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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Somdatta Mandal explores six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali andBrajbuli 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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When the word ‘Partition’ is mentioned, it is always assumed to refer to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In fact, the Partition of the British Raj occurred five times.
Not so long ago, as recently as 1928, a vast expanse of land from Aden in the West to Rangoon in the east was united as the Indian Empire, all under British rule. It was the zenith of the British Empire, and it seemed the sun would never set on the Empire. A quarter of the world’s population lived here, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia, and they all used the Indian rupee. One would travel across the span with an Indian passport. By 1971, in just 40 years, this Empire had been shattered five times, resulting in 12 nation-states.
We should learn to tell stories by listening to how housewives gossip. They narrate intimate personal stories about their neighbours, with vivid detail, as if they were there in the target’s bedroom. It becomes more believable when real characters are added. The same advice applies to telling history, his-story. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia does exactly that. A dry subject like history is turned into an unputdownable book by giving human faces to the people making difficult decisions at the administrative level and to those who have to bear the brunt of those decisions. Perhaps the author’s filmmaking background pushed him towards this style. That makes it very engaging.
The author, Samuel Hew Tantallon Darymple, is a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, as well as a historian, author, activist, and social media influencer. He co-founded Project Dastaan[1], a peace-building initiative that uses digital technology to reconnect people displaced by the 1947 Partition of India with their childhood communities and villages.
The five Partitions mentioned in this book are: the separation of Burma from India in 1937; the reclassification of Aden as a British protectorate; the formation of Pakistan; the dissolution of the 550-odd princely states; and, finally, a bloody civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh.
The Indian idea of ‘Bharat’ is traditionally shaped by the ancient Hindu geography of Bharatvarsha, a triangular landmass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Notably, Afghanistan, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Burma, known as Brahmadesh (Land of Brahma), do not fall within this framework. The city of Kandahar in Afghanistan is apparently named after Gandhari, the blindfolded matriarch of the Kaurava clan.
After the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, calls for self-governance grew louder. To pacify the Indian public, the Crown sent a group of seven, known as the Simon Commission[2], in 1928 to implement constitutional reforms. It did nothing to advance Indian independence but demarcated Burma as a territory quite separate from British India, and its inclusion in India was an error.
Coincidentally, this was the aftermath of the 1928 Depression. Before this, Burma was a melting pot of cultures. Its capital, Rangoon, one of the busiest commercial cities in Asia, was labelled the ‘Paris of the East’. It is said that in 1920, there were more traders in Burma than in New York. Rangoon port was an important harbour for the export of rice, teak and petroleum. Its banking services drew people from many regions. It was a multilingual and multicultural city, shaped by large-scale migration. People were heard speaking Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marwari, Urdu, Chinese, English, and other languages.
The turn of the economic tide and the disparity in economic status between the ethnic Burmese and the sojourners sparked a series of unrest. The Chettiars and Bengali houses and shops were targeted. Indians were systematically excluded from Burma, forcing rich traders to become refugees and make a beeline for India. This long march over the Patkai hills to India became a feature again as Japanese soldiers (and the Indian National Army under Bose) advanced during World War 2. The experiences of Mariappan, a Tamil shopkeeper who fled to Tamil Nadu to start anew in Burma because of his lowly caste, and had to run again because of Burmese nationalism, are heart-wrenching. Then there is Uttam Singh, who had to endure a treacherous long march home to Punjab across the hills. Losing everything, it was a miracle that he and his family made it in one piece. Little snippets like these are the real reasons this book grows on readers.
Caught in the middle are the Naga people, whose land lies precariously between Burma and India. Although its leaders rallied for an independent Naga state, a fifth of the region fell under Burmese control. For decades to come, insurgency remained an issue. On April 1st 1937, Burma was carved out of British India, leaving many unanswered questions and triggering years of attempts to usurp power within Burma, followed by years of military rule and turmoil.
After its capture by the British East India Company, Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency. It was an important coal station for ships. The administrators regarded Arabs as fundamentally different from Indians. To increase efficiency, the British decided in 1937 to rule the port of Aden as a British colony and its hinterland as a protectorate, much to the dismay of many in the Indian community there. The rise of Arab nationalism that followed, with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who promoted Arab patriotism, meant the former Arabian Raj kingdom would no longer be associated with Indians. Indians, once regarded as cultured and civilised, were soon viewed as competitors. By the late 1950s, a reverse exodus began. Indians with deep roots in these Arab lands, including property, businesses, and connections, had to flee helter-skelter back to India and the UK. The Ambanis were one such family affected by this.
Although Jinnah initially joined the Indian National Congress, his affiliation with the Muslim League grew stronger as he felt that Gandhi was leading the party and the nation towards a more Hindu-centric direction. The way the Congress conducted its meetings was as if they were at a religious ceremony, with chanting of mantras and singing of religious hymns. Muslims began to question how they would be treated in an independent India with Congress at the helm of power. Even though Jinnah appeared as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity, later events propelled him and other Muslims to push for a two-state solution for post-independent India.
In a way, as Gandhi promoted his Hindu agenda, the Burmese, with their Buddhist practice, also increasingly felt more detached from India, further fuelling Burmese nationalism.
The post-WW2 era saw many changes in India. Britain was in debt, and the push for independence and a separate nation for Muslims was in full force. The third Partition was about to take place, but it was preceded by mindless killings and violence in the areas destined to be part of Pakistan. The Bengal region witnessed brutality on Direct Action Day, led by Suhrawardy and his acolyte, Mujibur Rahman, who would later be instrumental in the formation of Bangladesh. Things were no better in Punjab. The confusion created by Radcliffe’s arbitrary carving of the country left people unsure which country they belonged to, even one month after the ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.
There was then a scramble to recruit the 550-plus princely states to join Pakistan or India, or to stand alone. This was the 4th Partition. Recruitment reached feverish heights in states such as Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Junagadh housed two sacred Hindu sites, Dwarka and Somnath, but was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Kashmir had a Hindu king, but his subjects were predominantly Muslims. The situation was reversed in Hyderabad.
The shattered subcontinent of India has been in constant flux even after attaining self-rule. It has to deal with internal squabbles and hostile neighbours. The situation becomes complicated as the world divides itself into the blue corner of capitalism and the red corner of communism. Marxism and Maoist ideology spread across its states, creating skirmishes here and there.
Pakistan, too, had its own problems. The insistence on using Urdu as the national language was not taken lightly by the Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis. The discord reached a tipping point in 1971, when the Bengali Awami League won the Pakistani elections. Civil war broke out when West Pakistani leaders refused to accept the election results. India sent in its troops to squash West Pakistan’s army and effectively completed the Fifth Partition, the creation of the country of Bangladesh.
The recurring theme throughout the book is that people continue to help one another, regardless of the day’s political climate. Despite ideological differences, people help people. The book highlights numerous heart-stirring accounts of the extraordinary resilience and compassion of everyday people. These ‘unity in diversity’ stories emerge from small acts of kindness that transcend religious, social, and economic boundaries.
It remains to be debated by future historians whether the colonial masters can be blamed for shattering the land that spanned the Arabian Gulf to Southeast Asia. Given the insatiable appetite of human greed for land, wealth and power, are these sequelae inevitable anyway?
