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Swopno (Dream), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriexplores how Nazrul transformed a Persian musical form into a distinctly Bengali expression of love, devotion and cultural coexistence
Nazrul (1899-1976) teaching Nazrul Sangeet. From Public Domain
The journey of the ghazal into Bengal is, in many ways, the story of India itself: a form travelling across languages, faiths, courts and cultures, losing something of itself at every crossing and acquiring something new in return. Born in Arabic poetry, refined in Persian, transformed in the Hindustani world and eventually absorbed into several Indian languages, the ghazal was never a form that remained untouched by the cultures through which it passed.
In Bengal, its most remarkable transformation came through Kazi Nazrul Islam.
Nazrul did not merely introduce the ghazal into Bengali. He made it feel as though it had always belonged there. That achievement becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that Bengali already possessed a rich and deeply individual musical-literary tradition. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had produced the great poet-composers who came to be remembered collectively as the Panchakabis[1]: Dwijendralal Roy, Rajanikanta Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Atulprasad Sen and, the youngest of them, Nazrul. They wrote their own lyrics and generally composed their own melodies, creating a modern Bengali song tradition that combined literary sophistication with music. Unlike the privileged urban backgrounds of most of his predecessors, however, Nazrul came from poverty and rural Bengal. His childhood and youth exposed him to worlds that the emerging Bengali middle class often experienced as separate: Islamic learning, Persian literature, Hindu mythology, Vaishnava poetry, folk theatre and the songs of rural Bengal. This plurality was not an intellectual position Nazrul adopted later in life. It was the atmosphere in which his imagination was formed.
The ghazal itself had already travelled an extraordinary distance before reaching him. Its origins lay in Arabic poetry, but it acquired much of its classical identity in Persian literature. Persian poets such as Hafiz, Rumi and Saadi gave the form its characteristic world of desire, intoxication, separation, beauty and mystical longing. When the ghazal entered the Indian Subcontinent, it encountered local languages and traditions and changed again. Amir Khusrau and, later, Wali Daccani were among those who helped transform the Persian form into something increasingly Hindustani. In India, the ghazal acquired new vocabularies, new images and new musical possibilities.
At its simplest, the ghazal consists of a series of couplets, each capable of standing independently while being held together by a common metre, rhyme and refrain. Yet the formal structure is only half the story. The real unity of the ghazal is emotional. Its verses circle around longing, often without resolving it. The beloved may be a woman, a man, God, beauty itself, an absent homeland or an impossible ideal. In the Sufi imagination, earthly and divine love can become indistinguishable.
That ambiguity was perfectly suited to Nazrul.
Bengal had experimented with the form before him. Atulprasad Sen is generally credited with the first substantial Bengali experiments with the ghazal. But Nazrul took the experiment much further, turning it into a popular musical form. He did not approach the ghazal merely as a literary structure to be reproduced in another language. He understood that it had to be made to breathe in Bengali.
His preparation for this was unusually rich. He learnt Urdu from his uncle Bazle Kareem and encountered Persian more deeply during his years with the Bengal Regiment in Karachi, where he studied the language with a Punjabi maulavi. He read Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Hafiz, and the attraction was immediate. The Persian poets gave him a vocabulary of intoxication, rebellion, sensuality and mystical desire that seemed to correspond naturally with his own temperament. In the early 1920s, he translated and adapted Persian and Urdu material into Bengali. But it was towards the end of the decade, with greater maturity as both poet and composer, that he began creating original Bengali ghazals in earnest. These compositions were published with musical notation and eventually travelled through gramophone records and radio.
That technological development is important. The Bengali ghazal might have remained an interesting literary experiment had it been confined to printed pages. Gramophone and radio changed its destiny. Nazrul’s songs entered homes, tea shops, theatre halls and public gatherings. A form associated with the Persian and Urdu world could now be heard in Bengali by listeners who might never have encountered its literary ancestry. The ghazal became something to sing and listen to before it became something to analyse.
Nazrul’s great innovation was to make the Persian inheritance sound Bengali without stripping it of its Persian character. Listen to the vocabulary of his songs. Words such as ishq, dil, mahfil, gulshan, bulbuli and gulbahar enter the Bengali lyric naturally. They do not sit there like foreign ornaments. They become part of the emotional vocabulary of the song. The Persian garden begins to coexist with the Bengali landscape.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of Nazrul’s ghazals. He could summon the rose garden of Persian poetry and, almost in the same breath, evoke Bengal’s rivers, spring winds, flowering trees and muddy pathways. The imported image does not erase the local one. They inhabit the same poem. Consider the rose and the nightingale, perhaps the most familiar pair in Persian and Sufi poetry. Nazrul gives them an intimacy that is unmistakably his:
Mohammad naam jopchhili bulbuli tui aage, Tai kire tor konthe aaji emon modhur raage. Ore golap niribili, bujhi Nobir kodom chhuye chhili, Tai tar kodomer khoshbu aajo tor atore jaage.
*
O nightingale, surely you once whispered the name of Muhammad Is that why such sweetness dwells within your song? O rose, perhaps, in secret, you once touched the Prophet’s feet; That is why, even today, the fragrance of his footsteps lingers in your attar.
The rose and nightingale are ancient Persian symbols. But Nazrul does something wonderfully intimate with them. The Prophet is not invoked through theological abstraction. His presence survives as fragrance, birdsong and touch. Devotion becomes sensory. The sacred enters the ordinary world through things one can smell and hear. This ability to make different traditions converse is at the heart of Nazrul’s art.
Nazrul was writing at a time when Bengal’s cultural life was being increasingly marked by communal anxieties. The Bengali Muslim community, despite its demographic importance, often found itself culturally marginalised within a literary establishment shaped substantially by the Hindu bhadralok[2]. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals offered Bengali Muslims a literary and musical vocabulary drawn from their own Islamic and Persian inheritance while simultaneously keeping them within the larger Bengali cultural world. That is why his Persianised diction matters. It was not merely decorative exoticism. It helped create a cultural space in which Bengali Muslim listeners could hear themselves without having to abandon Bengali identity.
At the same time, Nazrul was introducing the Hindu listener to an Islamic world that Bengali literature had often treated as something outside the mainstream of its cultural imagination. His ghazals therefore worked in both directions. They gave Bengali Muslims a sense of cultural recognition while inviting Bengali Hindus into an unfamiliar but deeply embedded part of Bengal’s history.
The scholar Dr Pushpita Mitra identifies three broad tendencies in Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals, and this distinction helps us understand the extraordinary range of his achievement. In some compositions, he brought Urdu words and phrases directly into Bengali, creating an idiom that consciously mediated between the two languages. In a second group, he used Persian imagery – gulbahar, gulbagicha, bulbuli, gardens, flowers, seasons – to evoke the landscape of Persian poetry while allowing it to overlap with Bengali nature. In a later phase, his ghazals became less dependent on obviously Persian or North Indian vocabulary and forms and increasingly absorbed his own mature musical and lyrical personality.
One of the most delightful examples of the first tendency is a song that moves between Bengali and Hindustani with a playful sensuality:
Alga koro go khopar bandhan Dil wahin mera phans gayi Binod benir zareen fitay andha ishq mera kas gayi. Tomar kesher gandho kokhon Lukaiye ashilo lobhi amar mon, Behosh hokar gir pari haath mein, Baaju-band mein bas gayi.
*
Undo the knot of your hair My heart is caught there still. In the golden ribbon of your braid, My blind love has tightened its hold. When did the fragrance of your hair Slip secretly into my heart? Before I knew it, drunk and helpless, I fell into your hands And made my home in your armlet.
What makes the song so charming is not simply its sensuality. It is the linguistic play. Bengali and Hindustani rub against each other, creating something that sounds at once theatrical, folkish and unmistakably Nazrul. The Persian vocabulary is not being displayed; it is being lived.
The second tendency in his ghazals is equally revealing, as Dr Mitra points out. Consider his evocation of spring:
The poem begins in the Bengali spring – the season of phagun, flowers, southern winds and the stirring of the heart – but Persian imagery soon enters the frame:
Spring has come, the season of flowers, And every grove is suddenly awake. The southern breeze moves through the blossoms, And the heart begins to sing and dance. The rose-garden spills its colours Over the branches and vines; The cuckoo calls from somewhere within, And sleep and languor open their doors.
The Persian garden has entered Bengal, but Bengal has not been Persianised. The two landscapes overlap. That is perhaps the most important thing Nazrul achieved with the ghazal: he did not translate one culture into another. He allowed them to meet.
And the emotion was never confined to romantic love. Nazrul could move from sensuality to devotion, from devotion to rebellion, from rebellion to loneliness. His ghazals contain lovers, mystics, intoxicated wanderers, flowers, nightingales and gods. Their beloved is often deliberately elusive. Is it a woman? God? Memory? Death? Desire itself? The uncertainty is part of the pleasure. This is where Nazrul’s Islamic inheritance meets the Bengali Vaishnava tradition of biraha, the spiritualized ache of separation. In both traditions, absence can become more powerful than presence. The beloved’s physical absence intensifies his or her presence within the imagination. Nazrul understood this instinctively. His songs rarely hurry towards resolution. Longing is allowed to remain longing.
Consider this:
Bagichay, bulbuli tui phul shakhate disne aji dol, Ajo tar phul-kolider ghum tuteni, tandraate bilol. Ajo hay rikto shakhay uttori bay jhurche nishi-din, Asheni dakhine hawa, ghazal-gawa moumachi bibhol. Kobe se phul-kumari ghomta chiri, ashbe bahire re, Shishirer sparsha-sukhe bhangbe re ghum, rangbe re kapol. Phaguner mukul-jaga dukul-bhanga ashbe fulel ban, Kurider ostho-pute lutbe hashi, phutbe gale dol. Kobi tui gandhe bhule dubli jole, kul peline ar, Phule tor buk bhorechis, ajke jole bhar re aankhir kol.
*
In the garden, O bulbul, do not set the flowers swaying on their branches today; The buds still sleep, their slumber has not yet been broken from their drowsy dreams. Alas, even now, the empty branches tremble day and night in the northern wind; The southern breeze has not yet arrived, nor the honeybees, intoxicated with the ghazal of flowers. When will she come, the flower-maiden, tearing apart her veil and stepping outside? When will the touch of dew awaken her from sleep and paint her cheeks with colour? When spring comes, when buds awaken and the banks overflow, a flood of flowers will arrive; Laughter will spill from the little buds’ lips, and dimples will blossom upon their cheeks. O poet, bewildered by fragrance, you have plunged into the waters and can find no shore; You have filled your heart with flowers, but today, fill the hollows of your eyes with tears.
