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Essay

Tagore’s Dance-Dramas in Translation

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

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

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

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

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

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

Photo Courtesy: Somdatta Mandal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stories

Her Hyderabad

By Mohul Bhowmick

The procession to mourn on Muharram (Bibi-ka-Alam) travels through the city of Hyderabad. From Public Domain

Hyderabad was not meant to be consumed only on Sundays. Especially when the Bibi-ka-Alam proceeded towards Masjid-e-Ilahi in Chaderghat, with mourners of all hues lamenting their inability to wage war alongside the pious. The elephant on which the howdah was placed murmured its assent before being offered cups of frothy Irani chai. The sidelong glances at the youth besmirched with the blood of a sacrifice heretofore unknown in their lives — and therefore easily bypassed — could not be missed.

She could not grasp, at first, why the chai had to be sweetened with such copious quantities of sugar. Nor could she understand why the students of the fine arts college in Masab Tank had to wrestle with their lives — and a passerby’s conscience — when getting off bus number 49M. She was told much later that they were forced to read The Fountainhead before they could even dream of touching their coursework. Their professor of drawing was no fan of Francisco D’Anconia, lesser still of Dagny Taggart — for reasons he credited to his deficient childhood in the treeless expanses of Rayalaseema — and, quite understandably, Atlas Shrugged was passed over.

She had bumped into an architect of renown, whose primary skill consisted of knowing someone who knew someone who had erected a brutalist coffee shop in west Hyderabad, and who had not heard either of Howard Roark or Ayn Rand. He called himself a modernist and displayed an unnatural interest in Balinese architecture. Spring had come late that year, and she had often found herself wondering what the brutalist coffee shop architect was called, and if she would be able to tell upon seeing it without being told. She seldom questioned her inability to see past charades those days.

But she had questioned her inability to separate facts from fiction, and one warm afternoon, upon finding herself in an auto-rickshaw on the national highway connecting Bowenpally to Suchitra, she had wondered at her own resilience. A fictional flyover, proposed to ease the misery of motorists, seemed comfortable in adding on more to it, and she had struggled to be a mere spectator in such a carnage of dust. Coughing seemed to be an act of participation, and she had denied herself the pleasure. Seamus Heaney often came to her those days — not least because of the parallels she could draw between the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and those in her life — and she was reminded of the anguish of being an innocent bystander.

*

Turning south, her attention was taken up largely by the passion with which the Bibi-ka-Alam journeyed past Purani Haveli, and with a stab of recollection, she was reminded of why the city was home. Such brushes with epiphanies confined her to the immediate past, and whatever largesse Mir Mahbub Ali Khan or Mir Osman Ali Khan had bestowed upon the land, she could not look past the perverse stains of neglect on the walls of the Chowmahalla. The Khilwat Mubarak often wept these days, for want of heirs who truly knew the Deccan, and she had shied away from taking photographs of its compromised state.

She hardly ever turned east except to see Hyderabad play in the Ranji Trophy at the new stadium constructed at enormous expense to the taxpayer. She could not forget the Fateh Maidan as quickly as the newfound bourgeoisie that lived in Sainikpuri had, and it was also why, for sentiments she would not voice out of a fear she could not understand, the IPL[1] had passed her by. Her forebears spoke of ML Jaisimha and Abbas Ali Baig in the same breath (and deemed MAK Pataudi a mere passenger), and she had come to the Gymkhana expecting to see suave men in white. Cricket not played in its true colours had not appealed to her.

But one rainy evening, not long after the murderous summer had drifted away, a friend had spoken wistfully of the bric-a-brac one could conjure on the jumbling avenues of Dilsukh Nagar, and she had not known how to refuse. Soon afterwards, having been caressed by a sickly downpour, they found themselves in Kanchan Bagh (where a vision, as if from a previous life, had roused her to action) and a meal at Hotel Sohail in Malakpet — with the feasible attraction of Barkas and the debonair Chandrayan Gutta, warts and all, lurking close by — had seemed too cheery an enticement to pass up.

*

She had not truly known the city before journeying past the necropolis that was Golkonda. Her grandfather had often sung her lullabies about the ancient riverbed of the ferocious Musi. In moments of unguarded alacrity, she had found herself wishing to see it. Having lost everything but herself in the mêlée that the city had become, she had found enough strength in her lungs to bargain and hail an autorickshaw off the ranks at Basheer Bagh. Thankfully, it had not rained, but she could carefully envision the fresh petrichor wafting north from the exhibition grounds in Nampally.

The driver had turned and twisted, driven on the wrong side of the road and gone past Moazzam Jahi market without paying obeisance, and she could feel the clock tower warning her to steer clear of exigencies to come. The courteous guide, with salt and pepper in his hair and dressed immaculately in a brown kurta at the Salar Jung Museum — where she had detoured after glimpsing the sickly Musi at Naya Pul — had spoken highly of his regard for women, and addressed her throughout as aapa. Of course, she had not gone close enough to smell the liquor under his breath, nor fathom his inexplicable urge to indulge in his favourite pastimes of beating his wife every night and collecting lithographs from the Asaf Jahi era.

Whatever was left of Hyderabad in her veins promised to wash away in the floods that had in the past reminded the Musi of its penurious state in 1908, or the spate it had reached in 1578, when Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah had worried endlessly about the well-being of Bhagmati. Such a Hyderabad did not exist for her anymore, and in her dreams, she recounted only the rapine and the arson and the pillage that Julius Caesar had expressly forbidden, and of which Raja Singh and Akbaruddin Owaisi were proud inheritors. Just like Rome, Hyderabad had been an idea, an idea worth fighting for, but she found herself disabused of any such notions on her midnight rambles to Gachibowli.

The thought of the Cyber Towers existing in a city where the Arts College proliferated disgusted her; where men such as those who had erected the Deloitte Towers (and Trump Avenue) existed, she could not. Her views on perfection were not mixed — she wanted the best or nothing at all — and to breathe in the same air where the dead architects of the Paigah Tombs and the Falaknuma shared space with real estate barons from Kokapet seemed sinful.

The government was involved too, hoping to pocket large parcels of Raidurg, and by then, she did not find it difficult to contemplate suicide on her way home. Only a hot cup of frothy Irani chai from Café Green Corner — going to Café Niloufer may have been the final straw — could calm her down before she mustered the courage to knock on her door, and open it to come face-to-face with herself. Did she need to protect Hyderabad from men, or did men need to be protected from Hyderabad? No. The answer was simple. She had to forget Hyderabad.

*

When she could afford the luxury of thinking about Hyderabad at all these days, she imagined herself turning west and staring at the last Hyderabadi across the Pacific, daring him to blink.