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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I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
By Percy Shelley, 'Ozymandias', 1819 edition
The real world spark for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” wasn’t purely poetic imagination but it was archaeological gossip with excellent comedic timing. In 1816, news reached England that a colossal granite bust of Ramesses II, often referred to as the Younger Memnon, (aka Ozymandias by the Greeks) had been unearthed in Egypt and was on its way to London. The statue was enormous, ancient, and very much not intact. Broken, battered, and missing key pieces, it arrived less like a triumphant relic and more like history’s version of a “before” photo gone permanently unanswered. Shelley, never one to miss an opportunity for philosophical irony, saw exactly where this was going.
Ramesses II, after all, was not a man known for moderation. His titles alone read like a LinkedIn profile written without character limits. One of them, “King of Kings”, was inscribed on the pedestal of the very statue now showing up in London looking like it had lost an argument with time itself. Shelley translated that title straight into the poem, ensuring that Ozymandias’s voice would echo loudly, right before being undercut completely.
At its core, “Ozymandias” is what happens when an ancient ruler commissions the Bronze Age equivalent of a massive Instagram flex, and time responds by absolutely ratioing it.
The poem opens with a traveller recounting what sounds suspiciously like the least glamorous vacation slideshow imaginable. Instead of sunsets or souvenirs, we’re given ruins in a desert. Not even dignified ruins, either, just two giant legs standing awkwardly in the sand and a shattered face lying nearby. This is not the kind of monument that inspires awe so much as mild concern. If this were a modern tourist site, it would come with a plaque reading: “Formerly Impressive. Please Use Imagination.”
And then comes the inscription, which is where the satire really starts to stretch its legs. Ozymandias doesn’t simply claim power, but he declares himself the King of Kings and commands all who pass to look upon his works and despair. It’s bold. It’s confident. It is, as history clearly demonstrates, wildly optimistic.
Because immediately after this declaration of unmatched greatness, the poem delivers its deadpan punchline, “Nothing beside remains.” That’s it. No empire. No cities. No loyal subjects live tweeting his victories. Just sand. Vast, flat, indifferent sand. It’s as if time paused, reread the inscription, raised an eyebrow, and quietly erased everything else.
The statue’s physical condition doesn’t help his case. The face, half buried, cracked, and broken, still carries what Shelley calls a “sneer of cold command.” This suggests that even in ruin, Ozymandias managed to retain the personality of someone who would have been exhausting to follow online. You can practically imagine him posting daily declarations of greatness with comments disabled. His empire didn’t last, but his bad attitude, preserved in granite, somehow did. It’s the archaeological equivalent of a fossilized ego.
What makes the whole thing even more amazing is the sheer effort that went into creating this monument. This wasn’t a casual side project. Designers planned it. Sculptors carved it. Workers hauled it across landscapes to place it somewhere appropriately dramatic. Years of labour went into capturing Ozymandias in his full “behold my glory” aesthetic. And now, centuries later, it’s a broken art installation in the world’s largest sandbox. If monuments received annual evaluations, this one would read, “Strong initial impact. Failed long-term objectives.”
Shelley’s point isn’t just that power fades, it’s that Ozymandias genuinely believed he’d outsmarted mortality. Death might come, sure, but his legacy would remain forever, intimidating future generations into awe. Instead, his message survives only because it’s so spectacularly wrong. Readers don’t despair when they see his works, they experience second hand embarrassment on his behalf. His warning to rivals has become a warning to himself.
The setting seals the joke. The “lone and level sands” contain nothing else, no ruins of cities, no remnants of civilisation. Nature has gone full minimalist, stripping the scene down to its most brutal contrast. Against that emptiness, Ozymandias’s claims look less commanding and more delusional. The silence delivers the verdict more effectively than any narrator could.
Of course, Shelley isn’t just mocking one long dead Pharaoh. Ozymandias stands in for every leader who confused dominance with permanence. History is full of people who built monuments, declared themselves irreplaceable, and assumed the future would be impressed. The future, as it turns out, is rarely in the mood.
Even Ramesses II himself, arguably one of Egypt’s most powerful and accomplished Pharaohs, could not escape this irony. His statues were propaganda tools, meant to scream greatness across centuries. When one finally arrived in London, broken and incomplete, it did exactly that but not in the way he intended.
‘Ozymandias’ in that sense, isn’t just a warning about fading power, it’s a satire about how absurd unchecked confidence looks once time has had a say. The king who demanded despair now inspires reflection, humour, and a gentle reminder that the louder the boast, the quieter its echo tends to be.
Time doesn’t argue. It waits. And then it lets the ruins speak.
In the 19th century, Benito Mussolini fancied himself less a man and more a monument, preferably one carved in marble, chest thrust forward, chin angled eternally toward destiny (or at least a flattering light source). In his own imagination, he was the sequel to Rome, not a mere politician, but a reboot of empire, complete with dramatic speeches, synchronised salutes, and an alarming number of uniforms for someone who never quite won a war.
He spoke often of glory, of legions, of history bending obligingly in his direction. If Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon River, Mussolini would cross the street, provided there were cameras. His Italy would be disciplined, resplendent, and feared. Trains would run on time, crowds would roar on cue, and maps would gradually recolour themselves in reassuring shades of “Italian ambition.”
But there is something endearingly fragile about men who compare themselves to eternity. They tend to forget that eternity has a long memory and a sharp sense of irony.
Like the boastful Ozymandias in the poem with the shattered statue in the desert, Mussolini constructed not just a regime, but a self-image meant to outlast sand, wind, and inconvenient facts. He posed, proclaimed, and postured his way into history, convinced that future generations would gaze upon his legacy and tremble appropriately.
Instead, history did what it does best, it waited.
The Round Colosseum originally built in 80CESquare Colosseum built by Mussolini in 1942From Public Domain
Because while Mussolini was busy reenacting Rome, the world had moved on to more modern catastrophes. His empire turned out to be less of a Colosseum, more cardboard set, impressive from a distance, but distressingly flimsy up close. Military campaigns faltered, alliances shifted, and the grand narrative began to fray like a cheap banner left out in the rain.
And then came the collapse, swift, humiliating, and utterly indifferent to his carefully rehearsed grandeur. The man who styled himself as Il Duce (The Leader), the infallible leader, found that infallibility has a very short shelf life when reality intervenes. Statues, literal and metaphorical, do not crumble all at once. First, a crack. Then another. Then, suddenly, the whole thing looks less like a monument and more like debris.
In the end, Mussolini’s legacy resembles that broken colossus in the sand, a once imposing figure reduced to fragments, surrounded not by awe, but by a kind of puzzled silence. The grand declarations echo faintly, like lines from a play no one remembers attending. “Look on my works,” he might have said, but history, squinting into the distance, struggles to find anything intact enough to admire.
What remains is not the empire he promised, but the cautionary tale he became. A reminder that self-mythology is a risky business, especially when you start believing your own press releases. The louder the proclamation of greatness, the more satisfying the eventual deflation.