This ghazal unfolds as a delicate allegory of waiting, awakening and loss. At first, its world seems entirely pastoral: the garden, the bulbul, sleeping buds, empty branches, dew, the southern breeze and intoxicated bees. Yet beneath these images lies a deeply human longing. Spring has not arrived; the flowers remain asleep, the branches shiver in the cold northern wind, and even the bees that will eventually turn the garden into music are absent.
The ‘flower-maiden’ becomes the central image of this anticipated awakening. Her emergence from behind her veil, her cheeks coloured by dew, and the laughter and dimples appearing on the buds transform nature into a living feminine presence. Spring is imagined not merely as a season but as a moment of emotional and sensual renewal.
The final couplet dramatically changes the mood. The poet, intoxicated by fragrance, has plunged into the waters and lost the shore. The flowers that once represented joy now coexist with tears. This movement from expectation to intoxication and finally to sorrow gives the ghazal its poignancy. The poem’s greatest beauty lies in this tension: spring promises fullness, yet the poet discovers that beauty and grief are inseparable. The garden blooms outside while the heart fills with tears within.
In another ghazal, the poet says:
Bosiya bijone keno eka mone Paniya bharone cholo lo gori Cholo jole cholo kande banatal Dake chholchhol jol-lahori. Diba chale jay bolaka-pakhay Bihoger buke bihogi lukay. Kende chokha-chakhi magiche biday Barowa-r sure jhure banshori. Ogo be-dordi o ranga paye Mala hoye ke go gelo joraye. Tobo sathe kobi porilo daye, Paye rakhi tare na gole pori.
*
Sitting alone in solitude, Why do you linger there by yourself? Come, fair one, come to fetch the water; Come, let us go to the water. The forest floor weeps; the rippling waves call out to us. The day slips away on the wings of the cranes; within the bird’s breast the female bird hides. The chokha-chakhi, the loving pair, weeps and bids farewell; To the plaintive strains of Barowa, the flute languishes. O heartless one, at your red feet, who has gone and entwined herself like a garland? The poet, bound to you, is caught in a dilemma: shall I place her at your feet, or wear her around my neck?
This lyric unfolds as a gradual movement from invitation to longing, and finally to surrender. Its opening image, a young woman sitting alone and being invited to fetch water, places desire within the familiar pastoral world of Bengali song. Water becomes both a literal destination and an emotional metaphor: ‘come to the water’ suggests movement from solitude towards intimacy.
The second stanza deepens the mood through nature. Day departing on the wings of the balaka, birds seeking one another, and the chokha-chakhi bidding farewell create an atmosphere of separation. The mention of Barowa and the languishing flute introduces the classical-romantic vocabulary of Indian music, where melody itself becomes an expression of yearning.
The final stanza transforms pastoral romance into personal devotion. The mysterious figure who ‘entwines’ herself around the beloved’s red feet as a garland evokes both surrender and erotic attachment. The poet’s dilemma, whether to place the garland at her feet or wear it, is deliberately paradoxical. Love has erased the distinction between worship and possession. What begins as a simple invitation to the water thus becomes a meditation on desire, separation, devotion and the inability to decide whether love is an act of surrender or an act of embrace.
His later work makes this even more poignant. The death of his young son, the illness of his wife Pramila and the devastating illness that eventually silenced Nazrul himself cast a shadow over the later part of his creative life. The rebellious energy never entirely disappeared, but the songs increasingly turned towards loss, memory, mortality and mystical yearning.
My heart is full; I listen for a song Perhaps today my beloved will come. Dreams are folded into golden wings, And some restless bird of the heart flies away into the sky.
The poem then moves towards the riverbank, the muddy path, the approaching beloved and the drifting scent of the wind. Who is coming? Nazrul never tells us. That is precisely its power. The beloved may be a lover remembered, a divine presence, an apparition from the past, even death itself. The song does not close the door on any possibility. It leaves us waiting on that riverbank.
This late Nazrul is very different from the young ‘Bidrohi Kobi’, the Rebel Poet who thundered against empire, oppression and communal divisions. Yet the two poets are not really different. The same refusal to accept boundaries lies beneath both. The poet who would not accept the separation of Hindu and Muslim traditions would not accept the separation of love from devotion, the sensual from the spiritual, or beauty from sorrow.
This is also why his use of Hindu and Islamic imagery could be so radical without being merely provocative. Nazrul could write of Krishna, Shiva, Kali and Durga with the same intensity with which he invoked Islamic devotional imagery. His Hindu devotional songs, particularly his Shyamasangeet, became an important part of Bengal’s musical heritage. His ghazals, meanwhile, brought Persian and Islamic imagery into Bengali popular music. His artistic universe was not a collection of separate compartments; it was a single, restless landscape.
There were critics who found this troubling. Some conservative Muslims objected to his Hindu imagery; some Hindu critics were uncomfortable with his Persianised diction. Nazrul belonged fully to neither camp because he refused the premise on which both positions rested: that cultures preserve themselves by remaining apart. For him, Bengal had never been culturally pure. Its languages, music, metaphors and religious traditions had been meeting one another for centuries. The Bengali ghazal is perhaps the most beautiful evidence of that history.
What Nazrul finally created was not a Bengali imitation of an Urdu form. Nor was it Persian poetry dressed in Bengali clothes. It was something new: a musical-literary language in which Persian imagery, Arabic devotional vocabulary, Bengali lyricism, folk symbolism, Vaishnava emotionalism and Hindustani musical traditions could exist together without apologising for one another.
And this is where his importance extends beyond the history of the ghazal. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals were part of a larger cultural intervention. In the Bengal of the 1920s and 1930s, when communal identities were hardening and the colonial political order was encouraging competing claims of belonging, he offered another possibility. A culture could be Muslim and Bengali. It could draw from Persia without ceasing to be Bengali. It could invoke Krishna and Muhammad without treating the two as mutually exclusive. It could be modern without severing itself from folk memory.
The political message was sometimes explicit in Nazrul’s journalism and poetry. In the ghazals it was often quieter. It resided in the very sound of the songs – in their vocabulary, their imagery, their musical forms and their refusal to remain inside a single cultural enclosure. The effect could be political without the song ever becoming a political slogan. Perhaps this is why Nazrul’s ghazals continue to feel so alive. Nearly a century later, his Bengali ghazals remain part of the musical lives of Bengal and Bangladesh. They continue to be sung, recorded and reinterpreted. Their survival is testimony not simply to the durability of Nazrul’s melodies but to the emotional generosity of the world he imagined.
A rose can belong to Persia and Bengal at the same time. A nightingale can sing the name of Muhammad in a Bengali song. A river boat can carry an Islamic prayer. A spring garden can be simultaneously gulbahar and Bengal. A lover can be human, divine or simply remembered. Nazrul understood that these were not contradictions. They were the truth of Bengal. And perhaps that is his greatest gift to the Bengali ghazal: he did not merely give Bengal a new musical form. He showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before. The ghazal arrived in Bengal as an inheritance from elsewhere. Nazrul brought it home.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriis a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).
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In the literary cartography of the Global South, fiction has often been pressed into the service of nation-narration. From Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, canonised as the novelistic metonym for India’s tumultuous post-independence history, to Tahmima Anam’s celebrated Bengal trilogy, received as a fictional appraisal of Bangladesh’s birth pangs, critics have persistently sought foundational texts that can emblematise emergent nation-states. Bangladesh, a nation forged in the crucible of a 1971 war that violently severed the geographic and ideological construct of Pakistan, occupies a distinctive position within this literary ecology. Its fiction emerges from a fractured genealogy of linguistic and political resistance, one that inherently unsettles monolithic, linear narratives of statehood.
Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines provides not as a supplement to a pre-existing history, but as an epistemological correction. It radicalises the project of narrating the nation by relocating the locus of meaning from the birth of a state to the structural, gendered violence its delivery both requires and represses. In doing so, the novel demands that we rethink the very relationship between fiction and national history, turning away from the monumental icon of the “tree” toward the unseen, divergent “branches” of women’s testimony.
The novel situates its inquiry not in the heroic theatre of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaigns, but in the circumscribed, carceral space of a military camp where women are held as spoils of a genocidal war. The protagonist, Lucky, is introduced as a figure of radical ordinariness, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband works in London, whose life is violently unmoored during a journey to visit her ailing mother. Abducted alongside her sister Jamila, she is thrust into a temporal and spatial parenthesis where historical time collapses into the cyclical horror of daily violation.
Begum’s masterful narrative choice is to dwell in this atemporal zone, resisting the teleological pull of rescue and nationhood. The novel insists that the truth of national formation is to be found not in the climax of independence, but in this interstitial, nine-month duration of captivity—a dark, inverted gestation of the state. The narrative voice meticulously records a reality where agency is atomized into the smallest of sensory perceptions: “A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight.” The prose transforms the scene into a spectral image of beauty and abjection, a visual field where the women are reduced to a single organic mass, their subjectivity merging with the material textures of their prison.
Begum’s aesthetic project hinges on her refusal of graphic spectacle. The violence is rendered not through an unveiling of the wounded body, but through an immersive phenomenology of trauma and a choreography of survival. A dialogic exchange between the two sisters becomes a profound meditation on the ontology of endurance. Jamila’s counsel, “Close your eyes… The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave…” and Lucky’s retort, “What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open…” stage a dialectic of memory and presence, of protective dissociation and sensory assault. When Jamila counters Lucky’s terror with the sacred identity of “A praying mother,” Begum constructs what can be termed a fragile counterforce; an affective and spiritual armature that stands against the physical machinery of the camp.
These whispered philosophies, born from the collective precarity of womanhood, elevate conversation into a mode of existential resistance. The female prisoners emerge not as silent victims but as vernacular philosophers whose dialogue constitutes a parallel archive of wisdom, a repository of insight into the patriarchal logics that subtend the spectacular violence of war.
The novel’s metaphorical architecture is anchored by the recurring, titular motif of jasmine, “a flower that blooms at night, alluding to the possibility of survival and beauty in darkness.” This is not a simple consolatory figure. The jasmine operates as an olfactory and mnemonic counter-symbol to the visual regimes of state power and historiographic documentation. It is a scent that persists where light, the Enlightenment metaphor for knowledge and liberation, fails. In the novel’s most formally striking passage, the dehumanising violence is refracted through a complex simile of capture: the soldier grabs Zoleyka’s braid “like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.” The comparison is devastating in its precision, momentarily stripping the character of human subjecthood to figure her as catch, as non-human resource within a predatory political economy of bodies.