[1] Indian Premier league – cricket

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, sports journalist, poet, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published five collections of poems and one travelogue so far. His latest book, The Past Is Another Country, came out in 2025. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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Categories
Essay

A Prince Who Opted for Poetry over a Crown

By Charudutta Panigrahi

Upendra Bhanja. From Public Domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

[2] One of the first Odiya romances

[3] Picture poetry

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

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Categories
Review

A Fire over Mount Everest

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Fire over Mount Everest

Author: Siddharth Kak

Publisher: Penguin Random House India


“I had given into a whim. It was not even a career move. Just the indulgence of a fantasy – to make a film on the highest mountain on earth.” 
                                                                                                       -- Siddharth Kak

Books on mountaineering, especially those narrating the climb to Mount Everest from various perspectives, are quite popular till date because though there have been more than fifteen hundred ascents, the aura of climbing and narrating the conquest of the highest peak in the world remains equally exciting even today. Even after so many deaths, Everest’s lure is eternal. India’s 1984 Expedition to Mount Everest, organised by the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF), that succeeded in placing Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman and the fifth in the world, and four others, on the summit had noted filmmaker and television presenter, Siddharth Kak, and his crew of four cameramen follow this expedition from day one and record each moment of loss and triumph, instances of glory and distress. Though the expedition was romanticised in the world press as a story of bravery, teamwork and human triumph over nature, the entire narrative is told from a different point of view by Siddharth Kak. The spectacular achievement of that May 1984 is etched in history in glorious terms but it does not tell the behind-the-scenes stories of this expedition. This is where this book under review is particularly appealing.

Kak begins by telling us how he got involved in this project in the first place. A small news item in the newspaper in the summer of 1983 announced that after nineteen long years, a national expedition to Mount Everest, featuring seven women, was to be launched by the IMF the following year. Instantly Kak thought it would be a really cool and exciting adventure to capture in a documentary film. He approached Mr. H. C. Sarin under whose aegis the expedition was taking place, earnestly promising him that they would create a gripping script with human emotions and begin filming immediately with the expedition members and the selected girls all over India with their dreams and expectations  even before the expedition started and then later match them with what actually happened. When they were confirmed as the official film crew for that particular Everest expedition in 1984, Kak was convinced that he didn’t need to be a mountaineer to make a mountain film.

The narrative then elaborates on how the people who would climb Mount Everest turned out to be very different from any he had ever met before. It was a largely Army team he met at the Delhi Cantonment. The team members included Col. Darshan Khullar, the 23-year -old former national judo champion, Sharavati Prabhu, Lt Col Premchand, Sonam Paljor of the ITBF, Naib Subedar N.D.Sherpa and a few others like Magan Bissa of Rajasthan and Flt Lt T. Sridharan. In those days, each expedition had to open its own route and ensure the safety of its own members. His four-member film team consisted of Deepak Haldankar, who was an ace cameraman in Films Division Delhi, Sanjeev Saith, a skilled mountaineer and still photographer, K. Nandakumar, the sound recordist, and Kak himself.  They reached Kathmandu in an Army AN10 aircraft on 7 March 1984. From there they started their trek towards Lukla and several moments of rural celebration were etched in his heart as part of the romanticism of mountain life.

Kak describes in detail their next great filming adventure – a flight over Everest in an unpressurised cabin of a Pilatus Porter aircraft with the pilot Emil Wick while the cockpit door was kept open to capture the mountains in all their majesty. They had to even use chewing gum ingeniously to stick torn pieces of film together that had snapped at such high altitude.

The details of their experiences cannot be narrated within the brief purview of this review, but their stay at the Everest Base Camp, which was their home away from home for nearly two months, provided the most diverse and exciting mixed expedition that India had ever sent to Nepal and Everest. They discovered new aspects of life at high altitudes. Among the women were Bachendri Pal, Rekha P, Chandraprabha Aitwal and Sharavati Prabhu. All of them were equally competent, ‘an irresistible combination for the outside world’, but soon we get to know how they became victims of jealousies and whims of the very strict patriarchal team leaders, who acted according to an inherent army attitude of looking down upon these fellow women climbers. As Kak rightly states, they believed the mountains taught them camaraderie, but in the higher reaches, it was each man for himself.

We are then told of how Col Khullar’s ‘official’ decision about the composition of the three summit parties left women like Chandraprabha Aitwal, Rita Gombu and Rekha Sharma out without even consulting them and how ultimately Bachendri Pal successfully ascended the Everest Summit on 23 May 1984. Kak in his narrative therefore deals with the problems of male-centric mountaineering.
A Fire on Mount Everest springs from an understanding of an incredible moment etched in the memory of the author―a moment very few live to talk about. This is how Kak describes the experience of catching the incredible picture of the first sunrays that fell on the summit of the mountain:

“To an amateur like me, it seemed as if a gigantic fire was raging over Everest. Its majestic glow dwarfed the amphitheatre of the still dark 8000 metre peak around it, Lhotse and Nuptse, huddled in obeisance. It seemed as if Everest was carrying a heavenly torch lit by the gods themselves to symbolize the acme of achievement.

“I was stunned by this celestial display of nature’s savage beauty. I realized that we had been favoured by unseen mystical powers to see what the world had never seen before, a vision of Everest on fire, with towering flames that flew upwards to the heavens.”

 After the disaster of the camera films being lost or destroyed, the scene only remains immortal in his memory. The fifty-two coloured as well as black-and-white pictures along with a hand-drawn map of the standard SE route up to Mount Everest that are included in the book add to the reader’s interest as visuals can communicate much better than written words.

The second half of the book appears to be even more interesting because what the author does is to try and locate each individual participant of that 1984 expedition and find out their present status, especially after the passage of forty long years. In the meantime, eight lonely deaths awaited some of the male members of the Everest 84 team. They included Sherpa Ang Dorjee, Major Kiran Inder Kumar, Major Jai Bahuguna, Phu Dorjee, Lopsang Tshering, N.D. Sherpa, the expedition doctor, Dr. Minoo Mehta, and the Deputy Leader of their expedition, Lt Col Premchand. Except for the male mountaineers who had passed on, the others, especially the women, were constantly evolving and adapting.

Kak clearly tells us how the world of mountaineering is not woman-friendly. Women themselves are both victims and perpetrators of a system that condemns them to second-class citizenship in the mountaineering hierarchy, as indeed in most of their lives. After taking a lot of trouble in locating the erstwhile women members of the team today who are located in different corners of the world, Kak realised how for a woman in India, it is difficult to combine an independent career with marriage and domesticity. With the exceptions of Sharavati Prabhu and Rita Gombu, the rest of the women members have carried on their mountaineering ambitions as single women. Certainly, for active mountaineers, like Chandraprabha P and Bachendri Pal, mountaineering began as a liberation from male dominance and continued as such throughout their life. It is sad to learn that the 1984 expedition left a bad taste in the mouth for many members. Their story never ended, not even on the fortieth anniversary in May 2024.  