And so, Mussolini endures, not as the architect of a new Rome, but as a rather theatrical footnote to its long shadow. A man who aimed for immortality and achieved, instead, a kind of poetic symmetry, the bigger the statue, the more dramatic the ruin.
Then in 21st century, Trump arrived, as not so much as a politician but as a brand, capital letters implied, gilded edges included. His name was already stamped across towers, steaks, ties, and the general concept of self-confidence. When he entered politics, it seemed less like a campaign and more like a licensing deal with history.
Here, at last, was a figure who understood that power, in the modern age, is as much about spectacle as substance. Why simply govern when you can perform governance? Why speak when you can proclaim? Why build policy when you can build a persona so large it requires its own skyline?
Like the monarch in that well-worn desert poem, he projected an image of immovability. His words carried that same tone of “cold command”, a conviction that reality itself ought to rearrange in response to his declarations. Critics were dismissed, facts negotiated with, and complexities flattened into slogans sturdy enough to fit on a hat.
He cultivated loyalty not just as support, but as devotion. Crowds gathered, slogans echoed, and the line between leader and legend blurred in the heat of repetition. There were rallies that felt less like civic exercises and more like episodes in an ongoing series, complete with catchphrases and recurring villains. The message was clear, this was not merely a presidency, it was an era, a brand extension into the realm of destiny.
And then there were the monuments. Not carved in desert stone, perhaps, but etched into skylines, social media feeds, and the collective consciousness. Towers bearing his almost spoken name stood as vertical declarations of success. Each structure seemed to say, “Look on these works,” though one suspects the subtext was “preferably from a flattering angle.”
But the thing about monuments, whether sandstone colossi or glass and steel high rises, is that they depend heavily on perspective. From up close, they can appear overwhelming, permanent, inevitable. From a distance, or with time, they shrink into context. The desert, metaphorical or otherwise, has a way of reclaiming narrative.
History, as always, proved to be an uncooperative audience. The seemingly untouchable aura began to flicker, then waver, then, most inconveniently, invite scrutiny. The voice that once filled arenas began to echo differently, as though the acoustics had changed. What once sounded like certainty started to resemble insistence.
And here the comparison to that shattered statue becomes irresistible. Not because everything vanishes, far from it, but because what remains is oddly disjointed. Fragments endure, phrases, images, impressions. A pedestal without its full figure. A face remembered more for its expression than its achievements.
The lesson, if there is one (and satire insists there must be), is that power built on projection is particularly susceptible to erosion. The louder the declaration of permanence, the more history seems to take it as a challenge. “Observe my greatness,” says the ruler. “Give it a moment,” replies time.
In the end, the figure who once seemed larger than the system becomes part of it, filed, debated, reinterpreted. The monuments still stand, of course, but their meaning shifts. What was once awe inspiring becomes, with enough distance, a curiosity. A relic of a moment when personality tried to outpace permanence, and, like that ancient king in the sand, discovered that time is the harsher critic. Perhaps his current antic in the Middle East could be his “Waterloo”.
If Ozymandias had taken a brief detour eastward say, a spiritual exchange programme before commissioning that ill-fated statue, he might have found in the Mahabharata a rather comprehensive warning label, “Caution, ego may appear permanent but is, in fact, highly perishable”.
Because if there is one text that understands the fine art of watching powerful men dramatically overestimate their shelf life, it is this sprawling epic of dynasties, destinies, and deeply committed bad decisions.
Take Duryodhana, for instance. Here was a man who didn’t just believe the kingdom was his, he believed the universe had personally notarized the claim. If Ozymandias carved “King of Kings” into stone, Duryodhana essentially carved “Mine” into an entire map and dared anyone to bring an eraser.
Like our desert bound statue enthusiast (and certain more modern figures with a fondness for branding), Duryodhana cultivated loyalty that blurred into devotion. Courts were filled with nodding allies, affirming uncles, and the occasional voice of reason that was quickly ignored for disrupting the aesthetic. After all, nothing ruins a good narrative of invincibility like someone pointing out reality.
Enter Krishna, who might best be described as the epic’s version of a calm, cosmic fact-checker. While others delivered speeches, Krishna delivered perspective, the kind that gently suggests, “Perhaps don’t build your identity entirely on winning at all costs.” This advice, naturally, was received with all the enthusiasm of a terms and conditions agreement.
And so, like a man commissioning a statue taller than his own foresight, Duryodhana doubled down. The result? The Kurukshetra War, an event so catastrophic it makes Ozymandias’s lonely desert look like a minimalist art choice rather than the aftermath of total collapse.
What’s particularly Ozymandian about the whole affair is not just the fall, but the confidence before the fall. Duryodhana walked into the war convinced of his permanence. His power was vast, his allies numerous, his rhetoric polished to a fine sheen of inevitability. If he had a pedestal, it would absolutely have read, “Look on my armies, ye Mighty, and reconsider.”
History (or epic poetry, which is history with better dialogue) responded in its usual way, by waiting.
Because just as the sands eventually reclaim the boastful statue, the battlefield of Kurukshetra quietly dismantled every assumption of permanence. One by one, the pillars of Duryodhana’s certainty collapsed. Not all at once, never all at once but enough to turn confidence into something far less photogenic.
By the end, what remains is strikingly familiar, not the empire he imagined, but the lesson he unintentionally authored. Much like Ozymandias, Duryodhana’s greatest legacy is not his power, but the spectacular mismatch between his expectations and reality.
Meanwhile, characters like Yudhishthira, hardly perfect, occasionally indecisive, and significantly less interested in self-branding, endure in a different way. Not as towering monuments, but as complicated, human figures who understood (sometimes too late) that power without humility is just a very elaborate countdown.
The Mahabharata, then, reads like a long form satire of the Ozymandias Syndrome, the irresistible urge to declare oneself permanent in a universe that specialises in editing such claims down to footnotes.
So, if there is a lesson worth carrying forward, it is not about avoiding ambition, monuments, or even great struggles. It is about perspective. Before we carve our names into stone, raise towers toward the sky, or wager everything on a certainty, it is worth pausing to ask, how will this endure when seen from far away, at a distance measured not in kilometres, but in time?
Because time does not rush to correct us. Like Krishna, it does not need to raise its voice. It allows events to unfold, lets pride exhaust itself, and waits patiently for meaning to reveal itself. When the noise has faded and the dust has settled, what remains is not the spectacle of victory, but the quiet truth of what was built with wisdom, humility, and awareness. And that, more than triumph, is what lasts.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Younger Memnon British Museum. “Colossal Bust of Ramesses II (Younger Memnon).” London: British Museum Collection Online, accessed 2026.
Benito Mussolini Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.
Farrell, Nicholas. Mussolini: A New Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951.
Donald Trump Setoodeh, Ramin. Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass. New York: HarperCollins, 2024.
Mahabharata Debroy, Bibek, trans. The Mahabharata (10 vols.). New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2010–2014.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and not of Borderless Journal.
Story by Kallol Lahiri: Translation from Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
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.