Yet, the meticulous catalogue of her braids, “Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid”, preceding this act of violation is a testament to a life of self-care and cultural practice. The text thus inscribes violence not as an isolated event but as a systemic logic that weaponises what women have tended with love. Begum’s narrative eye, however, is unremittingly dialectical, and in a chillingly audacious shift, she turns the omniscient gaze onto the hyper-sensory paranoia of the soldiers: “Tasted sugar when they bit into the flesh of bloodied girls.” This perspectival haunting refuses a Manichean simplicity, exposing the perpetrators’ psyche as a landscape corroded by superstition and a barbarity that recoils upon the self. It suggests a war that consumes both the captured and the captor, albeit along radically asymmetrical axes of consequence.
This bifocal vision culminates in the novel’s central epistemic maxim: “God must’ve given us different eyeballs, men and women, they only seem to see the tree and never the direction of its branches.” The folk aphorism articulates a gendered scopic regime. The masculinist, state-centric gaze sees the singular, monumental “tree”—the nation, the war, the linear narrative of liberation—while women’s perception traces the divergent, lateral, and unseen “branches”: the capillaries of care, the trajectories of trauma, the lived experiences that the grand narrative cannot integrate.
The novel’s own form embodies this branched perception. It intersperses harrowing depictions of suffering with moments of startling levity born from collective wit: “Never marry a man who needs to make a mistake to learn.” “Look at your mother-in-law’s hair.” This rhythmic oscillation between the visceral and the light is not a tonal inconsistency but a profound formal mimesis of the survival strategies of the captive women. Humour and gossip become technologies of selfhood, momentarily reassembling a world of intimate sociality within the zone of annihilation, proving that the unsayable can only be approached through a dance between testimony and the sustaining grace of the mundane.
The final act of the novel delivers a liberation that is no liberation at all, structurally executing a terminal critique of the nation-form. The Mukti Bahini liberates the camp; the state, in a gesture of political commemoration, confers the title of ‘birangona’ (war heroine) upon the violated women. Yet, as Begum’s paratextual note devastatingly clarifies, societal excommunication transmutes the honorific into its homophonic, pejorative other: ‘barangona’ (prostitute).
The state’s promised apparatus of care—rehabilitation, vocational training, social reintegration—evaporates, revealing a patriarchal compact that allows the nation to valorise the violated female body as a symbol of its own violated territory while violently disavowing that body’s living, breathing claim to dignity. This post-war abandonment constitutes a second, more insidious violence, a form of slow death by social prescription that exposes the nation-state’s liberation as a gendered event, incomplete by design. The women are granted a symbolic place in the national epic while being denied a livable place in the nation’s society, a schism that The First Jasmines identifies as the founding lie of the postcolonial settlement.
Published at a critical historical conjuncture, as Bangladesh navigates a new landscape of political turmoil following the 2024 mass uprising and the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, The First Jasmines performs an urgent act of archival retrieval. It excavates the foundational, suppressed memory of gendered violence as the unspoken condition of the nation’s emergence, an inheritance that successive governments have refused to fully acknowledge or redress.
Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their “humanity, resilience and heart,” depicting them as “architects of family and community.” To return to the novel’s governing metaphor, Begum abandons the vertical, central stem of the “tree”, the official history of the nation-state, to follow the rhizomatic directions of the “branches.” In doing so, she reframes the project of national literature not as the celebration of a fait accompli, but as a witness to its hidden costs. The novel ultimately insists that the nation cannot be received as an uncomplicated patrimony. True liberation, like the late-blooming jasmine, is a fragrance that unfolds only in the darkness, a promise whose truth is recognised only when we find the courage to sit with its scent long after the fanfares of dawn have faded.
Mudassar Javed Baryaris a scholar atthe University of Faisalabad, Pakistan.
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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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Narrative by Kallol Lahiri: Translation from Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
What if someone were to ask me, where is your desh[1]? Quite naturally, I would reply, “Why? It’s India, isn’t it?” If I were to ask my snack-vendor, Ramesh, “Where is your desh, Ramesh?” As he weighs out fifty grams of hot peanuts to mix with roasted chira[2], he’ll say, “It’s Samstipur, Dada.” Isn’t India your country then? Ramesh would give me an exasperated look as he stirs the chira.
There was more of a crowd at his shop at this time in the evening. The train coming from Howrah drops people returning from work at the station. Many of them then walk home chewing peanuts, gram and muri[3] on the way. Ramesh’s hands work like a machine then. Handing the paper packet to me hurriedly, he says, “Arrey, all of us belong to India. Does one have to say that separately? My village is in Samstipur. Our house is there. I feel happy when I go there, Dada[4]. Does everyone have a desh like that?” That’s correct, not everyone has a desh, or a village. The desh which actually does not refer to the state called India – a place which does not shackle you with law and order, for which one does not have to prove one’s patriotism at every step. The desh which actually becomes sujala suphala shasya shyamala, abundantly watered, fertile and lush green with crops, and makes your heart wistful. Which beckons you to return home. That desh and the state are not the same. And so, while Ramesh refers to his village as desh out of an attachment, I cannot find any place with which I am similarly attached. Because I do not have a village like his. I only have a concrete, solid state.
There are many places to go on a holiday to, scattered all over. Arbeliya, Noyagram, Shibhati. But my own village? Which is one’s desh, in Ramesh’s language? As soon as I feel wistful, the bank of a pond, an earthen veranda, Orion in the night sky. The village beneath whose soil the ribs and bones of fourteen generations lie hidden, with which there is an umbilical tie? I cannot find one even after a lot of thought. The April sky feels heavy and stifling atop the attic in my Uttarpara. One can no longer see even a sprinkling of stars. It is only the lights of the teeming apartments that sparkle far and near.
Although Dada or I do not have a desh, or village, like Ramesh does, my Baba’s elder sister, Boro Moni, had a desh, a village from where she had to come away — almost all of a sudden, without any real preparation. But from time-to-time, Moni used to go off to a desh all by herself — especially when the first raw mangoes of summer arrived from the market; some special vegetables — banana flowers, banana stems, figs, spinach of taro. Observing those, and assessing their quality, she was not very satisfied. Even though she did not say anything, she seemed to be lost somewhere. She was not easily available then. She was going around, wandering, right in front of us, and talking and yet it was as if she was somewhere else. She had to be called twice for her to respond. She forgot to add salt to the cooking. She sat fixedly for a long time in a meditating posture as if she had nothing to do with this bank or the other bank, with any shore. She seemed to have left the boat of her body and become immersed in the ocean of attainment. But it was also true that even though all of us were around her, Moni did not really have anyone.
Moni was the solitary resident of a piece of desh where others other than those she led by hand were forbidden entry. You would not be able to enter the main door of that house even if you tried a hundred times. Ordinarily, Moni was busy all day attending to work. She did this and did that. If there was no work at hand, or if it was all done, she turned over the clothes put out to dry in the sun. She washed the baskets, floor-seats, and utensils with water, and left them face-down. After water had drained out of those, she put them back in place. When all these tasks were completed, if there was time, she broke coal into dust. She smeared lumps of coal dust with rice starch and made briquettes. If it had turned dark by then, Moni lit the evening lamp. And then it was time to cook dinner.
Who did Moni do all this work for? For a family — the family, which was actually not hers, but her brother’s. This never occurred to her. And even if it did, there was nothing to be done. The ambit of the narrative knew a bit about all these unspoken, unpronounced things. The characters around her knew. Family existed for this person and yet did not exist — living in a home and yet not having a home. The agony of not having a desh although she had a country – it was named Moni. That was why Moni worked without a word. She chatted with us. She used to talk to no one in particular. She filled up her spare time in her own ways.
Moni used to do various other things. If someone in the neighbourhood got a stiff neck, or got hurt on his leg, or had a bad dream just before dawn, or if a strapping boy wet his bed in his sleep, Moni performed faith healing with ritually consecrated water and oil. She used to recite mantras in whispers into ears. Blow on the head. She used to massage a stiff neck and undo the crick. She used to run her hand over an ear and soothe a piercing earache.
Dada used to say that Moni knew magic — the magic with which Moni floated oil in water and blew, muttered to herself in darkness. It wasn’t just that, so many familiar people as well as strangers came and poured out their heart’s woes. Moni listened. She chanted while counting on a finger. Blew on the head. She had no ishta devata[5], performed no pujas, had no excessive restraint when it came to conduct or judgement.
“What do you say as you blow, Moni?” I had once asked her. Widening her eyes, she had said, “All that is not for your ears.”
Why not? What if I did hear? As she waved the palmyra-leaf hand-fan over my head, she had said, “A sonless man will have no sons. The destitute will not gain wealth. The homeless will not have a home. He has to become completely alone. All his life.” Had Moni become alone after learning the mantras? Why did she learn such mantras then? Who taught her? Moni scrambled up hurriedly. The power is back. Baba’s students too had left a long while back. The newly purchased wall-clock chimed ten o’clock. A shotoronchi[6] would now be spread lengthwise on the long veranda. The radio would be on.
Everyone would listen as they ate. They would talk. After that, each one would go off to sleep as they chose. Like every day, another day would come to an end. But would it really end? If one woke up in the dead of night, wouldn’t Moni be audible? Either sitting in the veranda, or while asleep, she would be blabbering. With whom? Apparently, Moni used to have a lot of people. They were not visible. They were like shadows. Who used to crowd around Moni? Were they the memories of old days left behind? Or were they from the present? Those for whose stories Moni had to sit late at night with her legs stretched out on the small veranda beneath the patch of sky? Hearing all this gave many people the creeps. But I was not the least bit frightened of Moni. Tell me, who would pat you affectionately on the back in the way she did? Who would fan you with the hand-fan when there was a power cut, recite mantras and blow on the hand before an exam so that an entire essay on a cow could flow out of the pen?
After the mistress of the Bhattacharjee household next door took ritually consecrated water for her grandson and gave five rupees, who would immediately order milk from the Haringhata milk supply? The milk with which rabri[7] would be prepared according to Thamma[8]’s recipe. The entire household would wait in front of the stove for the thick crust to form over the milk set to boil on a low flame.
Moni never had any possessions. You could say she didn’t want any. So did Moni have no wants, no dreams? Except for the pinch of tobacco on the tip of her finger which she put into her mouth? I don’t know. I only know the pull of the house which people returned to. They worked extremely hard all day long. With the money from that hard work, they sat together at the end of the day to eat, chat, and the joys and sorrows of domestic life fell gently around the people, like drops of dew. Although all that kept Moni enclosed, Moni was very far away from this world of illusion. We knew, yes, even at that very young age, we knew, that actually Moni had no one. No home, no husband, no children, no family, and for that matter, no desh either.