The last chapter of the book titled “The Black Everest” is really alarming as it shows how a new culture of dehumanisation is brought into play with commercialization of such climbs as it takes away from the very joy of ascending. At present the adventure, the romance and indeed, the thrill of mountaineering is literally reduced to a cold robotic logistic with high investment and returns, which do not necessarily go back to the mountain. The body count goes up every year, and ironically the fascination to climb Everest also rises in direct proportion to the increasingly visible thrill and danger of death in the higher reaches of the mountain. As Kak states: “My heart goes out to Everest, which appears as if it is being slowly disrobed due to self-defeating commercial priorities over and above the ravages of climate change, cataclysmic earthquakes and contamination littering its pristine slopes.” In 2023, despite all the advances in safety and technology, the highest number of people died – nearly a score – climbing Everest in a single season.

Reading this book on mountaineering by a non-mountaineer filmmaker like Siddharth Kak is a pleasurable experience. His simple, lucid style will surely entice one to pick it up and enjoy a thorough good read.

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

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Categories
Review

Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title:  Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons from the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Author: Ruskin Bond

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Recently Ruskin Bond turned ninety-two and from the various interviews he has been giving, one finds a single word that recurs in different forms in his interaction with his interviewers and that is ‘solitude.’ The recently published non-fiction book titled Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, captures this solitude and his deep, lifelong love for the Himalayas. It is a gentle, meditative reflection on the changing seasons, nature, and the quiet rhythms of daily life in Landour and Mussoorie, a place that he himself states to be his home for the last sixty-one years.  He had moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time. In the ‘Introduction’ he tells us about how he moved into a cottage called Maplewood Lodge after renting a room from a lady called Ms. Bean and settled for good in these hills. The old and isolated cottage was tucked away in the shadow of a hill, but it brought him close to nature and helped him develop a rapport with it in all seasons. The open window of the small living room exposed him to the forest outside that seemed full of possibilities and the birdsong.

The book is not a novel or a continuous narrative; rather, it is a collection of vignettes, journal entries, and remembered moments.  It allows readers to experience the mountains exactly as Bond does, observing the nuances of the landscape over the course of five distinct seasons. Most of the entries are very brief, the lengthier ones are hardly more than a page in length, but through them Bond manages to give his readers his very close observations of the place as he experiences it through the five different seasons of the year. He divides the book into six parts, and the last part is called ‘The Eternal Season’. Each section begins with a suitable prologue borrowed from the Australian traveller John Lang’s mid-nineteenth century travelogue Wanderings in India (1869), a book which Bond had retrieved from oblivion and edited for the benefit of future readers.

Bond organises his observations into a seasonal framework, detailing the subtle shifts in his environment. In the first section ‘Spring’ we get detailed description of how the first tender leaves appear, bringing a sense of tentative warmth and new beginnings. Through his very perceptive and minute observations, we get visual images of the small birds that arrive to bathe and drink in the little pool beneath the walnut tree, water beetles and tiny fish that lurk in the shallows of the pool. The different varieties of birds that he has observed include two delicate little willow warblers, the whistling thrush, the wild ducks, eagles that fly high on the mountain, the cheeky mynah birds meeting under the eaves of the roof, and sparrows that flutter in and out of the room at will. Spring comes with its varieties of flowers with splashes of colour and Bond rightly describes how “the infection of spring spread simultaneously through the world of nature, and made them one”. The honeybees and butterflies also add to the beauty of the place and as he rightfully states, they do not recognise any “man-made border”.

The vignettes of summer have details of long, insect-filled, sun-drenched days that invite slow walks and quiet afternoons. Summer for Bond “was never entirely solitary”. As he sat in the window seat in his cottage and spent his mornings turning out stories, poems, essays, children’s tales and anything that came to his mind, he looked out upon a sociable gathering of trees that provided a recreation ground for different kinds of birds too. Very evocative descriptions of the mangoes, lichis as the fruits of summer and also the ice cream are drawn from his memories. He writes how as a boy he was engulfed in loneliness, and as a man in solitude. On some mornings when he carried his small table, chair and typewriter outside on to the knoll below one of the oaks, the different birds helped him with his punctuation. For his reflective and descriptive writing, he looked into the distance, at the purple hills merging with the azure sky; or examined a fallen leaf as it spiralled down from the tree and settled on the typewriter keys. The summer sun bathes everything with clear, warm light and the camera-eye of the narrator records everything to the minutest detail. He tells us about other prolific writers who were busy writing their books during this period while he produced not so much as a paragraph.

The monsoon is a defining feature of the hills, bringing mist, heavy downpours, and the lush abundance of the forest. “The first monsoon rain always felt like a beginning,” writes Bond and how this season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas. As the forest dripped and it rang with birdsong, Bond found it always worthwhile tramping through the forest above the stream to feast his eyes on the foliage that sprang up in tropical profusion. He tells us how the rains also heralded some seasonal visitors like leopards and several thousand leeches, and snakes as well as insects like grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas who produced different kinds of music.

When autumn arrives, burnished light, ripening fruit, and a golden hue take over the landscape and according to Bond it is the best time of the year in the hills. Now more than any other time of the year, the wildflowers come into their own and it is the best time for taking long walks. An atmosphere of peace and harmony descends on the hillside, and Bond watches the spectacular sunset as its faint glow spreads across the whitewashed walls of the ageing cottage, as though a part of that spectacular sunset has been left behind only for them. This season also occasionally brings in bears who come to the village to eat pumpkins, flying foxes sweeping across the roads and leopards circling the houses along with dogs. The cool, uplifting autumn breeze always stirred him to the marrow and Bond thought it to be the best aphrodisiac in the world.

Winter brings with it old silences, snow-laden trees, and the beauty of the serene Himalayan peaks against a clear blue sky. During Christmas when it was bitterly cold outside, the blazing wood fire in an old-fashioned fireplace made him enjoy the experience. Again, one day, after being cooped up in his room for several days, he set out for an enjoyable tramp outside in the snow-covered countryside with hardly anyone on the way. He also reminiscences about his school days when he took the train ride from his boarding school in Shimla to come to Dehradun and find occasional snowfall there. He also remembered the first time it snowed in Maplewood. From the windows he could see, up at the top of the hill, the deodars clothed in a mantle of white. “It was a fairyland: everything still and silent.”