In memory of all the forgotten nameless actors and actresses of the world
If one woke up very early in the morning, the city looked different through this window. It seemed as if the city was encircled by three whole mountains. But actually, that wasn’t the case. Pray tell me, where would three mountains appear from in the middle of this city? Is this Darjeeling or Kalimpong! After all, these are all mountains of garbage. The garbage of the entire city has been brought here to create mountains. It has been given a mouthful of a name too, “Dhapa”. Sarala smiled inwardly. What did the word dhapa mean? Was it dhappa (meaning, bluff)? Perhaps Notu Babu would have said that had he been around.
“Can’t you see the torn clouds at the crest of the mountain?”
“O Notu Babu, that’s garbage.”
“So what if it’s garbage! Doesn’t it take on the appearance of a mountain and bluff us! Hey … play a tune in Behag on the flute … let me hear that.”
The flute would have sounded, together with the harmonium and tabla. Sarla would have advanced with small steps towards the middle of the stage. The light from the spotlight would have fallen on her. Afar, concealed by the wings, was Bani Babu, the prompter notebook in hand. And in that enchanting atmosphere, Sarla Debi gazes at the audience and begins singing.
Just that much. If she remembered any more, her mind would go awry. She would feel like just sitting and remembering all the tales from way back when. The morning would then be ruined. Wasn’t there a lot of work to be done! She had soaked two saris last night. And a bedsheet. The mosquito net was dirty too. All those had to be washed when it was time for water at the standpipe. She had to clean the house and then bathe. After that, all she had to do was boil a bit of rice and dal on the stove, and then she was done.
There had been plenty of days when Sarala had eaten only muri[1]both times. In this old age, she no longer felt like cooking just for herself. Nonetheless, if Notu Babu had been around, he would have gone to the market. He would surely have brought back tender pui spinach, pumpkin, fresh potatoes and the head of a carp fish. And said, “Here you are, why don’t you make some chyanchra[2] today, Sarala …” Or he would have gone to the market close to noon and brought back whatever fatty viscera of fish he got, and said, “Cook this, make a fish oil chochchori[3]with ground chillies.”
Sarala used to apply attar[4] on her body after her bath. Nizamuddin, the attarwala[5], used to bring it for her. All those days were of a different kind. Coloured in the hues of a rainbow. As spectacular as the backdrop in a theatre. No one would believe it if they heard about it now. There were so many nights when Notu Babu did not return home. He read out page after page of a new play to Sarala. He did rehearsals. He was really keen that Sarala had a baby boy on her lap. He would carry on with this theatre. The intoxication. The madness. But what would his paternity be? Would society accept a dancing woman’s son? O Notu Babu, will your wife accept the child? Your family? The theatre world of the babus and bhadraloks[6]? You yourself would accept him, won’t you, O Notu Babu? Notu Babu had emptied the bottle of whisky and returned home before dawn without answering Sarala’s query. He needed to sleep till noon. Or else he wouldn’t get any play ideas in his head. It couldn’t be taken to the stage quickly. The audience wouldn’t cram the hall.
There was a routine of offering puja in Dakshineshwar on the day a new play was being staged. Sarala used to go to Sri Ramakrishna’s room and seek his blessing, “Let it go well, thakur[7], I’ll give you an offering of hot jilipis[8].” And so, all those plays did well very quickly. There wasn’t even space for a sesame seed in the packed hall. There was repeated applause. People used to scream out, “Encore! Encore!” And then one had to act out a scene once again. Or sing a song. Sarala enjoyed it. People learnt from theatre. Notu Babu believed that. He reminded people of Sri Ramakrishna at every moment. Everyone held their folded hands at their foreheads in obeisance. On the day of the New Year, and on the day of Rathayatra[9], there was always a puja[10]in the drama group’s premises. It was a small group, but so what? All the etiquette and civility of a large group were always in place. Notu Babu saw to that. Sarala used to visit Kashipur on the day of the Kalpataru festival. She prayed inwardly that Sri Ramakrishna came alive and stood before her. That he placed his hand on her head, blessed her, and said, “May you attain enlightenment.”
But where did that happen? Had she been able to shed the veil of illusion? Or this body? She was still standing somehow on her weak legs, a lump of flesh and blood. So then was everything not finished as yet? Did that mean something else was left? What exactly was that? Sarala had not been able to figure that out. When she was about to carry the bucket with the soaked linen to the standpipe on her wobbly legs, she stopped with a start. The morning sunlight that had fallen on the dilapidated wall with exposed bricks beside the main door looked exactly as if someone had cast a theatre light there. Sarala took small steps and went and stood in that light. She shut her eyes. The sound of the third and final bell came wafting from somewhere.
The play, Binodini, the Dancing Girl, was being performed one time. That role had been a longtime dream of Sarala! Binod Babu, the emperor of theatre, had overwhelmed everyone in the role of Sri Ramakrishna. He had been brought after having been paid a hefty advance. The drama group had to pay him a huge fee. Sarala herself had given up the twenty-gram gold necklace that she had received as a prize from the mistress of the Dutta household of Syankrapara. But that play went down really well. The crowd that had come simply to see the play had overflowed beyond the hall and the road and gone all the way to the five-point intersection. Notu Babu used to say in jest, “You seem to have surpassed even the matinee idol, Sarala, my dear!” After rehearsing all night long, when she went to the ghat[11] at dawn and dunked her head in Ma Ganga, she felt refreshed in mind and body. Her wavy hair went down to her waist then. The skin on her body was the colour of gold. Everywhere men ogled at her, as if they were about to pounce on and devour her. After all, they had devoured Binodini. Hadn’t they? Men devoured her. The theatre devoured her. And what about Sarala?
*
A huge crowd at the water-tap today. Apparently, there had been no water at night. And so, the children, the pots and pans, and men and women all seemed to have flung modesty to the winds and exposed themselvesin front of the water-tap. Sarala did not want to go there. There had been none of all this trouble when she lived on a platform on the ghat by the Ganga. There was an open, gaping sky there. And Ma Ganga was with her. Yes, it was a bit difficult during the rainy season and in winter, but what could one do about that?
Sarala had enlisted herself in the ranks of all those folks in this city who did not have a roof over their heads, who lacked a permanent address, who had no one to call their own, let alone a son! It occurred to the actress who had once stood in front of the footlights on stage that the arrangements were complete for the antarjali (the ritualistic act on the bank of the Ganga of immersing the lower part of a dying person’s body)! She spread out her old copy of Kashiram Das’s Mahabharata everyday and recited the verses. After all, that too was an acquirement from way back when Notu Babu himself had schooled her. He has said, “Hey you, what on earth have you learnt of acting if you haven’t read the Mahabharata?” His finger moved from one word to the next. Sarala would sway from side to side to the auspicious cadence –
Offer puja to the Lord of the Universe With the lotus from the grove where the maiden was born Her name was formerly Lakshmi Haripriya She took birth and arrived after a sage’s curse Because of which the Sindhu was churned But it can be reversed if Lakshmi finds Narayan.
But Sarala had never attained Narayan, ever. She had never ever been able to hold on to the one she desired. Meanwhile, a dark shadow seemed to fall on the visage of the professional theatre halls and they began to close down. The Five Pandavas could not be staged after the opening show. People slandered it saying the female body had been exposed. They vandalised the theatre. The government declared that it was a perversion of culture.