Even after much searching, I could not find a picture of Boro Moni by herself. The pictures I had were all group photos. With everyone. No solo pictures. Perhaps such a picture of Bijonbala was not even supposed to be there. And so, I had to cut and crop and take out Moni from the group of people. Did Baba’s Yashica camera never find his elder sister Bijon alone then? Or had he and yet never felt the urge to put her in a frame? Or was it that after having begun my archaeological excavation so many years later, I was unable to find Boro Moni? After all, I could not print all the negatives. Some had got lost. Many more had been destroyed. Yet, Thamma, Handa are all there in whatever there is, so why is there no photo of Moni by herself? She sometimes found a place, like an extra, within the frame, in a corner, amidst a tangled, jostling group of people. Why had Thamma and Dadu[9] given such a name to their first-born? After all, “Bijon” meant alone. Devoid of people around her. How did a person’s name match her life?
In truth, she was alone all her life. Although she had her Baba, Ma, and siblings around her. Her husband’s home after she got married. And yet Bijon had to return to her mother. She did not get to live with her husband. Why not? Did her husband not like her? Had there been a quarrel? Had they driven her out? After all, much later, after coming to this side of the border, Moni had to wipe off her sindur[10], discard her conch-shell, iron and coral bangles. She had to wear a widow’s garb. Some people had apparently searched for the house and conveyed the news of Moni’s husband’s demise. How on earth did those who never kept in touch with a person come to dress her in window’s garb? Even after all these days, when I think about all this, I feel astonished.
I want to know about a lot of things. But not everything can be known. The youngsters at home were not supposed to know everything. With whatever is whispered, and more than that, with whatever one hears, they create an imaginary world. Even if there are smiles on the faces of the people in those worlds, those who roam around the house, it is understood that they are sorrowful for some unknown reason. Even if they never said anything, they went around hiding something in the depths of their hearts which they would never tell anyone. Like Indir Thakrun[11], sitting in the terrace of Sarbajaya’s kitchen, even if she asks in gasps for some water, she would never be able to convey her immense hunger.
Gazing at the plate of rice, her eyes would rain tears. And yet, she would drink a bit of water from the pot, sprinkle the rest on the saplings in the corner of the courtyard and go far away to the bamboo thicket, hoping to count the coins for the final crossing. If Sarbajaya had wanted, could she not have called Indir Thakrun that day? What would have happened if she had fed the old woman a couple of mouthfuls of her own share of rice? Sarbajaya did not perceive at that moment the contentment derived from feeding a starving person. As if it had all been masked by an all-devouring hunger. Was it really that? Or could Sarbajaya herself see that it was her own future sitting opposite near the steps of the terrace? A feverish body. The evening train too had gone by. She thought someone called out to her, “Ma,” from the door. After all, it had been a long time since she had heard being called “Ma”.
Was it Apu? Have you come, Apu? She rushed and opened the main door and saw there was no one anywhere. Infinite emptiness. Sarbajaya had to go away forever, all alone, from a desolate house in a completely unknown village. Indir Thakrun had at least been found lying in the bamboo grove by her small niece and nephew, Durga-Apu. None of Sarbajaya’s close kin found her. Apu had come and seen an empty homestead. His Ma was absent. The Ma he had learnt to manage by sending letters. Apu had not left behind any token of memory of his Ma in that house. There was nothing to speak of in Sarbajaya’s existence, except for a bundle, like with Indir Thakrun.
There was a huge crowd in the field beside the Ganga that day. A mobile cinema van had come from the Information and Culture Department of the Government of West Bengal to screen a film. They came from time to time. They screened this and that. The government wanted to make people aware by screening educational films. Before that, the dadas and didis[12]of the neighbourhood gathered together and sang, “Ora amader gaan gaite daey na … shilpi songrami Paul Robeson, They don’t let us sing … artist, fighter, Paul Robeson.” We too nodded our heads and kept the rhythm. Once the tarpaulin sheet was spread on the ground, I tried to find a good place in the first row.
Dada came and whispered in my ear, “You watch films from the rear, stupid. No one sees it from the front.” I raised my thumb and showed him a banana. Ghenchu. Nothing. He was jealous because I had found a good place. He went to the rear. Moni asked people on the two sides to move and sat down beside me. She covered my tiny feet with the shawl around her so that mosquitoes wouldn’t bite me. The field was full of people by then. Was a film screening a trivial thing? In the time I am talking about, except for one or two people, nobody in the neighbourhood possessed a television set. No telephone. There were power cuts all of a sudden. As soon as it went off, the elderly uncles of the neighbourhood sitting in the roak, the spot where they hung out, would laugh and say, “There goes Jyoti Babu.” That was why a generator set had been rented as a special arrangement.
Indir Thakrun was now on the white screen beside the Ganga. She was taking something furtively from Sarbajaya’s kitchen. Moni seemed to huddle up and stiffen herself all of a sudden. She had only recently begun to lose her health then. She brought her face close to my ear, and said, “Shall we go home? Come.” What was this! Why did Moni want to go back home? After all, I had seen so many plays with Moni before this. Seen jatras[13]. Seen Tarun Opera’s “Ami Subhas Bolchhi[14]”. When Shantigopal comes on stage in Subhas costume to the accompaniment of tumultuous orchestral music and lighting, and says, “Give me blood, and I shall give you independence”, I have seen a few thousand people break into explosive applause. Moni had folded her hands in pranam[15], and said, “Please come back. Join the two countries together.”
Moni believed that if Subhas had been there, the Partition would not have taken place. Moni would never have had to leave her village, leave her desh, and come away to this side of the border. Moni loved seeing jatra performances and plays so much, so why did the very same Moni not want to watch the film today? She had seen plenty of films before this — how, thanks to the boon of the king of ghosts, Goopy and Bag[16] had travelled to so many countries, eaten so many kinds of food, punished the wayward king. For that matter, finally they got married to princesses too. Indir Thakrun had just been caught red-handed on the screen in front by Sarbajaya. There was unease on her face. She was desperate to hide herself. And Moni’s eyes were streaming tears then. For whom? For herself? Or was it for those who stayed around like shadows out of compassion and fondness?
Moni felt like eating a lot of things in her final days — all that she had never eaten in her life. What a fierce hunger she had! How would a household that was itself hand-to-mouth obtain so much food? And yet Baba tried very hard. Towards the very end, she took a fancy to eating fish. How she loved to eat fish.
On the other hand, could a widow in a brahmin household eat fish? Nothing would remain of caste and religion! Harm would befall the family. Food then consisted of rice provided by the ration shop, a vegetable preparation, milk that was either available or not, and after lunch, it was the same at dinner, with ruti[17]. What would so many people eat in between? And where on earth would they get that from? In addition, there were, of course, the ekadashi and various other occasions for fasting. There was ambubachi[18] once a year. And of course, many people in the neighbourhood used to give out one or other kind of food in order to earn merit for themselves. Relatives too either sent money, or fruits and suchlike. But that did not benefit the widows in the household at all. However, there were no limits or bounds to the joy of kids. An abundance of fruits, sweetmeats, and chire, muri.
Moni complied with all the strictures. But in her final days, everything was turning topsy-turvy. Not only was she devoured by an all-devouring hunger, it also pushed her to greater ill health. It so happened that Moni began to eat fish furtively. After all, there was a count of the number of fish pieces on the table at home. Ma knew everything. She used to move aside her share of the fish in such a way that it seemed to be extra. Moni used to eat that bit of fish in secret. I had covertly espied one afternoon how contentedly she ate that. Even now, when a lot of fish is brought home, I remember Moni. A person sitting with her back turned around and cautiously eating fish, averting everyone’s gaze.
During tarpan[19], after making offerings of water to one’s deceased male ancestors, it is the turn to appease their wives with offerings of water. And after that come those whom the one offering the tarpan wishes to make offerings to. Dada made ritual water offerings to Moni every time. To Handa. He made offerings of water to all the people who had no one else to do that for them. Those who truly never received water when they were dying. I pour that water with black sesame seeds floating on it into a flowerpot.
The morning of Mahalaya turns into something different instantly. Standing in the middle of the sunny terrace of Dada’s flat, I like to think, what if Moni was around today? If Handa was? And Baba? Who would sit where with their back turned in this sunny terrace then? Who would put mangoes for the kashundi[20]out to dry, and where? Who would stock freshly made paper packets from the teashop and the damp copy of the last volume of the collected works of Rabindranath Tagore?
Following Moni’s return to her own mother a few years after her marriage, she never returned to her husband’s house. And so, when everyone was coming away after being uprooted from their desh, Moni’s Ma was unable to leave her own daughter behind. She had brought her along too with her. Or else how would we have got Boro Moni? Eaten her mango-mustard kashundi? Who would have taken Dada and me to a house in a village on the nights when the power went off after we had finished our studies, to an earthen courtyard, beneath a tulsi pedestal, to the round-the-clock devotional chanting of the name of Hari, the sacred offering there of rice in a clay bowl? Who would hold the hands of the two of us and walk along that dew-drenched path on the bank of the pond and stop beneath the falsa tree there?
The village floating in the early morning sunlight that we had never laid eyes on which Moni conjured up on the nights of power cuts, was Moni’s tiny piece of desh. The desh Moni left behind to never be joyful again. Was it because she was sorrowful that Moni told us stories like they were fairy tales? We used to fall asleep as we listened to those stories. A beautiful village stayed awake all night long right in front of our eyes. The village that did not belong to Ramesh, or to Dada or me, but only to Moni; the village from which, under the cover of nocturnal darkness, three women had crossed two rivers, countless villages and a vast expanse.
The place they arrived at, where they were eventually able to stand on their own feet, was then another country. A place that belonged to other people. And people became refugees in their own birthplace, their homeland, on their own soil, who, having been rendered surplus, made a fresh start in the hope of survival.
Many years later, when I was able to meet all those people, they had lost their health and reached the final stages of their lives. And yet, such élan vital. They had guarded and protected Dada and me with that infinite and inexhaustible vitality. Not just that – the narrative that had been enacted before us over a long time, even after crossing so many winters, summers, rainy seasons, autumns, late-autumns, has not faded; rather, like Baba’s Yashica, it remains hanging in the form of a photo-frame in the inner sanctum of one’s mind. And it is because it’s hanging that the residence in Bally seems to me, from time to time, like a fairy tale. And those days become Thakumar Jhuli, a grandmother’s bag of stories.