The eight selected entries for the last section titled ‘The Eternal Season’ describe the quiet renewal that begins where all endings meet. Here Bond reflects on renewal and the passage of time across sixty years of living in the mountains, examining how the landscape remains wondrous despite changing times. All through his life he says he had been plodding along, singing his song, telling his tales in his own unhurried way and it didn’t matter if he hadn’t managed to get to the top of the mountain. He had lived his life at his own gentle pace and his long walk had brought its own sweet rewards; buttercups and butterflies along the way. He had been observing the natural world—along forest paths, during walks, storms, solitary afternoons, and shared silences.

Thoughtful, attentive and reflective, he offers the seasons not as events to be marked, but as a way of living in time.  In the penultimate entry he states: “In spite of all indications to the contrary, I have survived – as a writer, as an individual, as a breadwinner, as a lover of beauty. So many failure and setbacks along the way; but I suppose my inner stubbornness saw me through… And here I am, ninety-one, my own person, determined to live and love till my last breath.”

This aesthetically produced hard-bound book is not to be read chronologically from beginning to end but can be opened by the reader at leisure from whichever page or season he feels like, and he can go back to it again and again. It is a collector’s delight and also one to be gifted and recommended for anyone who loves to read about Ruskin Bond’s deep and lifelong love for the Himalayas. Bond’s poetic prose can hardly be imitated and some of the spontaneous poems that abound in the collection speak immensely of his ability to cross over genres of prose and poetry with utmost ease. The black and white interior illustrations that abound in the book also add extra charm and help the less-perceptive reader gain better understanding of the particular image or scenery that Bond talks about. One is also fascinated by his exquisite sense of subtle humour, that includes the ability to even laugh at oneself.

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

Click here to read the book excerpt.

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Categories
Poetry

Monsoon Afternoons

By Aardhra Chandran

MONSOON AFTERNOONS

The first heavy drops hit the dry clay tiles,
smacking a cracked blue plastic bucket left out in the yard.
Mud splatters the hem of an old lungi.
Under the veranda, the concrete stays dry and cool.

An old brass vessel catches the steady leak from the eaves,
clinking a slow, uneven rhythm into the small room 
where the fluorescent tube flickers and dies.

A neighbour drops off a bundle of jackfruit chips wrapped in newspaper,
asking when your train leaves, her voice loud against the sudden thunder.
The wet ink bleeds old headlines across her thumb like a bruise.

The smoke of a green mosquito coil rises from a tin plate,
making our eyes smart in the sudden dark.

We sit on the woven mat, measuring the exact inch of cold air
left between our shoulders against the red oxide wall,
waiting for the sky to clear so you can step out,
leaving three flattened stalks of straw unravelling where you sat.

Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Active Muse, Eunoia Review and anthologies, exploring everyday life and quiet emotional spaces.

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Categories
Review

Celebrating the Monsoon

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon

Author: Stephen Alter

Publisher: Aleph Book Company  

Stephen Alter has long established himself as one of India’s finest chroniclers of landscape, memory, and the natural world. In The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon, he turns his attention to the phenomenon that has shaped the subcontinent more profoundly than perhaps any other force of nature—the monsoon. The result is a richly textured work that combines travel writing, environmental history, natural science, and cultural reflection into a compelling narrative that celebrates India’s most anticipated season.

At its heart, the book is a journey. Alter traces the progress of the monsoon from the southern coast of Kerala through the Western Ghats, the forests of Goa, the plains of North India, and the mist-covered hills of Mussoorie. Yet this is not merely a geographical expedition. It is also an exploration of the countless ways in which rain has influenced the lives, livelihoods, imagination, and history of the people of the Indian subcontinent. The monsoon emerges not simply as a weather system but as a civilisational force that has determined agricultural cycles, guided maritime trade, nurtured ecosystems, inspired artistic expression, and shaped political destinies.

A key strength of the book is Alter’s ability to weave together diverse strands of knowledge without losing narrative momentum. He moves effortlessly from meteorology to mythology, from ecology to economics, from history to literature. Readers encounter perfumers in Kannauj who preserve the scent of rain in tiny bottles, fishermen who read the skies with remarkable precision, scientists tracking elusive amphibians and glowing fungi, and artists whose works reflect humanity’s enduring fascination with clouds and storms. These encounters lend the book a vibrant human dimension and prevent it from becoming a purely academic study.

The prose is among the finest aspects of the work. He writes with the sensitivity of a naturalist and the observational acuity of a seasoned traveller. His descriptions of rain-laden landscapes are evocative without becoming sentimental. Whether portraying the first monsoon clouds gathering over the Arabian Sea or the dense mist enveloping Himalayan ridges, he captures the sensory richness of the season with remarkable clarity. Readers can almost smell the damp earth, hear the distant thunder, and feel the coolness that follows a long spell of summer heat.

The title itself points to one of the book’s central concerns: the emotional and sensory experience of rain. Alter understands that the monsoon occupies a unique place in the Indian imagination. It is a season associated with longing and fulfilment, romance and renewal, abundance and uncertainty. Across centuries, poets, musicians, painters, and storytellers have celebrated its arrival. The author explores these cultural representations with insight, demonstrating how the monsoon has become a recurring metaphor for transformation, desire, and hope.

At the same time, The Fragrance of Rain does not romanticise its subject. Alter acknowledges the monsoon’s unpredictability and its capacity for destruction. Floods, landslides, crop failures, and storms are integral to the story. As climate change intensifies weather extremes, the monsoon has become increasingly erratic, raising urgent questions about environmental sustainability and human resilience. Without becoming alarmist, the author highlights these concerns and encourages readers to appreciate the delicate balance upon which ecosystems and communities depend.

The book also succeeds as a work of environmental writing because of its deep attention to biodiversity. Alter’s fascination with wildlife and natural habitats is evident throughout. His encounters with rare species and fragile ecosystems reveal a world that thrives because of seasonal rainfall yet remains vulnerable to ecological disruption. These passages add depth and reinforce the idea that the monsoon is not merely a climatic event but a life-giving process that sustains countless forms of existence.

The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging. Stephen Alter has produced a work that is informative, beautifully written, and deeply engaging. By blending personal observation with historical and ecological insight, he reminds us that the monsoon remains one of India’s most powerful and defining experiences. Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact—a rewarding read for anyone interested in India, nature, or the intricate relationship between climate and civilisation.

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

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Categories
Essay

One Soul, Two Seas

By Charudutta Panigrahi

Goa
Odisha
From Public Domain

There is a cartographic trick that India plays on the careless observer. Place a finger on Goa, cradled in the lap of the Western Ghats where the Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. Now drag that finger clean across the peninsula — past the Deccan plateau, past the red laterite and the black cotton soil — until it arrives at Odisha, where the Mahanadi fans into the Bay of Bengal. The distance is vast. The terrain changes several times over. And yet, when you finally arrive, you feel, inexplicably, that you have not travelled at all. You have merely walked from one room of the same house into another.