Notu Babu seemed to have been battered and crushed. The scion of such a distinguished family was humiliated. Evil was spewed against him. He contracted a deadly disease. But could he give up theater even after all that? Not at all. His final wish had been to play the monk Nimai. He had promptly written the script too. At the very centre was Vishnupriya. Could Nimai have become a renunciant without her? This magnificent woman had given up the lotus of the age, something she had been urged to hold on to firmly by everyone. Hadn’t she lamented? Suppressed tears? You have to cast all these aspects like pearls on the stage, Sarala! Only then will your Vishnupriya come alive. Notu Babu had called her close and said to her. “Will you make me a paan[12] with that rose water of yours? Put some wet supari[13] in it. And some Surabhi zarda[14].”
Sarala used to lay out the paans, folded into small quids. Notu Babu would fill up a silver box with them to eat later. He used to stuff a paan in his mouth and then sit with his eyes shut on an easy-chair. His colourful Kashmiri shawl used to droop down on the floor. It was as if Sarala could see it all hazily even today. That’s why she kept talking covertly, behind the scenes, inwardly, all her life, with that man alone. She badly wanted Notu Babu to at least see this play about the one whom society had deliberately abused. Made dishonourable. Let that same society come and sit in front of the monk Nimai now. Let them realise what theatre was. But that was not to be. Notu Babu suddenly fell off the rickshaw one day on his way to the rehearsal. He never rose again after suffering that fall. How the big and hefty man seemed to have shrunk and become one with the bed!
The rehearsals came to an end. As did the theatre. What a tug of war there was regarding money. The house rent was due. Money was owed at the grocer’s shop. Keshto Chatterjee ran a theatre in the commercial district in Dalhousie Square. He came often to their troupe. He had told Sarala quite a few times in the past to come and act there. She had beauty, glamour, and fame. They would pay her well. ‘What’s the harm in being intimate with educated babus?’ Sarala paid no heed.
When she stood on stage, the entire hall broke into applause. When the audience liked the dialogue, they screamed, “Encore! Encore!” Some people placed bouquets of flowers near her feet at the end of the show. They threw paper planes of love letters at her. Those who dared, came up to her and said they would give her the life of a queen. But Sarala shut the door on all their faces and loved the theatre alone — the theatre in which Notu Babu alone was the presiding deity. How on earth could that very same Sarala go to Dalhousie Square and rent herself out!
But she had to go, much later. When she was completely broken in body and mind. She had applied make-up and acted in a theatre which was a hobby of some babus. She had wanted to share her innermost thoughts with Notu Babu. But the people of his household did not let Sarala enter. She had to return from the main door that bore a lion motif. She had rushed to the cremation ground as soon as she heard about his death. All she saw there was the pyre burning afar.
*
There came a time when the dramas in Dalhousie Square too vanished. Her youth vanished. Her beauty too. Nor were there any more people who wanted to have fun with her body of flesh and blood. When the house she lived in was going to be demolished for redevelopment, Sarala had gone to the ghat on the bank of the Ganga one night. She stood there clutching the Kashiram Das’s Mahabharata to her bosom. She had wondered, had anyone else ever rendered Draupadi more naked than this? “Did you ever get such a large stage anywhere, Notu Babu!” This platform beside the Ganga. Under an ancient banyan. Next to such a big crematorium, with an electric furnace. If Sarala died that night, who would care a whit?
But Sarala didn’t die. She wanted to act again one final time. After dunking herself in Ma Ganga, she had sat on the platform in the ghat and spread Kashiram Das’s Mahabharata in front of her. Those who had come to bathe in the river in the morning saw an ancient lady opening a tattered book and reciting something tunefully. None of them were competent to say whether that was the Mahabharata, or the Ramayana. Some of them were hurrying to work. Some others had come to earn merit by immersing themselves in the river.
As noon approached and her throat grew parched, Sarala had noticed that there was a collection of loose change in front of her. Considering it to be the grace of Ma Ganga, she had knocked her knuckle to her forehead in obeisance and tied the coins in a corner of her anchal[15]. She had bought an earthen basin with the money. Rice. Some fuelwood from the shop in the crematorium that sold the items for the purificatory rites. A bit of ghee. Sarala had fetched and laid two bricks on the bank of the Ganga and prepared the sacred hobishyi,[16] or rice semi-cooked with ghee. She had rolled the rice into large spherical lumps and she had inwardly declared to Ma Ganga, “I performed the funerary rites of my earlier life, Ma. Grant me a new life.”
Her eyes had glistened. She had then gobbled the lumps of rice to feed her belly that had starved for several days. In truth, she was born anew that day. With a new identity too.
So many people used to come to hear Kashiram Das’s Mahabharata! They sat around Sarala in the light of dawn. It was as if she was seated on a large stage, sometimes enacting the Sage Vyasa, sometimes Arjuna, sometimes Bheema, sometimes Draupadi, or sometimes the truthful king Yudhishtra. What an assemblage of simultaneous roles! “If only you saw your matinee idol, Notu Babu, wouldn’t you have been inwardly happy?” Sarala muttered to herself. Yet, it seemed she could not have such happiness for very long. That was the destiny that the Almighty had written on her brow when she was a tiny infant in the delivery chamber.
*
The number of people at the riverbank suddenly waned. Apparently, an epidemic had spread all over the world. And everyone was dying of that disease. The government had prohibited anyone from leaving their house. Don’t go to work. So, then what would people eat! So many hundreds of corpses wrapped in plastic sheets had arrived at the crematorium. The furnaces had burst into flame. But Sarala had cheated death even after all that! It seemed that Yama, the Lord of Death, had developed a distaste for her!
And then something happened during this time. Phuleshwari, the woman who swept the riverbank with her broom, who Sarala used to call to drink tea, and whose tales of joy and woe she listened to, the one whose husband Dumureshwar drove a hearse – one day Phuleshwari simply refused to listen to Sarala’s protests and took her along to a basti[17] beside Dhapa. To their neighbourhood. “Stay here, Ma. There’s an epidemic outside.” Sarala had remained there ever since. But she was not one to be a burden on anyone. After all, she had worked to feed herself from an early age!
Every time she wanted to return to the bank of the Ganga, Phuleshwari, Dumureshwar, their child Bundi, and quite a few city street sweepers had blocked her way. After all, it was they who were her family now. A son-in-law of one of them was a driver for film shooting crews. He took along groups of people from the basti. Apparently, all of them acted. They got a meal and two-hundred rupees in return. One day Sarala too got into the crowded vehicle. Hoping to get work. To feed her belly. And out of the love of acting from way back when.
*
An old woman was frequently spotted in the film studios locality, either behind some major artist, or in a crowd, or sometimes in a procession. Her hair was the colour of jute yarn. A kindly face. Of slender build. Her sun-scorched skin had a copper hue. This old lady didn’t seem to get annoyed at anything at all.
The fussiness over particulars that was prevalent among those who came to swell crowds was completely lacking in the old woman. She could beautifully execute whatever she was told. Most astonishing of all, she could memorise and rattle off any bit of dialogue. She was completely unfazed by the camera. Gradually her circle of acquaintances in the film studios locality began to grow. She got more and more work. And Sarala Debi, who had stood on stage in front of the footlights way back when, kept on performing. Although she never spoke to anyone about her memories of the past. Because she herself had performed her funerary rites, hadn’t she!