In the kitchen of the Bally residence, something special is being cooked. Ma is in the foreground. Moni is behind her. Half of the rolling pin and board for ruti in the middle is visible. Perhaps Ma had turned towards the door to do something in the middle of rolling out the rutis. One can’t make out what she is doing. Was she washing her atta-covered hands? Baba is on this side of the door. Looking through the lens of the Yashica, capturing very casually the door on the left and the wall on the right like a frame-within-frame.
Visible among the few items in the kitchen is the floor-seat. Moni seems to be in a hurry to remove something from the stove. Was someone supposed to come home that day? Or was it just like that, all of a sudden? Was something special really being cooked? Or was it merely ruti and soyabean curry? Ma is radiant with her smile even amidst all that. The moment comes to a standstill right there. But the stream of life flows ceaselessly past that. The day of that photograph and the present day seem to be separated by the vast distance of a nebula. Yet, was it not along that very path that an endless dialogue unfolded within the mind? The very dialogue whose echoes are woven into this piece of writing, all those unprinted negatives, piles of letters and the weight of memories of a long time ago.
Towards the end, Moni had become one with the bed. You could not distinguish Moni from the bed. She used to scream for food all the time — food which she could not digest at all. And so, the whole bed used to get soiled seven or eight times a day. There was shit smeared all over her body, like bedsores, Ma used to clean up all by herself, with her own hands.
Dada and I were very small then. We were in merely two rooms. So many people. Gradually, Ma too began to fall ill with that kind of terrible, inhuman toil. Right next to us was Doctor Kisku’s dispensary — our Doctor Kakima[21]. She visited us so frequently and was so fond of us that she had become like a member of the household. She attended to Moni with much care for a long time. It was because she was our family physician that she had everyone’s details at her fingertips. She warned Baba, “If this sick person remains at home like this, everyone will fall ill.” Where would this sick person be taken then? Would a public hospital take her? They tried very hard. No assurance of getting admitted there was forthcoming. Who would admit a sick person who was on the verge of death? In the end, Doctor Kakima found a way, which remained a permanent witness to a heart-rending incident in our family. It was Doctor Kakima who arranged everything. Moni was left at Mother Teresa’s “Nirmal Hriday”.
Mother Teresa had established her Nirmal Hriday for all those people who had no one, who lay on the street and waited for their final day. Nirmal Hriday provided shelter to these dying people. They spent their last few days peacefully in the land of slumber. But, after all, Moni was not lying on the street. She had everyone — brother, sister-in-law, nephews, niece and various other relatives. And yet she had had to become an unidentified person without any family and enter Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday.
Even today, it is as if I can clearly remember the day Moni left home. Ma bathed Moni and dressed her in a new sari. Moni’s favourite pulao and fish curry was cooked that day. Ma fed Moni. Dada and I were standing quietly beside her. Moni acted as if she was impatient to go to the hospital. For the last few days, she had driven everyone crazy saying she wanted to go to the hospital. She believed that she would get well as soon as she went there. And once she was well, she would go to her village. How would she go? Who would take her? That was not certain. Meanwhile, a yellow-coloured taxi had arrived in front of the house. Baba carried Moni in his arms and got into the taxi. Gora Kaka[22] as well.
Moni seemed to have shrunk somehow in Baba’s arms. She gaped wide-eyed. Dada and I were at the taxi window. Ma too came and stood behind. We were saying goodbye to Moni. The taxi engine started. We heard the sound of that. Did a stream of compassion finally flow from her eyes at that moment? Yes, Moni gaped at us in astonishment and wept. “Why are you crying, Moni?” Dada ran behind the taxi. I did too. The taxi was going along the G.T. Road, becoming more and more distant. Dada screamed out, “Why are you crying, Moni?”
No reply came wafting. Once the taxi went past the bend at Kablikutir, it was no longer visible. We too never saw Moni again after that. Within a week of being admitted to Nirmal Hriday, Moni had passed away. Where did she go? To that tiny piece of homeland? The village that she had dreamt of going to after returning from the hospital?
If ever I woke up in the dead of night, I used to keep my ears pricked – could I hear Moni’s voice? Talking to herself? No, I never heard anything. Once someone leaves, they don’t return. All of us seemed to become quiet somehow after that. Baba did not utter a single word to anyone for quite a few days. When we had to find a picture for the sradh[23] ceremony, it was taken from a group photograph and framed. When the purohit moshay[24]objected to fish being offered at a widow’s sradh, Ma had told him, “Isn’t the peace of the soul the law in that book of yours?”
He could not say anything. Dada and I carried that fish head in the ritual clay pot with the lump of rice and floated it in the Ganga and walked back without looking back even once. There was no longer anyone at home that day to return to for protection. Was there truly no one? After all these years, when I look back at that road, I realise there was. There was an earthen house, atulsi pedestal as well. There was a falsa tree at the bank of a pond. There was a village awash in the morning sunshine. And there was that tiny piece of homeland that belonged to Moni, which we never set eyes on, but only kept in our dreams, like Aladin’s amazing lamp.
(This is an excerpt from the ongoing translation of Baba’s Yashica Camera: A Photographic Memoir of a Refugee Family, by Kallol Lahiri. All the photographs have been provided by Kallol Lahiri.)
Kallol Lahiri teaches cinema, makes documentary films, writes screenplays for films, television and OTT series, and writes blogs of various flavours in between. He is the author of four novels, Gora Naxal (2017), Indubala Bhater Hotel (2020), 1990, A Love Story (2022) and Ghumiye Porar Aage (2024), and a memoir, Babar Yashica Camera (2021). He was awarded the Sadhana Sen Memorial prize in 2021 for the novels Gora Naxal and Indubala Bhater Hotel by the magazine Bhumodhyosagor.
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V. Ramaswamy is a literary and nonfiction translator of voices from the margins. His translation of the novel, The Struggle, by Showkat Ali, was published in 2025.
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From the title of this novella, Homecoming, one can guess that a particular place becomes the focal point in the unravelling of the story, and that place is none other than Lucknow, seeping in past history, a promise of grace that the city was famed for, and a unique brand of Nawabi culture. The novel opens with a ‘Prologue’ where we are told that Hassan’s wife Samina has decided to leave Lucknow after she discovered that a small monument with a grave had been destroyed and the calligraphy over it had been vandalised. From that vantage point, Omair Ahmad, an eminent novelist, tactfully gives us the entire history through rendition given by three characters – Hassan, Ahmed Sahib and Sam or Samina narrate the story in four independent segments.
Hassan originally belonged to a Reddy family in Hyderabad and was of mixed parentage with a father steeped in communist ideology. His father married a Muslim lady from Patna. After several years, when they quarreled and fell apart, Hassan, a dentist by profession, left for Lucknow in search of a stable job. That became his home for almost twenty-five years. After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit—Ahmed sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Unable to pay his professional fees, Ahmed sahib accepts Hassan’s proposal to show him around the city of Lucknow with the hope that it would become his home and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship. He believed that the city was too close to him. Sometimes, he thought, everything had changed, and sometimes he thought nothing had. In the company of this man, the city opened itself to him, parting ever so slightly, slowly making him its own in a way he had not felt in all the years he had lived there.
Ahmed sahib himself was an abandoned son, had no siblings, no wife or child, but was still connected to a wider family. It was through his connections with an extended family that the novelist depicts the lifestyle and stories of old Lucknow with its begums, kothas, tawaifs, courtesans, old havelis[1], music being practiced by so many great artists, intricacies of inheritance etc.
The third and the most significant protagonist is Sam or Samina, who was born in Lucknow, though she didn’t know that, and as an orphan went to live and grow up in London with her aunt and uncle. In college she fell in love with Urdu calligraphy and the Lucknawi style, and she managed to receive a fellowship from the Royal Historical Society to go to Lucknow to study calligraphy on the tombs of the noblewomen there.
Her aunt used to receive a letter once every six months from Badinani in Lucknow, from a great aunt called Begum Waheed, who briefed regularly about the myriad people she still thought of as her family, even if she hadn’t met most of them. At first Sam was afraid because she felt she was entering a world where everybody was an aunt or uncle, or a great-aunt or great-uncle. But gradually she becomes slightly more stable.
Hassan and Samina meet and gradually fall in love with the machinations of Ahmed sahib. When Ahmed sahib dies, the two of them felt orphaned once more. Hassan concludes his narrative by telling us that he was no longer the man he had been before he met Ahmed sahib, before he learned of all he was to so many people. It had taken a year after his death for him and Samina to discover each other, and when she offered him her name, he knew he could never let her go. The concluding lines of the novella are striking:
“I will let Samina rescue me from Lucknow, as her parents were once rescued by exile, and go haunt another land. I think Ahmed sahib would forgive me, I think he would even approve.”
Spare, nostalgic and moving, Omair Ahmad’s new novella is a meditation on love, lost and gained, dwelling on ideas of family, home and belonging. A wonderful read and the novelist should be congratulated for it.
[1]Kothas– brothels; Tawaifs– courtesans; Havelis– old palatial houses
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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Meher read Dhruv’s silences the way other people read weather apps — obsessively — always half-an-hour too late.
They met on a Wednesday that felt like every other Wednesday — rooftop café in Bandra, fairy lights up for no festival in particular, a mutual friend’s birthday, that humidity that makes everyone’s laugh sound more generous than it is. He was scrolling his phone when she sat down next to him.
“Sorry,” he said, not looking up. “Fighting with my therapist. Over text. Which is, I realise, already the whole problem.”
She laughed before she could stop herself. “You fight with your therapist?”
“I lose. But I make him work for it.”
That was Dhruv. He announced his fractures like other people announced achievements. And Meher — twenty-eight years of being told she was too much, too intense, too quick to say I love you — found something restful in a man who wore the damage on the outside. Less digging required, she thought.
She was wrong about that.
*
Four months. It looked good from the outside, and honestly, it was good, some of it. He carried her slippers across sand too hot to walk on, then got sunburned so badly he couldn’t lie on his back for two days, and complained about it the whole time, dramatically, until she was laughing again. Voice notes ran eleven minutes long on that. A toothbrush at her flat, then a charger, then a hoodie she wore so often it just… stopped being his.
He wasn’t a villain in a costume. He forgot her cousins’ wedding dates. Twice. He was mortified both times — I’m an idiot, tell me the date again, I’ll set four alarms. Once, drunk on his best friend’s terrace, he told her his father left when he was nine, and cried the way men cry who haven’t done it in front of anyone in a long time. Then, after, he said: “Don’t bring this up when we fight. I’ll deny it happened.”
But under the pattern, there was another pattern. He’d vanish — not physically, just into some weather inside him she couldn’t track — two days of nothing. Then: sorry, was in my head. She stopped asking what that meant.