Goa and Odisha are India’s fraternal twins, stationed like sentinels on opposite coasts, facing outward toward different oceans but turning inward toward an almost identical soul. They share no border, no common neighbour, no obvious historical corridor. And yet their resemblances are so startling, so layered, that they make a quiet mockery of the assumption that east and west shall never meet. In this country, at least, they have been meeting all along.

The Plate That Speaks First

Begin where all honest cultural inquiry must begin — at the table. In both Goa and Odisha, the grammar of a meal is written in two words: rice and fish. The xitt-kodi of a Goan Catholic household — rice with fish curry — is a mirror image of the bhata-machha that anchors every Odia thali. The curry leaves may change, the tamarind may yield to kokum, but the fundamental covenant between grain and sea remains unbroken.

Both states worship the coconut with equal fervour. It thickens their gravies, sweetens their desserts, oils their hair, and thatches their roofs. And in both places, the humble samosa — that deep-fried triangle of spiced potato — enjoys a curious and disproportionate celebrity, sold at every bus stand, every temple gate, every rain-drenched evening stall, as if it were the official snack of the coastline itself.

Weavers of Light

If food is the first language, cloth is the second. Odisha’s handloom tradition is among the most sophisticated in the world. The Sambalpuri ikat, with its geometric precision born of a tie-and-dye technique older than memory, is a textile that calculates like mathematics and sings like poetry. The Bomkai of Ganjam, the Kotpad of Koraput — each weave carries a district’s autobiography in its warp and weft.

Goa’s handloom heritage is no less poignant. The Kunbi saree, woven by the indigenous Kunbi community in checks of red and maroon, is a garment of earthy defiance — a refusal to vanish beneath the weight of colonial and commercial textile culture. In both states, the handloom is not an industry. It is an act of inheritance.

The handicraft traditions run parallel with uncanny symmetry. Odisha’s Pattachitra — those luminous scroll paintings rendered on cloth with pigments drawn from stone, earth, and lamp-black — find a philosophical cousin in Goa’s azulejos-inspired tile art and the painted terracotta work of its hinterlands. Odisha’s silver filigree from Cuttack, those impossibly intricate webs of metal that seem to have been spun by patient spiders, speak the same aesthetic dialect as the filigree and brass work of Goan artisans.

Temples, Tides, and the Slow Pulse

Both states are drenched in divinity. Odisha shelters the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose Rath Yatra rolls through the world’s imagination every year, and the Konark Sun Temple, a stone chariot frozen mid-gallop toward the dawn. The Lingaraj Temple of Bhubaneswar presides over a city that was once a forest of a thousand shrines. Goa, often misread as merely a beach destination, guards some of the oldest Hindu temples in western India — the Mangeshi Temple, the Shanta Durga Temple, the Mahalasa Narayani, the Tambdi Surla — alongside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in baroque silence. In both states, the sacred is not a Sunday affair. It is the air.

And then there is the pace. Both Goa and Odisha move at a tempo that the hyperventilating metros of India find baffling. The Goan susegad — that philosophy of contented ease — is a first cousin of the unhurried dignity with which Odisha conducts its daily life. Long before the global “slow living” movement became a wellness-industry buzzword, these two states had been practising it for centuries, not as aspiration but as instinct.

Songs in Different Scales

The musical traditions reveal yet another layer of kinship. Odisha gave the world Odissi — both the dance and the music — a classical tradition of astonishing fluidity, shaped by poets like Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda remains one of the supreme lyric achievements in any language. The folk traditions — Dalkhai, Gotipua, the tribal Dhemsa — pulse with a rhythmic vitality that no concert hall can contain.

Goa’s musical soul lives in the Mando, a slow, swaying ballad of love and longing born from the encounter between Konkani sensibility and Portuguese fado. The Dulpod, faster and more festive, is its playful sibling. And beneath the tourist-facing trance and EDM, Goa’s folk traditions — Fugdi, Dhalo, Dekhni — carry the same rooted, communal energy that Odisha’s village squares have known for generations.

Goa’s Tiatr and Odisha’s Jatra are born of the same impulse — raucous, deeply local theatre traditions that turn village squares into stages, blend music with social satire, and have for generations served as the people’s newspaper, courtroom, and concert hall rolled into one.

The Literary Mirror

The literary parallels are quietly profound. Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia literature, wrote Chha Mana Atha Guntha — a searing, ironic novella about land, power, and peasant dispossession — in the 1890s. Across the map, Goa’s literary tradition in Konkani, shaped by figures like Bakibab Borkar (the poet-laureate of Konkani verse), Ravindra Kelekar, and Damodar Mauzo, has grappled with similar themes of identity, colonial memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Odisha’s Pratibha Ray and Goa’s Mauzo — both Jnanpith laureates — wrote in languages the literary mainstream often overlooks, yet carved from Odia and Konkani respectively a body of work so luminous that the nation’s highest literary honour had no choice but to find its way to their doors. Both literatures are enormous in depth and criminally under-read outside their states.

Even the economies rhyme. Both states sit on vast mineral wealth — iron ore in Goa, iron ore, bauxite and coal in Odisha — and both have built significant chapters of their economic story on extraction. Mining has been, for decades, a genuine engine of revenue and employment. But prosperity extracted from the earth exacts its own price. Both states have watched hills reshaped and rivers thickened with slurry, and both have grappled with the same difficult question that every resource-rich society must eventually face: where does sustainable use end and irreversible damage begin? The Dongria Kondh resistance in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills and Goa’s prolonged civic movement against unregulated mining are stories of communities recognising that the wealth beneath their feet should not come at the cost of the world above it. In both states, the mandate is the same: to mine responsibly, restore what can be restored, and find an economic imagination that honours both the ledger and the landscape.

Stone, Laterite, and the Architecture of Belonging

The buildings of Goa and Odisha could not, at first glance, look more different. Odisha’s architectural glory resides in the Kalinga style of temple building — a tradition that flowered between the sixth and thirteenth centuries and produced some of the most breathtaking sacred structures on the subcontinent. The Rekha Deula, with its curvilinear tower soaring heavenward, the Pidha Deula, with its stepped pyramid, and the barrel-vaulted Khakhara Deula — each is a masterclass in proportion, carved from sandstone and laterite without a drop of mortar, held together by iron dowels and the sheer precision of stone cut to stone. The Lingaraj Temple rises a hundred and eighty feet; the Sun Temple at Konark was conceived as a stone chariot for Surya himself.