“What can I tell you, Notu Babu, you’ll laugh if you hear it. These people do a scene so many times, and the camera is placed in so many angles. And each time, one has to do exactly what one did before. Look back, smile, speak, everything has to be exactly the same. Like our encores. I really like it, you know. So many people, so many lights, so many stories. And do you know what I like most of all, Notu Babu? When all the lights in the set come on, one after another. The Director Babu shouts out, ‘Action!’ We rush and stand in front of the camera. At once, I can clearly see a stage. The black heads of the audience. And far away, very far away, you are sitting in the last row. Watching me act. Do you know what they call me, Notu Babu? No, no, not your Sarala. She died a long time back, didn’t she! I am now “Shooting Dida[18]” in the film studios locality!”
.
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.
Pongal Pot. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
On the 15th of January 2026, while much of the modern world was busy checking notifications, updating calendars, and worrying about quarterly outcomes, traditional Tamil households across the globe were doing something far more radical, watching milk boil. “Pongal”, the harvest festival, is one of those ancient cultural practices that stubbornly refuses to modernise. It does not arrive as an app update, cannot be streamed, and has no subscription model.
Milk is poured into a pot, heated patiently, and allowed, indeed encouraged, to overflow. This overflow is not considered inefficiency or waste, but it is the very point. It signifies abundance, wellbeing, and prosperity not merely for humans but for the entire ecosystem that made the meal possible, the sun, the rain, the soil, the cow, and the quiet, unseen labour of nature itself. Rice, lentils, jaggery, nuts, legumes, and raisins follow, and the resulting sweet dish is shared freely among family and friends, because prosperity that is not shared is considered incomplete.
This is an economy based not on accumulation but on circulation, not on profit but on participation. Something I believe is deeply unsettling to modern sensibilities.
Into this defiantly non-consumerist ritual wandered a chickpea with an extraordinarily well travelled past. This was no humble backyard legume, nor had it been picked up at the nearest market. It had sprouted in Mexico, been packed in Lebanon, purchased in Sierra Leone, and generously gifted by my wife Greeja’s friend, Saras, and her husband Pieter, a Belgian whose kindness, like the chickpea itself, clearly knows no borders. The chickpea’s journey to Malaysia, where, after crossing more continents than most humans manage in a lifetime, it finally fulfilled its destiny, being cooked into a traditional Tamil Pongal.
By then this chickpea had crossed more borders than most people ever will, navigated more currencies than a multinational executive, and yet arrived without a single stamp of self-importance. If globalization were ever to seek a spokesperson, it would do well to choose this chickpea, which achieved in silence what conferences and treaties have struggled to explain. The chickpea does not attend Davos, does not publish white papers, does not tweet about resilience or sustainability, and yet it embodies globalisation with a calm confidence that makes economists look unnecessarily stressed.
We often speak of globalisation as though it were invented sometime in the late twentieth century by economists with impressive haircuts and Power Point skills. But the chickpea, unimpressed by timelines, has been global for at least nine thousand years. Its origins lie in the “Fertile Crescent”, that much abused cradle of early civilisations covering modern day Turkey and Syria, where early cultivation was recorded between 7500 and 6800 BCE. The wild ancestor, “cicer reticulatum”, still grows in southeastern Turkey, quietly ignoring the fact that humans have spent millennia fighting over the land around it. From this region, chickpeas spread naturally to the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, and India by around 3000 to 2000 BCE, becoming a staple across cultures, religions, and cuisines. This was globalisation without shipping containers, trade sanctions, or consultants, just humans carrying seeds because hunger is wonderfully non-ideological.
India, once it encountered the chickpea, embraced it with characteristic enthusiasm and then proceeded to dominate its production. Today, India accounts for more than 70 percent of global chickpea output, a statistic that has made the chickpea an unlikely participant in modern trade wars. Protectionist policies, tariffs, reciprocal duties, and import bans imposed by major players such as India, the United States, and Mexico have transformed this humble legume into a politically sensitive commodity. It turns out that even the simplest food becomes controversial once spreadsheets get involved.
Thiruvalluvar (an ancient philosopher), writing two thousand years ago, anticipated this uncomfortable truth with brutal clarity:
“Only those who live by agriculture truly live; all others merely follow and feed upon them.” - Kural 1033
The verse throws stylish shade at modern life, while we sip lattes under perfect air conditioning and call it “work”, farmers are out there negotiating with the sun, rain, and stubborn soil to keep humanity fed. Our sleek jobs, fancy titles, and glowing screens? Well, they are merely luxury addons. Strip away agriculture and civilisation collapses into a very well-dressed famine. Turns out, all our progress still runs on dirt, with attitude.
The chickpea’s journey to South America, especially Mexico, is a reminder that globalisation has often travelled under less noble banners. Portuguese and Spanish explorers introduced chickpeas to the New World in the sixteenth century, carrying them across oceans as reliable, non-perishable protein sources. From these initial points of contact, chickpeas spread across Central and South America, embedding themselves into local agriculture and diets. In modern times, Mexico has emerged as a significant exporter, specialising in the Kabuli variety prized for its size and quality, with major production zones in Sonora and Sinaloa. Argentina and Chile also joined the club. Thus, a crop born in ancient Anatolia, nurtured in India, and sanctified by ritual, found itself repackaged for global markets, complete with branding, logistics, and regulatory oversight. The chickpea, once again, remained silent.
Silence, however, does not mean insignificance. Homer knew this. In TheIliad (Book 13) he famously compares arrows ricocheting off Menelaus’s armour to chickpeas and dark-fleshed beans flying off a threshing floor in the wind. The metaphor works only because the audience knew exactly how dried chickpeas behave, hard, resilient, and oddly bouncy. By likening lethal weapons to pulses, Homer not only emphasises the strength of the armour but also performs a subtle act of cultural grounding. The epic world of gods and heroes is momentarily tethered to the everyday agricultural reality of farmers winnowing grain. War, Homer seems to say, may be glorious, but it is ultimately sustained by food. Chickpeas, by 800 BCE, were so deeply embedded in Greek life that their sound and movement were universally recognisable. Even epic poetry depended on legumes.
Indian tradition offers an equally revealing, if more logistical, narrative. In South Indian tale associated with the Mahabharata, an Udupi King is said to have managed catering for the massive armies at Kurukshetra. Legend holds that he could predict daily casualties by observing leftover food. In some versions, the king visits Krishna at night, who eats a handful of roasted chickpeas, the number consumed corresponding mysteriously to the thousands who would fall the next day. This allowed precise meal planning and zero waste on an industrial scale of destruction. These divine data analytics allowed the king to cook exactly the right amount of food, avoiding waste on a genocidal scale. It is perhaps the earliest example of just-in-time inventory management, achieved without software, powered entirely by chickpeas and divine omniscience.
If you have ever wondered why Udupi cuisine is famous for efficiency and planning, this story offers a clue. Here, chickpeas function not just as food but as instruments of cosmic accounting.