Until she didn’t.
“This is starting to feel like a pattern,” she typed. “It’s making me anxious.”
He called within a minute. New flatness in his voice — rehearsed, almost. “I can’t be responsible for regulating your nervous system, Meher. That’s not fair to either of us.”
“I didn’t ask you to regulate it. I asked you to text back.”
“You’re catastrophising.”
She wanted, badly, to believe him. That was the part she never told anyone. Not the manipulation — her own hunger to be wrong.
*
She started a note on her phone — nothing dramatic, she told herself, just dates.
Nov 14 — silent 30 hrs, called it “protecting his peace.”
Nov 21 — called me clingy for asking if we were exclusive. Apologised. Didn’t apologise for the rest of it.
She never meant to build a case. She just wanted to see the shape of something that kept dissolving the second she looked straight at it.
The train home from his flat in Andheri turned into its own ritual. She’d stand by the open door, Mumbai blurring past — clotheslines, construction lights, a city that never quite finishes itself — and rehearse conversations she never had. She still checked the sky out of habit. Same habit as checking his last-seen.
*
The night it ended, they were on his terrace. She said it without deciding to say it. “I don’t think I feel safe with you. I think I feel managed.“
He didn’t get angry. He went still. The way he did right before a vanishing. “That’s a lot of projection for a Tuesday,” he said.
She looked at him a long moment. “You always do that. Turn my sentence into my diagnosis.”
He opened his mouth. And for once — nothing polished came out. Just, “I don’t— I don’t know what to say to that that isn’t also a deflection. So I’m going to say nothing. And I know how that’s going to look.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said in four months. It changed nothing.
She took an auto home. The city blurred gold through the plastic flap. Lay on her bed, fully dressed, feeling something that wasn’t quite heartbreak — closer to vertigo. The specific dizziness of loving someone who’d taught you to doubt your own eyes – gently, using words that sounded like care.
She didn’t message him, not that night, not the next.
*
Three weeks later. She was at her desk, half-writing a client email, when her phone lights up.
I went back and reread our messages from October. All of them, not just the ones I remembered. You were right about the pattern — I used therapy words to end conversations. Not writing this to be forgiven, or to get anything. I just didn’t want the last thing you knew of me to be a lie I told myself. I hope it was not just a symptom for you.
— Dhruv
She reads it twice, a third time. She hunted for the second meaning under the first one. It was an old habit — half faith, half muscle memory.
Outside, the evening traffic on Linking Road starts its long, indifferent roar. A city that never quite finishes itself, never pauses for anyone’s reckoning. She thinks about the note still sitting on her phone, its small dated cruelties, thinks about how good it felt, at the start, to be with someone so fluent in his own wounds — and how she never once asked why that fluency had never, before tonight, been used to actually change.
The message looks different from the others, she thinks.
That doesn’t mean it is, she thinks.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. It was the first time in three weeks that she wasn’t sure which fear was louder — being wrong about him again, or being wrong about herself for wanting to find out.
She started to type.
Jay Samanta is an undergraduate student of English at Panskura Banamali College, West Bengal, India. He enjoys writing contemporary literary fiction.
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The year was 1816. On the 21st October, Reverend Robert Sparke Hutchings, as part of his life mission to civilise the natives, started an English School free from the interference of royalty and wealth. The Penang Free School was opened to all people of Penang who wanted to learn. Hutchings’ idea of a school was not for free, as in charity, but free for all children of different races and creeds to mingle.
That year, too, the modern world first realised how closely connected it was. This was long before the world had known the song ‘It’s a Small World after all!’ A year earlier, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) expelled megatonnes of volcanic material into the skies. It was the world’s most explosive eruption in recorded history, and its effluents lingered in the atmosphere for a full year, giving the air a permanent, greyish, dirty tinge. As a result, the European winter in 1815 was extreme.
By the following year, its effect became apparent. 1816 became the ‘Year without a Summer’. Global temperature plummeted as the sun’s rays were blocked by volcanic ash. Harvests across much of Europe and North America failed miserably. The change in global temperatures also disrupted the monsoon pattern in India. Famine ensued following a poor harvest. To add salt to the wound, the temperature change gave rise to a mutated form of cholera in Bengal. In Southern Europe, a typhus epidemic was seen. An event triggered in one corner of the planet had a devastating effect on the other side, thousands of miles away.
Food prices skyrocketed, sparking riots, arson and looting in Germany. The summer of 1816 in Europe was miserable. In Switzerland, it was cold and wet for many Europeans who wanted to spend the summer by the scenic lakes. The glacier took a long time to melt, resulting in ice jams where chunks of ice blocked river flow, causing rivers to overflow their banks and cause floods.
In that situation, Lord Byron hosted a group of friends at Lake Geneva for the summer. The inclement weather had left them homebound, and they decided to hold a writing competition. They were to write something scary after hearing someone read a ghost story. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, wrote a short story about Lord Ruthven, a charming, upper-class vampire. It was published later and evolved into a vampire figure associated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Mary Shelley recreated a scary dream she had the night before, which eventually led to the novel the world knows as Frankenstein.
An environmental disaster can indirectly give rise to the literary roots of a new genre: horror fiction.
Climate has long been blamed for many cataclysmic events on Earth . Because climate is so intertwined with vegetation, and thus with our food, its role cannot be brushed aside. Famines that result from crop failure invariably change ruling regimes. French peasants were not bemused when told to eat cakes; instead, they crushed the monarch, stormed the Bastille, and declared a Republic. The revolutionaries in the streets of Moscow brutally murdered the Romanov family and eventually placed a communist regime to rule over them. Many ancient Empires, including the Akkadian and Aztec civilisations, went extinct in the same way, through severe climate change and famine.
With modernisation, humans thought it was imperative to slash forests, denude vegetation, and create concrete jungles in place of a balanced environment where plants and animals lived in symbiotic harmony. This, in turn, had devastating effects on greenhouse gas emissions and increased global temperatures. The civil society noticed these subtle changes in our environment. As awareness was raised, people became more mindful of global warming caused by trapped heat. This phenomenon, later correctly termed climate change, became the buzzword of modern life. Climate change encompasses the heating of the planet, the melting of the Arctic ice caps, and the rise in sea level that could submerge many island nations.
Climate change not only shrinks our summer beachwear but also makes outdoor living impossible. Additionally, it’s proving to be more expensive to consume anything. Many advanced economies are imposing a carbon tax on every ton of carbon used by their citizens. Unfortunately, there is discordance in how these taxes are collected and dispersed. As shown during the 2005 Yellow Vest Riots in France, people protested rising fuel prices. The poor people from the countryside were taxed for using fossil fuels. This revenue was paradoxically used to subsidise green technology, benefiting affluent metropolitan dwellers, who least required assistance.
Green technology, an initiative that found its impetus after the Arab world held the rest of the world to ransom with the oil embargo way back in the 1970s, has been around for the longest time. More than half a century after its inception, the technology has not shown fantastic returns on investment. Germany, one of the pioneers in renewable energy, is still paying the highest electricity rate.
Some people subscribe to the idea that this whole scare about climate change is just scaremongering. They defend their conviction with research from climate scientists who present statistics that run counter to the mainstream understanding of the subject. These sceptics profess that global temperature trends merely mirror similar 80- to 90-year solar cycles in the solar system. They also question the 10- to 20-year lag in temperature rise after a burst of CO₂ production, such as during the Industrial Revolution or a world war.
Whether our weather change is man-made or a natural occurrence due to the restless tectonic plates that shape our planet, our climate will change the way we live. It will change our culture, maybe our food, our population migration demography, as the people gravitate towards a comfort zone, and probably change our leadership. If what the scientists say is correct, Mars and Venus once held water and an atmosphere. The way these planets appear today is a cautionary tale of what could happen when greenhouse gas accumulation goes overdrive. Oceans will evaporate, turning our planet into a wasteland.
Still, like Reverend Hutchings, who, despite the calamities associated with the ‘Year without a Summer’, decided that building a school was necessary, life had to go on amidst all the uncertainty surrounding climate change. The human race is stronger and has more plasticity than we think. We shall overcome. When life gives you lemons… make lemonade!
Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
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Just as the European Renaissance was a transformative intellectual movement marking a transition from the social and cultural stagnation of the Middle Ages to a new age of enlightenment, a similar movement found its genesis in Bengal and gradually spread to the rest of India. Known as the Bengal Renaissance, it is generally believed to have had its genesis towards the end of the 18th century and its culmination in the first decade of the 20th. Like the preceding one, it marked a period of intellectual and cultural awakening in various fields: literature, politics, music, art, society and religion. At its heart was a shift from rigid religious primitivism to an all-embracing humanism. It represented a transformative era in which traditional norms were questioned, and new ways of everyday living were explored. This movement, influenced by Western liberalism, threw up many great thinkers and scholars. Among them were Raja Rammohan Roy, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Swami Vivekananda. It gradually paved the way for another — the national movement which demanded the end of British rule in India.
But the Bengal Renaissance was not only a period of intellectual and cultural awakening. Like its European counterpart, it also sparked a desire to push boundaries and go in search of unknown spaces and climes. It was a time when travel became a means of self-expression. Travelogues and narratives from this period reflect the colonised Bengali intelligentsia’s desire to assert identity and seek self-definition. While Troilakyanath Mukherjee, Romeshchandra Dutt, Dwarkanath Tagore, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore are known names in the field of secular travel, there were also those who undertook hazardous journeys in search of a different kind of enlightenment.
Earlier, religious travel was limited to traditional pilgrim spots. To sacred sites like Varanasi, Vrindavan, Mathura and Puri. But now, travellers were filled with new confidence. They became more adventurous and undertook spiritual journeys into the hearts of deserts and mountains. Some crossed miles of icy desert to reach the cave temple of Hinglaj. Some trekked to Amarnath, the twin peaks of Badri and Narayan, to Mount Kailash and Mansarovar Lake in the heart of the Himalayas.
The book under review has been written in the form of a diary. It describes in detail the hazardous journey the author undertook to reach Mount Kailash, believed to be the abode of the Gods, and Mansarovar Lake, a dip in whose waters promises redemption from a hundred years of sin. The height at which these pilgrim spots are located, the rugged terrain and the excessive cold at all times of the year made this journey almost impossible to complete in those days. Reports of deaths by falls from dangerous precipices, of being blown away by blizzards and freezing to death, were far greater than of successful returns. Only supreme faith and dogged determination enabled a person from even thinking of undertaking such a perilous expedition.