Goa’s architectural signature, meanwhile, is the Indo-Portuguese house — the balcão-fronted villa with its oyster-shell windows, its Baroque churches, its colour-washed facades in ochre and cerulean and terracotta. Where Odisha built upward in devotion, Goa built outward in conviviality.

And yet the kinship runs deeper than surface style. Both traditions are rooted in laterite — that rust-red, iron-rich stone quarried from the earth itself — and in an instinctive dialogue between structure and climate. Goan houses, whether Hindu or Catholic, were designed around the monsoon: thick laterite walls to absorb the heat, sloping roofs of Mangalore tile to shed the deluge, courtyards to channel light and air. The traditional Hindu house in Goa, with its rajangan (courtyard) and its Tulasi Vrindavan (holy basil) at its centre, is an inward-looking sanctuary not unlike the courtyard homes of rural Odisha, where domestic life orbits an open-air heart and thatched or tiled roofs slope against the same seasonal fury. In both states, the house is not merely shelter. It is a cosmology — oriented by Vastu[1], shaped by rain, and built from the very ground on which it stands.

The Sacred as Daily Bread

Spirituality in Goa and Odisha is not a compartment of life; it is the wallpaper. In Odisha, they say Bara Masa re Tera Parba — thirteen festivals in twelve months — and this is not hyperbole but arithmetic. From Rath Yatra to Raja Parba, from Nuakhai to Kumar Purnima, the Odia calendar is a procession of devotion, agriculture, and communal joy so tightly woven that one cannot tell where worship ends and daily life begins. The festivals are tied to the rice cycle — seeding, sowing, harvesting — so that the act of farming itself becomes a prayer. Odisha is a land where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have coexisted and cross-pollinated for millennia, leaving behind the cave monasteries of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, the Buddhist stupas of Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri, and the Shakti temples that dot the landscape like exclamation marks of feminine divinity.

Goa answers with its own brand of sacred pluralism. Here, Hindus light candles at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Catholics offer prayers at the Shantadurga temple at Fatorpa. The feast of Our Lady of Miracles gathers both communities under the same roof, exchanging oil and candles between church and temple as naturally as neighbours exchange sugar. The Zagor celebrations and the Shigmo festival are not Hindu events attended by Christians out of politeness; they are Goan events, full stop. In both states, religion is not a doctrine to be debated but a rhythm to be lived — embedded in the morning’s first lamp, the evening’s last bell, and every meal served between.

The Farmer and the Monsoon

Rice is not merely the staple food of Goa and Odisha; it is the organising principle of their rural civilisations. In Odisha, paddy covers nearly seventy per cent of cultivated land, and the entire social calendar revolves around its seasons — Akshaya Tritiya marks the seeding, Raja Sankranti the completion of sowing, Nuakhai the first tasting of the new harvest. The traditional beushening method — broadcasting seed and then tilling post-emergence — speaks of a farming intelligence shaped by centuries of reading the monsoon, the soil, and the floodplain.

In Goa, the ingenuity takes another form: the Khazan system, an ancient network of bunds and sluice gates that reclaim low-lying coastal land from the tides, allowing farmers to cultivate salt-tolerant rice varieties and rear fish and prawns in the same fields. It is an act of ecological engineering so elegant that modern agronomists study it as a model of sustainable land use.

Both states grow coconut, cashew, and areca nut alongside their paddy. Both rely overwhelmingly on the monsoon — Odisha’s irrigation covers barely a third of its cultivable land, and much of Goa’s paddy is rainfed. Both are lands of small and marginal farmers, where the average holding is modest and the relationship between cultivator and earth is intimate, personal, and unmediated by large-scale mechanisation. And in both states, a quiet revolution is underway: Odisha’s Millets Mission and Goa’s growing organic farming movement are attempts to reclaim indigenous crop diversity from the grip of high-yield monoculture — to remember that the land, like the people, thrives best when it is allowed its full vocabulary.

The Playing Field

In a nation drunk on cricket, Goa and Odisha are the two states that have had the audacity to fall in love with other sports. Goa is India’s football heartland. The game arrived with an Irish priest in 1883 and never left. Clubs like Salgaocar, Dempo, and Churchill Brothers have won national titles; six Goans have captained the Indian football team. During the FIFA World Cup, Goan streets erupt into a carnival of flags and giant screens, and the village tournament — barefoot boys on a laterite pitch — remains as sacred as Sunday Mass. Football in Goa is not a sport. It is an identity.

Odisha’s sporting soul beats to a different drum — the hockey stick. The state has produced legends like Dilip Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Sunita Lakra, and Deep Grace Ekka, and became the first state government in India to sponsor the national hockey team. The Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, which hosted the 2023 World Cup, is a monument to Odisha’s commitment. But what unites both states is not the particular sport but the underlying defiance: a refusal to accept cricket’s monopoly on the Indian sporting imagination.

Both states also share a love for traditional and community games — Kho Kho and Kabaddi [2] are played at village festivals in both, and both have ISL football franchises (FC Goa and Odisha FC) that draw passionate, roaring crowds. The playing field, it turns out, is yet another room in the same house.

Rivers, Mangroves, and the Shared Ecology

The ecological parallels between these two states are no less striking. Both are coastal, riverine, and monsoon-fed. Both shelter significant mangrove ecosystems — the Khazan mangroves along Goa’s estuaries and the Bhitarkanika mangrove forests of Odisha, one of the largest in India. Both are biodiversity hotspots: Goa’s Western Ghats forests are a UNESCO heritage site, while Odisha’s Simlipal and Satkosia reserves harbour tiger, elephant, and crocodile populations of national importance. The Olive Ridley sea turtles that nest on Odisha’s Gahirmatha beach have cousins that occasionally visit Goa’s Morjim. Both states understand, in their bones, that the sea is not merely a border but a livelihood, a deity, and a defining force — and that the mangrove, the estuary, and the fishing village are not the periphery of civilisation but its very foundation.

And then there is the matter of diaspora. Both Goa and Odisha are states whose people have scattered across the world yet remain fiercely tethered to home. The Goan communities of Bombay, the Gulf, the UK and Lisbon mirror the Odia communities of US, Europe, Surat, Hyderabad, and beyond. In both cases, the expatriate carries the cuisine, the festival calendar, and the mother tongue like a portable homeland — and returns, without fail, for the annual feast or the harvest celebration, as though the umbilical cord to the village were made not of flesh but of something altogether more durable.

Goa and Odisha do not need a bridge between them. They already are the bridge — two ends of a single cultural arc that bends across the Indian landmass, proving that civilisational kinship does not require geographical proximity. They are proof that identity in India is not merely a function of latitude and longitude but of something deeper: a shared covenant with the sea, with rice, with the loom, with the slow and sacred act of living.