Interestingly, while early Vedic texts sometimes viewed certain pulses as unsuitable for sacrifice, the Mahabharata period saw chickpeas elevated into sraddha rites (funeral rituals) and daily offerings. They transitioned from questionable to sacred, a promotion many humans would envy.
Thiruvalluvar’s ethical framework accommodates this evolution effortlessly:
“Sharing food and caring for all life is the highest of virtues.”-- Kural 322
A noble idea, until chickpeas quietly steal the spotlight. Modest, beige, and absurdly cooperative, they divide endlessly without complaint and nourish everyone from monks to gym bros. While humans argue ethics in panels and podcasts, chickpeas get on with the job, feeding the masses without ego. In the moral economy of virtue, they don’t preach but they simply multiply and sustain, humbling us one hummus bowl at a time.
Across civilisations, chickpeas became the dependable fuel of endurance. Roman soldiers consumed them as part of their standard rations, boiling them into thick porridge known as “puls” when meat was scarce. Gladiators relied on pulses for strength, earning nicknames that emphasised grain and legume consumption rather than heroism. Spanish and Portuguese sailors trusted chickpeas on long sea voyages because they did not rot, sulk, or demand refrigeration. During World War II, Allied researchers turned again to pulses to address vitamin deficiencies among troops, while the modern Indian Army continues to include chickpea flour and whole chickpeas in field rations due to their high caloric density and reliability. Empires rise and fall, but soldiers keep eating chickpeas.
Modern science, arriving fashionably late as usual, now confirms what ancient armies, monks, and farmers already knew. Chickpeas are celebrated as “brain food,” dense with nutrients that support cognitive function, mood regulation, and neurological health. Nutritional psychiatry highlights their role in reducing inflammation and stabilising the gut brain axis, making them valuable in alleviating anxiety and depression. Unlike the sugar-fuelled spikes and crashes of contemporary diets, chickpeas offer slow-release energy, the kind required for sustained thought, emotional regulation, empathy, and decision making. In a world addicted to instant gratification, caffeine dependence, and burnout worn as a badge of honour, the chickpea is almost offensively patient. That patience makes it profoundly incompatible with modern lifestyles, and incompatibility, in our times, is the surest mark of subversion.
If this sounds like ancient wisdom romanticised through hindsight, it is worth noting that modern civilisation has recently spent billions of dollars rediscovering precisely the same conclusion, often during lunch breaks. Sometime in the post-Covid era, somewhere between a glass walled co-working space and an overbranded café serving ethically sourced air, a young startup founder sat staring at his laptop, attempting to optimise a problem modern life seems uniquely skilled at inventing, how to eat “mindfully” without actually having time to eat. His company was building an AI-driven wellness platform designed to “personalise nutrition using real time biometric feedback.” Investors liked it. The pitch deck had the correct fonts. The valuation was impressive for something that had not yet solved hunger, distraction, or exhaustion.
Lunch arrived in recyclable packaging engineered to survive a nuclear winter. Inside was a bowl labelled Ancient Protein Medley. It contained quinoa flown in from the Andes, kale grown in a vertical farm two kilometres away, avocado sourced from somewhere geopolitically awkward, and, almost as an afterthought, roasted chickpeas. The chickpeas were rebranded as “plant-based protein spheres,” presumably because “chickpea” did not sound sufficiently disruptive, scalable, or fundable.
As the founder ate mechanically between Slack notifications, his smartwatch vibrated with updates. Blood sugar stable. Cortisol marginally elevated. Cognitive focus acceptable. The AI recommended breathing exercises and fewer screens. The founder ignored both and continued eating. The irony was complete. A system powered by cloud computing, global capital, and predictive algorithms had concluded, after millions in funding, that roasted chickpeas were ideal for sustained energy and mental clarity.
This was not new knowledge. Roman soldiers had marched on it. Tamil farmers had lived on it. Sailors had crossed oceans with it. But now it had a dashboard, a graph, and a subscription model.
Later that evening, the same founder attended a panel discussion on sustainability. Someone in the audience asked about regenerative agriculture. The panellists responded confidently, invoking carbon credits, blockchain traceability, lab-grown proteins, and the future of food. No one mentioned legumes fixing nitrogen. No one mentioned soil. No one mentioned that the chickpeas quietly sitting in the founder’s lunch bowl had already done more for planetary health than the entire panel combined. The chickpeas, true to form, offered no comment, no keynote, and no thought leadership, only nourishment.
The chickpea’s journey eastward is no less intriguing. It reached China via the Silk Road, settling primarily in Xinjiang, where evidence of cultivation dates back around two thousand years. There, it became part of Uighur medicinal traditions, prescribed for ailments ranging from hypertension to itchy skin. During the Tang and Yuan dynasties, chickpeas gained prominence as a “cosmopolitan” food, sometimes referred to as the “Muslim bean”. Yet in central China, the chickpea struggled for a distinct identity, often conflated with the common pea even by Li Shizhen[1], the famed Ming dynasty herbalist. Not all travellers are recognised for who they are, some spend centuries being mistaken for someone else.
And yet, through all this travel, confusion, commodification, and conflict, the chickpea remained quietly regenerative. Unlike extractive crops, it forms a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria in its roots, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil. It takes and gives simultaneously, leaving the land better than it found it. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of the chickpea’s philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to modern economic models based on extraction and exhaustion.
Thiruvalluvar warns us gently but firmly:
“Harm done to others inevitably returns to oneself.” – Kural 319
A warning humans hear, nod at, and immediately ignore. The chickpea takes a cooler approach. It survives by being outrageously generous, throwing itself into curries, salads, and hummus without a trace of resentment. No revenge arc, no ego. Just pure edible goodwill. While we stress over karma and consequences, the chickpea lives its truth, give everything away, become indispensable, and achieve immortality in every lunch bowl.
Humanity today resembles the ancient chickpea, hard, resilient, perpetually defensive. We pride ourselves on toughness, bouncing off crises with admirable persistence, yet rarely ask what we leave behind. Climate change, trade wars, and political upheavals are the shrill winds of Homer’s winnowing floor, tossing us about. The question is not whether we survive the tossing, but whether we enrich the soil when we land. Progress, the chickpea suggests, is not about becoming larger, louder, or more profitable. It is about being regenerative, ordinary, and useful.
In an age obsessed with luxury, consumption, and curated lifestyles, the chickpea offers a quietly subversive model. It is not elite food, but it is the food of soldiers, monks, labourers, and families. It does not advertise, rebrand, or reinvent itself. It simply nourishes.
Thiruvalluvar captures this understated wisdom perfectly:
“From seeds come harvests, and from giving comes abundance.” -- Kural 1030
A line politicians quote solemnly before approving tax breaks for themselves. The chickpea, deeply unimpressed, just does the math. One seed becomes many, then redistributes itself aggressively into every cuisine on earth. No gatekeeping, no merit tests, no ‘personal responsibility’ lecture. While humans weaponise scarcity and call it policy, the chickpea runs a ruthless experiment in abundance and wins, by being cheap, shared, and impossible to cancel. The chickpea has lived this truth for millennia.