One such brave heart was Ramananda Bharati. A Bengali scholar, reformer and ascetic, he set out on a trek to Kailash and Mansarovar lake in the summer of 1898. His travels across Tibet and the experiences he gathered forms the backbone of his book Himaranya aptly translated by the translator as The Forest of Snow. In Himaranya, Bharatichronicles his experience of crossing perilous mountain passes, snowbound peaks and glacial valleys to reach his destination. But he went, not only as a pilgrim seeking divine blessing but as an observant traveller eager to explore the lives of the people who lived in the bordering villages. He notes the clarity of thought and purity of heart in these people. Their patience, forbearance and hospitality despite the acute hardship of living in a snowbound region. This is a conversation he had with an old man in the village of Malhari.
“This country of yours is very cold…If this is your summertime how do you live during winter?”
“One cannot survive here in winter…all our houses will be under snow. No one will stay here.”
“Where do all of you stay in winter then?”
“Eighteen miles below Joshimath there is a place called Lalsangha. We go there.”
“Then it must be very difficult for you.”
“Sir what shall I tell you about our hardship. It is very difficult to travel with our children, cattle, sheep and goats every year.”
“Then why don’t you shift completely and live there?”
“If we lived below during summer, not only would we die, there would be no sign of our animals too.”
Passing through different landscapes, Bharati describes the scenery. This is a description of Donagiri mountain.
“The place was very pleasant. The grand path was in front of us, the cave was located above it. And the fast-flowing river was just below. On both banks of the river were sky-high mountains…at night thousands of bright lights can be seen over this mountain…if anyone climbed up to the top of this mountain, he would become dizzy with the smell of leaves and flowers.”
Bharati regales the reader with an account of the legend associated with this mountain. The Puranic name of Donagiri was Gandhamadan Parbat. When Lakshman fell unconscious during battle, he needed a special herb that only grew there. Hanuman went to Gandhamadan but, unable to locate the herb, he carried the whole mountain on his back and brought it to Lanka thereby saving Lakshman’s life. Bharati writes:
“Till this day there are signs of that. Donagiri doesn’t have a tall peak and looks as if someone has uprooted its peak. Different kinds of medicinal plants are found in Donagiri even today.”
Somdatta’s translation is faithful and apt at the same time. Though the original is written in a Bengali that may sound archaic to the ears of today’s readers the translation flows smoothly. Kudos to her for bringing an almost forgotten but compelling record of Himalayan travel to those who love reading travelogues.
Aruna Chakravarti has been principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with eighteen published books on record. They comprise five novels, two books of short stories, two academic works and nine volumes of translation. Her first novel, The Inheritors (published by Penguin Random House), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her second, Jorasanko, received critical acclaim and became a bestseller. Daughters of Jorasanko, a sequel to Jorasanko, has sold widely and received rave reviews. Her novel Suralakshmi Villa was adjudged ‘Novel of the year (India 2020)’ by Indian Bibliography published in The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureU.K. Her other well-known works include The Mendicant Prince which has been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, and Through a Looking Glass: Stories. Her translated works include an anthology of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitaan, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, First Light and Primal Woman: Stories. Her most recent work is titled Rising from the Dust. Among the various awards she has received are Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar.
Keith Lyon converses with Jayanthi Sankar, a fiction writerwho shares an excerpt from her story, Beyond Borders at the end of the interview.
Jananthi Sankar
Jayanthi Sankar is an author who explores history, identity and the human psyche through fiction shaped by her life across cultures. Her work reflects on writing, cultural difference, mentorship and the importance of creating space for emerging literary voices.
Keith Lyons (KL): Every writer has a unique starting point. When did you first realise that writing was more than just an interest for you, and how has that initial spark developed?
Jayanthi Sankar (JS): Years of passionate, continuous reading for pleasure led to an emerging voice of a critic deep within me, and I didn’t realise it. When I was debating with her over what I’d read, I ended up experimenting to experience how difficult it really is to write. They published the short fiction. And I didn’t know that would eventually give me the motivation to attempt a few more. It took me a few more years to write a dozen more before I started believing I should pursue writing.
KL: How do different cultural landscapes influence the themes you repeatedly explore in your work?
JS: I grew up in 15-16 places all over India owing to my father’s central government civil engineering job, until my mid-twenties when I migrated to Singapore. The exposure to diverse cultures during my formative years had organically shaped me to admire and adapt to cultural differences like a fish to water. Harmony lies more naturally on the edges of those differences, and I realised that only after I read seriously and began writing. Cultural landscapes weave naturally into my fictional world.
KL: What is your process for creating characters so they resonate with readers across different nationalities and backgrounds?
JS: I have noticed since my teens, I interacted with people not as me but as the other in front of me, and that perhaps innately equipped me with the ability to create credible characters. As I matured, I came to know that it has got to do not only with human psychology but also with empathy. While my characters unfold, those very close to me have observed I often think and talk like them because I live their lives.
KL: Your day job as an interpreter, how does that affect your ear for dialogue and understanding of how others view the world?
JS: The past three to four years of my current job have brought me the most profound understanding of migrant workers. Knowing their lives, challenges, and views often repeatedly makes me realise what a privileged life I have. Since listening is an integral part of my job, the dialogues become contextually crucial.
KL: How do you determine the ‘size of the canvas’ for a new idea, and do you find that different languages or cultures demand different narrative structures?
JS: The canvas mostly widens as the chapters unfold, and while rewriting, we could always chisel as required, as I did in my short fiction ‘Punkah Wallah’ in my collection Dangling Gandhi. The story’s seed sprouted within me when I was merely 13 or 14 years old.
I remember hearing one of my dad’s friends share, “a young lad born a deaf and dumb from our village in remote Punjab was taken to far away Malaya to be a fan man.” I showed no signs of becoming a writer in the future. It had stayed deep in me to surface nearly 30-odd years later. I set my character driven story in the colonial Singapore of the early twentieth century that had ample scope for depicting cultural, political climate. The time period of the setting brought about language variations in character building as well as the narrative structures that could bring in novelty and engagement.
KL: What insights have you gained about narrative structures from different cultures and traditions, and how can you use them to tell a story better?
JS: Several of my reader friends have said that by reading my fiction, they knew Singapore as if they’d already visited the place. When blended with the cultural nuances and slang of the land, any local issue becomes more convincingly relatable, and the stories reach readers better. As for readers from other lands, not only is the cultural flavour introduced to them, but it invites them to experience the land just as we, as readers, know Moscow from Russian literature, as if we’ve lived there.
KL: What was the primary motivation behind establishing the Jay Yes Foundation, and what specific gaps in the literary world were you hoping to fill?
JS: I have mentored, formally and informally, several aspiring young writers, including Liu Fang from Hong Kong, whose story travelled to the northeastern parts of India, and another, Sascha Wynn from Boston, who had a character of Indian ethnicity. And I experienced an incomparable sense of fulfilment. Helping them with their developmental editing and cultural checks also widened my perspectives, decades ago, and that was the beginning. I felt joyous watching their manuscripts evolve. And now the foundation has entered the next stage of giving a name and identity to the initiatives.
KL: Supporting unpublished writers is a core pillar of your work. In your experience, what are the biggest challenges these writers face today, and how does the foundation help them navigate those obstacles?
JS: As an emerging writer myself, decades ago, I stopped reading details as soon as I saw the submission guidelines mentioned. I’ve observed many of my mentees retreat when the call has fees to read. Not because they can’t afford but they naturally feel their stories are worth the read, and it feels discouraging to pay to be read. Any emerging writer would feel respected if a jury read their writing. So, the foundation continues to create opportunities like this year’s international contest.
KL: The foundation’s mission mentions building ‘sustainable literary communities’. What does a truly sustainable community look like to you in modern publishing?
JS: A writing community can sustain longer only with continuity in reading and writing at an individual level. Continuity is the key. Just one submission and the aspirant write only after two years for another doesn’t bring the needed traction. That’s why the Foundation does not stop at contests and podcasts; it continues to bring other opportunities as well without submission fees to the pool of writers it has already created.
KL: Many literary initiatives rely on entry fees for sustainability, but your foundation has chosen a different path. Can you share the philosophy behind this commitment to free entry for emerging writers?
JS: This year’s jurors have believed me when I said that the foundation aspires to set an example of how dedicated investment of time and expertise can encourage emerging writers. But for the support of Zero-Degree Publishing, such philosophies are bound to remain as dreams. Monetary investment might bring in transactional elements like charging an entry fee, or another fee for publishing the anthology that might reduce focus on the creative side of the initiative. There are so many out there calling to submit first without even telling the writer what’s coming next. I had my experience many years ago; one of my submissions was long-listed, they discussed payment to move the story forward.
KL: The International Jay Yes Short Story Contest 2026 is a significant undertaking. What led you to choose “Seeking Refuge: Stories of Displacement” as the central theme for the contest?
JS: Displacements have been part of my growing up, although I didn’t even know the impact it would have later on in my thoughts process and also writing. Forced or chosen, displacements have all the scope for exploring human lives, whether to seek refuge or to survive. After a brief discussion, the jury unanimously agreed on the theme. The theme also suited the contest, planned to go global.
KL: You’ve expressed a desire for stories that are bold and moving. When you are reviewing submissions, what is that elusive quality that makes a piece of writing truly stand out for you?
JS: If the ending leaves me pondering longer, stays long with me, I’d call it that. A loose ending does that better than a conclusive one. A genuine human voice in the AI era would touch my heart and most certainly the storytelling. Stories often begin fairly well, I’ve noticed, but aspirants get lost in the ending. Dramatic, cinematic, preachy endings are so common, and that’s where resting and rewriting might help. The jury assessed entries fabulously this time.
KL: From anthologies to podcasts, you use various platforms to share stories. How do you see the relationship between traditional publishing and these newer digital formats developing for emerging writers?
JS: E-Books and audiobooks are trending, and like physical books, they can be self-published or traditionally published. Creativity through natural intelligence deserves celebration and preservation regardless of the format it gets published. Using tools to display originality is better than using tools for the creative process itself. Digital or physical, as humans, let’s tell stories of humanity with relatable humaneness.
KL: How does the foundation’s work help create a world where literary voices reach audiences regardless of nationality or financial standing?
JS: Since my childhood, I’ve observed people of different cultures, cuisines, and languages across regions and countries, yet the values, ethics, hunger, anger, pain, and pleasure remain the same for every human. The success of this year’s contest has shown beautifully how creativity has no such restrictions, such borders. Nurturing natural intelligence has always been the core of the initiatives by the Jay Yes Foundation.
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.