If India is a house with many rooms, these two states are the twin balconies — one facing the sunset, the other the sunrise — built from the same stone, painted in the same light, listening to the same tide.

East and West do not merely meet here. They embrace.

[1] science of architecture in alignment with natural forces

[2] Local community games which involve teams

Charudutta Panigrahi writes on culture, geography, and the quiet connections that maps forget to draw.

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

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

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

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Excerpt

Burnout Highway

Title: Burnout Highway

Author: Anmol Diddan

The Education System

Think about a time when you felt stuck or stifled with the options that your professional path presented. Do you remember your general thoughts and emotions at the time? What expectations did you have when you started on that path? Do you wish you could go back and change some choices you made along the way?

I’ve felt this “stuckness” many times through the various stages of my career as a generalist, evaluating different paths, most recently when I secured permanent residency in the US after a 14-month hiatus of being unable to work in America. I was faced with the choice of taking my career in a different direction or trying to rejoin the corporate path where I left off.

During such ponderings, I’ve usually been able to break my feelings down into an expectations versus reality equation. While I’m sure that isn’t the most insightful thing you’ve heard, think about why the mismatch between that expectation and reality might have occurred in your own life. It is because the expectations you had of your path in two, five, ten, or twenty years, and the reality of that path, in terms of your own perception of reward and fulfillment, don’t match. Thinking of your life as a predefined path, with milestones and comparisons, makes you constantly ponder over this existential expectation versus reality equation, steeped in arbitrary milestones. The challenge, especially in this modern world obsessed with exceptionalism, is that our paths offer the false promise of infinite possibility and underestimate the reality of finite choices.

The Pressure to be on a Path

Remember that favorite interview question we’ve all asked or been asked: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Now think about yourself, your industry, or the job you did five years ago. Has all of that changed beyond recognition? The job I did as recently as 2016 is now basically done by a button. Software developers, who commanded the highest-paying jobs till only a few years ago, are being rapidly challenged by AI or scrambling to become AI engineers, reduced to supervisory roles. Subscriptions as a primary business model, for example, was only adopted in the last five years or so. AI wasn’t a word in the public consciousness till 2023, and today, we’re told we should let it run our lives, from making us breakfast to writing our resumes and picking candidates for jobs!

So, if companies themselves do not know their paths, why is there that pressure on individuals? Based on my own experience, that interview question itself is ill-advised. Someone who is extremely sure of their path, despite knowing how rapidly their context may evolve, is already a bit stifled.

This stifling, myopic path, especially if you’re not fulfilled by it, again brings with it a sense of constant jadedness and exhaustion. It is that exhaustion, coupled with a perceived lack of agency over your path, that eventually manifests as full-blown burnout. Being flexible and adaptable, and rebuilding agency over your own skills are key to building long-term careers today, especially in a time when the AI, internet, and gig economy is truly enabling infinite possibilities at an individual level.

While human beings need structure in their lives, society starts laying out that structure for us from the moment we barely attain consciousness, not leaving too much room for exploration. Remember that question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I’m guilty of asking this question myself to my nine-year-old niece. She insists she wants to be a vet, which is adorable. I think I wanted to be a cricketer back then. Those questions gave me and my niece structure to explore our personalities, but had I stuck to that path, given the context of my life (my state didn’t even have a team back then), I probably wouldn’t have made a career out of it!

As a 16-year-old, I could have never imagined living in four countries, traveling to over 60 countries marrying an American woman, and attaining financial independence, all before or around 30 years of age. And I am so glad I had the openness to explore divergent paths while still committing to a fairly traditional corporate path. Metaphorically speaking, I knew that I wanted to sail west in the Atlantic, but I was open to landing in Brazil, Mexico, the US, or Canada. That openness has enabled me to start afresh, after 11 years at Google, through this book, and through a coaching and workplace culture consultancy, WideWorldView.com, while continuing to positively engage with the corporate world.

While predefined paths are great to give our expeditions structure, we still need to adjust our sails as per the direction of the winds and currents. As a society, we are too eager to forcefit people into paths, generally very early in life. Thinking about your life and identity as one thing or one path stifles you from exploring all other potentially more fulfilling identities. Despite the rapid changes in societal structures and expectations, the corporate ladder is still largely not set up for individuals to be able to adjust their sails to changing winds, without making radical shifts in course. What if these paths that society puts us on and we often unquestionably follow weren’t meant for us at all?

What if we followed those paths because we constantly felt a stifling opportunity cost? What if those paths were designed to stifle innovation and exploration at a personal level? And what if the expectations our paths set for us were never based in reality? Who made us feel that these paths were the only ones we had? The answer is largely rooted in our modern education system, which is designed to prioritize “getting a job” over self-discovery.

ABOUT THE BOOK

You know the feeling: chronic workplace stress along with a nagging sense of ineffectiveness. That’s burnout. Burnout Highway demystifies this increasingly collective suffering by exploring the larger context that runs all our lives—the systems within which we make decisions, the milestones we were taught to desire, and the feelings of fulfillment we thought they would provide.

From pursuing grades and achievements to landing ‘dream jobs,’ the India Shining generation was promised a clear and straightforward path to success. However, this journey can feel exhausting, especially with India ranking among the countries with the longest working hours and the highest rates of burnout.

Anmol examines how societal conditioning, corporate ladder dynamics, and economic pressures influence our work and presents readers with a systematic framework for navigating the challenges of burnout while fostering the development of fulfilling and emotionally sustainable careers. This is an invitation to prioritize work that aligns with your values and addresses your emotional well-being, ultimately helping you break the cycle of burnout.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anmol Diddan is an advocate for emotionally sustainable careers and the founder of World Wide View. Raised Sikh in the complex geopolitics of the Northeast, Anmol spent his early years in Shillong before moving to Mumbai at sixteen to study Economics; an experience that exposed him to both the promise and pressure of ambition in modern India. His thirst for learning through experiences led him to a global career in behavioural and cultural research, working with Google across India, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. Now based in New York City, he draws on his dynamic background to explore how the intersection of economics, psychology, and culture affects all our lives, with a focus on wellbeing in the modern workplace. He works 1:1 to help professionals tackle burnout and career transitions, all across the world.

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

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

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

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pandies' corner

Songs of Freedom: Pink Dreams

A real life narrative by Priyanka (pseudonym), written and compiled by Deeksha Vats

Songs of Freedom bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.

–Sanjay Kumar, founder, pandies’1

Savoury samosas. From Public Domain

I loved eating samosas, always. I must have been 15 years, or younger. I cannot recall anymore. But samosas were always my favourite. And chocolates. Chocolates were always the best. I couldn’t do without them. That was my pink dream, nothing more, nothing less. A husband who would take care of me, a child I could love more than my life, a happy family, and some chocolates in the mix. 

