmentalist and writes about the potable water issue faced by locals. Click here to read.
My Love for RK Narayan, Rhys Hughes discusses the novels by ths legendary writer from India. Click here to read.
Travels ofDebendranath Tagore: These are travel narratives by Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath Tagore, translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Click here to read.
Baraf Pora (Snowfall): This narrative gives a glimpse of Tagore’s first experience of snowfall in Brighton and published in the Tagore family journal, Balak (Children), has been translated by Somdatta Mandal . Clickhere to read.
The Day of Annihilation: An essay on climate change by Kazi Nazrul Islam has been translated from Bengali by Radha Chakravarty. Clickhereto read.
Reminiscences from a Gallery: The Other Ray: Dolly Narang muses on Satyajit Ray’s world beyond films and shares a note by the maestro and an essay on his art by the eminent artist, Paritosh Sen. Click here to read.
The Bauls of Bengal: Aruna Chakravarti writes of wandering minstrels called bauls and the impact they had on Tagore. Click here to read.