An Excerpt from ‘Beyond Borders’ by Jayanthi Sankar
With moist, dismayed eyes a foreign worker in clothes mildly smeared with grease and paint stood first in the growing queue. Pusillanimously lost in thought he looked like a Bangladeshi, Anu guessed.
Just behind the Bangladeshi, a middle-aged rotund Chinese man was leaning on the side rails with two sizeable red plastic red shopping bags placed near his feet. Oblivious to the surrounding, he was busy talking on his mobile, thanking and laughing with exaggerated courtesy, “Háiméiyǒu, xièxiè.”
The moment Anu saw her son’s eyes sparkling brighter, she knew the reason, and she’d guessed it right. Crawling on one of the large plastic bags carried by a Chinese man was a huge fly that caught the keen attention of ten-year-old Kani. He couldn’t take his eyes off.
As always, Anu was fascinated by his interest displayed even before he’d turned one. From as early as seven months he used to look for tiny ants and insects in the corners of the marble floor and follow them crawling on fours. Though rare, they never failed to catch his attention. Flying insects thrilled him all the more. Long before he could say the word, “Amma,” to call her, he’d learned to say ‘Poochchi[1]’ in Tamil, which made history becoming the first word he learned to speak.
Eager to continue where they’d left their conversation just before leaving home, Anu asked her husband, “And Somu, what did that Pinoy colleague of yours exactly say to anger you that much? Somu, you didn’t tell me the details.”
Excited, wide-eyed Somu said, “He had the cheek to say right on my face without them our country will cease to function. Can you believe that, Anu?”
Although the haze due to the conflagration in the Sumatran forests seemed to have reduced to healthy levels, about six or seven out of the ten migrant faces wore the N9 masks.
“He means, without the Filipinos?”
“I am sure he must have meant all foreign workers in general. I couldn’t stand his temerity, you know. Seething through, I was intensely searing inside.” She just nodded looking at his face.
Somu’s cute chubby face was becoming more and more rounded with his receding hairline, she thought. His black curls highlighted his already fair complexion.
As if muttering to herself Anu looked around, “Humans seem to push the days of the week just for their weekend, when they live their lives.” The queues were suddenly getting longer, she observed.
The bus interchange was filling with an erratic mixture of children shrieking, loud laughter of young people in groups, buses maneuvering and halting, bus doors opening and closing.
Mandarin, Tamil, Malay, Tagalog, Hokkien, and Bangla heard here and there were certainly not mellifluous, but an intriguing babel. The aroma of the satay from the nearby hawker wafted along with the breeze.
The breeze bore the message of the approaching showers. The slowly gathering dark clouds not just dimmed the sunlight but suddenly increased the humidity.
Being the first few in the line waiting for route number 960, getting seats of their choice was not difficult.
The Bangladeshi worker walked straight to the back and took the left window seat of the long row of last seats.
Keeping his sight on the fly, Kani walked ahead but slowly.
“He went on saying things like they are a cheerful and contented bunch even with lower wages.”
“Lower?” Anu asked with an intrigued expression.
“Yeah lah! Their wages are somewhat lower than ours.”
“True,” she agreed.
The stout Chinese man placed the bags purposely on the adjacent seat so that the foreign workers boarding behind wouldn’t be able to occupy the seat near him.
Watching the fly, Kani stood there blocking the way for the other passengers. Anu hurriedly pulled him along. “Isn’t it just a common house fly, maybe just larger?” Somu hushed. They moved to the rear. Kani’s focus remained on the fly as he reluctantly walked turning his head backward. “No.”
As the bus exited at the Woodlands interchange, Somu continued, “You know Anu, I couldn’t help telling him, why don’t you go back since you get paid low here. But he left the place abruptly without saying much although he did tell I must learn to be happy.”
“You?”
“He meant us, Singaporeans,” Somu said lowering his voice. “I think.”
Near the exit, seated at the center of the bus the three domestic workers dressed in their weekend best, dolled up in all accessories, started watching videos happily, ready to enjoy their off day. One of them answered a call, “One angparaan, sanaymaging late,” assuring their punctuality to the friends on the other side.
Seated right behind his parents, next to the Bangladeshi worker, Kani kept getting up restlessly from his seat to look at the fly.
When a plump middle-aged Malay woman boarded at the Marsiling station, one of the foreign workers seated behind the driver spontaneously got up to give her the seat. The lady hesitated for a second and was about to lumber her way to the back when the other guy at the window seat followed suit. Happily, she sat on the aisle seat keeping all her bags and belonging on the window seat before she started looking out of the window.
Taking a look around within the bus, Anu said, “It’s fine, Somu. Not like you’d feared. I can even see a few empty seats.”
“You don’t know, darling. This bus really gets crowded on Sundays. We could have gone Diwali shopping next weekend after our car is back from servicing,” he sulked.
“Oh come on. Look at him! Kani seems to be enjoying the bus ride.”
“If not for the parking woes in Little India area, I wouldn’t choose to travel in this bus,” he sulked for the third time. “especially during the weekend.”
When the fly flew to the rear, it landed on the tab the domestic worker was holding. She jumped and shooed it off with a loud giggle. Her two friends joined in the amusement.
Kani got excited and shrieked, “Pa, look he is flying this way!” Suddenly feeling shy for having expressed loudly, he sat on his seat quietly observing.
The insect had comfortably settled on the glass window near the exit. Fixing his gaze on the fly, Kani sat calmly, glancing at other things once in a while. He shared his discovery, “Musca domestica,” tugging at his mother’s shoulder from the back of her seat. He pointed to the fly when Anu turned from the front seat to smile at him.
After the first few stops, at the Kranji station, foreign workers boarded in groups.
Somu gave her a, “I told you!” kind of a look.
“Kani needs to see some real world, at least, once in a while,” Anu smiled gathering the locks of hair and tugging them behind her ears with her right hand.
There was an empty seat after the exit. A tall and slender looking Chinese woman who’d boarded looked around, extended her hand with a pointed finger, “Go and sit there, lah.” The construction worker appeared to be a Tamil guy got up like an obedient student and moved to the back. With a haughty expression, “Thank you,” she said curtly, almost half-heartedly.
“What do you mean Anu?” Somu chided with a laugh. “Don’t tell me that only crowded bus rides are real life.”
“Not exactly,” Anu beamed. “But in a way yes.”
Many were startled when the Malay woman, in her attempt to alight at the Bukit Panjang CC advanced to the back saying, “Cannot taahan this anymore. Why are these people so smelly?” Right after getting off the bus, she threw an angry expression at the bus from where she stood.
“Ma, why is that old lady rankling for no apparent reason?”
“Hush, hush, no. Are you bored? Want my mobile?”
“No,” he said and went back to watch the big fly.
As the bus entered the BKE, most of them got busy texting. Most of them dozed off in their seats. The bus suddenly quietened.
The two high housing board blocks of flats followed by a few private condominiums beyond the green wilds, on the right disappeared within minutes.
The long terrain ride with the lush natural habitat on either side of the expressway, as always brought a serene feeling, Anu thought.
“Oh my God! I took the wrong set of shopping bags! I didn’t buy these live crabs,” the Chinese man suddenly jolted. He held up the tied bag with a large partially visible creepy crab within.
He stood up to go near the driver. “You have to get off at the Tanglin CC and cross the road via the overhead bridge and board a bus back to Bukit Panjang,” the driver said calmly, smartly kept his eyes on the road.
Kani was eager to have a look at the crab from near, but Somu said, “No need to go all the way there. We are speeding in the expressway, Kani. It’s enough to look from here. I thought you were scared of crabs,” he chuckled.
“Of course, I wouldn’t dare touch it, pa. Thought of talking a closer look. The crab looks unique,” Kani said but sat back in his seat.
The Bangladeshi worker was sincerely trying hard to look away from the young Anglo Chinese couple in secret and mild canoodle at the right end of the long back seat. He’d been talking seriously to someone for more than ten minutes. Sensing the network was bound to go erratic in the PIE, he winded up his conversation smartly, “Jaanish. Achchaa, thaarpor kotha bolbo, han?”
The road widening works near the exit to Eng Neo Avenue and Adams Road suddenly reminded the passengers of the city life.
“You look ravishing in this sari,” Somu whispered in Anu’s ear.
“And you’ve said that umpteen times, Somu. I still can’t forget the day you stood at the shop dead against me choosing this one.” Reminiscing, they laughed together and turned to look behind, at Kani.
Much familiar with the expressway, traffic, the downtown line works along the Bukit Timah Road, Kani was observed all that he could, mostly within the bus as if he might never a get another chance to travel by bus.
Once along Whitley Road, the louring urban face of the city showed. “This comes under the suborder Cyclorrhapha,” Kani bent down to whisper into Somu’s ears. The father forced a smile and looked at the fly.
The Chinese man holding the large shopping bags alighted, grumbling.
With not many passengers boarding or alighting, the bus streamlined through the Bukit Timah Road.
When the bus reached Little India bus stop, most of the commuters alighted. “Bus ride was damn interesting, Pa,” Kani mused as he got down. Though sunny, the roads glittered wet. The rains had just stopped.
Not losing sight of the Bangladeshi worker who’d also alighted, Kani told his parents to wait for a few minutes. When Anu pulled him, he said, “Ma, please wait just for a few minutes.”
“Can I have a few dollars, Pa?” he said hurriedly keeping an eye on the foreign worker.
Taking out his wallet from his pant pocket, Somu asked impatiently, “But what do you need money so urgently for?” Kani pulled out a ten dollar note.
He pointed at the Bangladeshi standing with a lost expression on his face. “He needs to top up his EZ link, Pa. I heard him cry over the phone. He is broke and in a dire state.”
“Don’t tell me you can understand his language.”
“Oh, I’ve been picking their language for more than a year,” he said. Always observing, he would smile and wave at the Bangladeshi workers who cleared the garbage chute and cleaned the common areas. But Anu never expected him to have learnt their language.
Kani swiftly went near the foreign worker and asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Paya Lebar,” said the foreign worker, looking at Kani a little hesitantly.
With all kindness, Kani said softly and slowly, “You take the train to Bugis from here. And, from there you board the green line towards Pasir Ris, you understand?” The Bangladeshi just nodded shyly.
Gently, Kani thrust the ten dollar note into his hand and hopped back to join his parents. As if trying to prevent them from looking at the Bangladeshi, he pulled them both by his hands. Curiously, he turned to look and was titillated to see the housefly riding on the tattered backpack of the Bangladeshi worker. “Eureka! Single pair of wings! Comes under the higher classification of Diptera,” Kani squealed
[1]Poochchi – A generic term to refer to any kind of insect.
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