I am Priyanka. I must have about fifteen years old when my mother told me that I could not go to school anymore. I wasn’t the best student or particularly fond of learning, but I knew that school was important and would do me good. But we needed more money at home, and someone had to work. Well, I was the one chosen to get the money, while my brothers continued to study. I was happy to help, but what I didn’t know at that time was that I was being discriminated against. Why? Because I am a woman. What started in my teenage, hasn’t stopped even today after all these years. 

I was happy to have a job. I had something to do. It was good work. All I had to do was cook and clean for a family that turned out to be quite wonderful. They were great to me, treated me like family. One day when didi[1] went to her parents’ house, her husband touched me inappropriately. I had just gotten my period. It was celebrated like a festival, and he knew it. He tried doing more than just touching me at places I did not like. And I was afraid something bad would happen.

When didi came back, I told her that I wanted to go back home. She asked me why. I did not want to break her heart but I burst out crying when she continued to insist. I was taken back home, given chocolates, and asked to keep my mouth shut. Their reputation was at stake, and my parents got what they had needed as barter. 

I was glad to be back home. Living with the people I loved was getting tougher by the day. But the happiness didn’t last long. I was sent away to another home in the city to work at and this time I accepted it as my own home. Auntie, whom I looked after, was gentle and had welcomed me like family. They were good times. I made money, saved some, and bought furniture for my home back in our village. And soon after I found a boy I fell in love with. 

It was a beautiful feeling. I had never felt that way before. It was as if butterflies had decided to make a home in my heart, fluttering every moment of the day. Not a minute went by when I did not think of him. Every time he came to auntie’s house, he would ring the bell of his bicycle. I would rush to the gate and every time I looked at him my heart jumped. It was magical. 

Life was getting better with each passing day. One good news after another, and I couldn’t believe I was the recipient of all this joy. My family had begun to feel the need to find me a husband. They found a boy and it was time for us to meet. I did not know how to feel or what to do. I was in love with another man. It so happened that the man my family had found for me was the same man I was in love with. That day my happiness had no limits. 

We got married in no time and built a beautiful life together. It was like a dream come true. Soon enough we had a daughter together. My husband was everything a woman could ever ask for. He was loyal, cared for me, loved me, and understood me. He was happy to just let me be. I was finally free. Free to live my life on my own terms. 

I started glowing, started smiling more. I made new friends, one of whom I grew particularly close to. He understood me too. Steadily enough he became my confidante. I could talk to him, hang out with him, sometimes even drink with him. And my husband, the lovely man I loved more than my life, never objected. What more could I have asked for? 

Life was good, when one day everything came crashing down. I found a nude photograph of myself on social media. It was visible to my entire family including my husband. His heart broke. My friend had laced a drink, taken a nude photograph of me, and posted it online. I begged him to take it down, I offered him every penny I had, but he refused. I wept bitterly. I told my husband that I had been tricked and that I had never even touched this man, but he refused to believe me. My husband, the love of my life, beat me and turned me out. Before I could even realise, I was ordered to not see my daughter. I did not have a family anymore. 

When I came back to my mother’s home, I was blamed for what I had never done. I was punished for trusting a man whom I called a friend. The only solution now was to marry him instead. I was married off again to a man who was responsible for shattering my home, for breaking my hopes and dreams into tiny pieces. I did not know how to feel, all I knew was that I had to accept it in order to survive. 

His family had no love for me. Taunts were served on a platter, through the day. I was always hungry. Every member of their family had a job, but their financial troubles were endless. And I was always hungry. It had been ages since I even saw samosas. I did not want another child. Life wasn’t the same anymore. However, before I could even process everything, I was pregnant again. Even in that vulnerable state, I was always hungry. I dreamt of my favourite food. I craved to eat. I had never slept on a hungry stomach before. But here, in this home of strangers, enough food was a distant dream. I would call my brother, sometimes even my first husband and beg them to send me money just so I could eat a little more than usual. They were gracious enough, and I could buy my samosas every once in a while. 

I did not want my child to be born. I wished to run away once it was born. I would have dreams of abandoning it and escaping. How would I love a child I had never wanted? When I was in labour, I had nobody by my side. I called my husband, the man I had always loved, but he did not want to see me anymore. I found out he had blocked my phone number. My pain meant nothing to him anymore. I was heartbroken, in pain and hungry, with a child on the way. 

My little boy came into the world. It was hard for me to love him. My new husband’s family had become crueler. Once when I talked back to my mother-in-law on my own birthday, my husband beat me black and blue. Once the beating started, it never stopped. Every few days, I would have a swollen lip, a bruised eye, an aching arm. 

Life had become intolerable. I wanted to end it. I had no family, no home. Then one night I dreamt of a pink garden — a garden where dreams still came true, where love did not have to be begged for. When I woke up, I lifted my child in my arms and walked away in search of my garden, to realise my pink dreams. Ever since I left, I haven’t looked back. The search for my garden continues, my pink dreams seem near, my heart has not felt lighter, and my spirit is finally free.  

[1] Elder sister – used to show respect to the employer 

Priyanka (pseudonym), a 28-year-old survivor of intimate partner violence, is originally from northeast India. She had been living with her partner and his family in Bihar, where she experienced violence and abuse. Lacking a support system in Bihar, she sought assistance from Shaktishalini and accessed a safe shelter. Subsequently, she reconciled with her partner and relocated to Madhya Pradesh to live with him.

  1.  “Establishing itself as a premier women’s organisation in India from 1987, Shaktishalini has spread out and deals with all kinds of gender based violence. A shelter home, a helpline and more than that a stunning activist passion are the hallmarks of this organisation. 
    “pandies and Shaktishalini – different in terms of the work they do but firmly aligned in terms of ideological beliefs and where they stand and  speak from. It goes back to 1996 when members of the theatre group went to the Shaktishalini office to research on (Dayan Hatya) witch burning for a production and got the chance to learn from the iconic leaders of Shaktishalini, Apa Shahjahan and Satya Rani Chadha. And collaborative theatre and theatre therapy goes back there. It is a mutual learning space that has survived over 25 years. Collaborative and interactive, this space creates anti-patriarchal and anti-communal street and proscenium performances and provides engaging workshop theatre with survivors of domestic and societal patriarchal violence. Many times we have sat together till late night, in small or large groups debating what constitutes violence? Or what would be gender equality in practical, real terms? These and many such questions will be raised in the stories that follow.” — Sanjay Kumar ↩︎
    ↩︎

Deeksha Vats is a Delhi-based theatre practitioner, writer, performer, and lighting designer. As programmer and producer at Serendipity Arts Foundation, she creates and supports diverse artistic collaborations.

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

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

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