So perhaps the real lesson of globalisation does not lie in trade agreements or consumer choices but in a small legume that has travelled from ancient Turkey to modern Mexico, survived Roman marches and mythic wars, endured misnaming and trade barriers, and still ends up quietly nourishing someone’s meal.
Even now, after dashboards have glowed, algorithms have pontificated, and every opinion has been optimised into a performance, the answer remains stubbornly ancient, from Roman roads to Tamil fields. The chickpea does not care about your ideology, your portfolio, or your meticulously curated identity. It will grow, fix nitrogen, feed someone, and move on without a press release.
In a world addicted to spectacle, branding, and moral pontification, this calm, beige indifference feels almost obscene. Quiet competence and unfashionable, the chick pea, turns out to be the rarest, and most outrageously extravagant, luxury left.
The travelled chickpea. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
[1] Li Shizen(1518-1593), Ming acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
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Ramaswamy, N. (2004). Festivals of Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
Origins of chickpea domestication in the Fertile Crescent; dates (7500–6800 BCE); wild ancestor Cicer reticulatum
Zohary, D., Hopf, M., & Weiss, E. (2012). Domestication of Plants in the Old World (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Fuller, D. Q. (2006). Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia. Journal of World Prehistory, 20(1), 1–86.
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Pope, G. U. (1886). The Tirukkural. London: Oxford University Press.
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Smith, B. D. (2011). General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366(1566), 836–848.
Modern chickpea cultivation in Mexico (Sonora, Sinaloa), Kabuli variety exports
Gaur, P. M., et al. (2012). Chickpea breeding and production. Plant Breeding Reviews, 36, 1–87.
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Hiltebeitel, A. (2001). Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Garnsey, P. (1999). Food and Society in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hansen, V. (2012). The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Unschuld, P. U. (1986). Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
During an extensive interview, Pankaj Kapur, the highly acclaimed actor, director and writer, nostalgically remembered his days in NSD[1] as a student in the 70s and of Ebrahim Alkazi who was the guiding light of the school as the Director from 1962-77. Mandi House was the vibrant cultural hub where the quartet of NSD, Triveni Kala Sangam, Sriram Art Centre and Kamani Auditorium breathed cadences of art, music, dance and theatre. As the presiding deity of NSD, Alkazi’s prodigious talent in all aspects of theatre except costume (where his wife was the moving spirit) brought his dynamic genius into the quest for intercultural and interdisciplinary thinking in artistic expressions that was both transformative and liberative for his myriad students like Sai Paranjpye, Nasir, Om Puri, Surekha Sikri, Uttara Baokar and Pankaj Kapur[2], who later on lit the stage and celluloid though their exceptional talents and skill. He would have been a hundred this month. Amal Allana, his daughter has authored a biography of her father, Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive. The book makes an absorbing read.
She brings out Alkazi’s early encounters and reception by the Hindi Theatrewallas of Delhi in the early 60s. It is the story of a western educated Bombayite who was presumptuous enough to think he could teach Delhi theatre buffs a thing or two. As a second-year student, Sai Paranjpye recalls Ebrahim as a storm under whom a metamorphosis took place in the NSD overnight. Walking in to the den of Hindiwallah writers’ camp, Alkazi caught them unawares by picking up the works of the most cerebral and experimental of the Hindi new wave movement; Mohan Rakesh’s Aashadh Ka Ek Din[3]and Dharmavir Bharat’s Andha Yug[4]. Aashadh ka Ek Din, a play with a rural background, was the story of the Indian villager, whose lifestyle, pace and values were succumbing to the inevitable onslaught of urbanisation. The basic theme was autobiographical to Mohan Rakesh himself, where he identified himself with a classical playwright like Kalidas. This mix of history and the present entwined in to a single entity, was a modernist strategy that Alkazi too had attempted while contemporising myths. He exquisitely crafted the mise en scene[5]that sparkled with delicate, nuanced performances from young student actors such as Sudha Sharma as Mallika and Om Shiv Puri as Kalidas.
India had lost a war with China in 1962. Alkazi had chosen Andha Yug, set during the last days of the Kurukshetra war, when Aswasthama stood in rage, prepared to use the ultimate weapon to annihilate the mankind. It was just not the play’s topicality, its anti-war thrust that drew Alkazi to it. Alkazi tried to shrug off the baggage of European modernism he was carrying, embarking now on a foundational journey towards a deeper ‘discovery of India.’ Through Andha Yug, Alkazi came closer to learning about India’s value system and philosophy as explored in the Mahabharata, while Aashad gave him an appreciation of the artistic sensibility of the great Sankrit poet-dramatist Kalidas, India’s veritable Shakespeare. From now on, he would engage with the idea of India between the two polarities: India as a myth and India as a kind of documented reality. Alkazi was introducing the idea that theatre was a performance art, not literature performed on stage. He was creating a language of performance that was distinct from the language of words.
The making of Tughlaq and its staging in Purana Qila is a watershed event in the theatre landscape of Delhi. Alkazi was greatly drawn to Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq. Karnad had confided in him how Tughlaq was the most idealistic, the most intelligent king ever to come on the throne of Delhi and one of the greatest failures also. And how in the early sixties India had also come very far in the same direction. Alkazi felt that this play effectively reflected the trials and opposition a visionary leader faced, while trying to function within a corrupt political scenario. The cast of Tughlaq had some of the most brilliant actors, each painstakingly trained by Alkazi himself. There was Manohar Singh who was playing Tughlaq, Surekha Sikri and Uttara Baokar were doubled as Sauteli Ma, Nasiruddin Shah as the Machiavellian Aziz, Rajesh Vivek as Najeeb. The young reporter members included Pankaj Kapur, KK Raina, Raghuvir Yadav, a veritable who is who of latter-day cinema. Tughlaq was staged in 1972 at the Purana Qila (Old Fort) in Delhi, utilising the historical ruins as a backdrop for the dramatic spectacle. This production is considered a landmark event in Indian theatre, combining history, politics and performance to create a commentary on the reign of Tuqhlaq[6] and politics of the 60s.
Nehru’s dream of reconstructing the nation needed a powerful and unitary concept of ‘nationalism’ to recognise all productive forces in the country. Culture was very much a part of the reconstructive process that needed to be systematised and brought under one umbrella and for this purpose, three national academies had been set up: the Sangeet Natak Academy, the Lalit Kala Academy and the Sahitya Akademi. The desire to modernise Indian theatre was part of the same reconstructive cultural policy. And Alkazi was the mascot of the theatre movement and Mandi House, the epicentre of cultural conflation and crescendo.
The Purana Qila festival in 1972, with Tughlaq, Sultan Razia and Andha Yug became the most talked about cultural event of the decade He wanted to offer both the hoi polloi and the cognoscenti, including burqa clad women, high quality theatre that did not conform to ‘popular taste’; theatre that had a social relevance, that both instructed and entertained. This was Alkazi’s ideal of what constituted national theatre.
There have many stars in firmament of Indian theatre. Ebrahim revitalised Indian theatre. Habib Tanvir, blended folk traditions with modern drama. Badal Sirkar revolutionised Bengali theatre by challenging conventional norms. They are like the great troika of Indian Cinema, Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.
Alkazi left NSD as it was denied autonomy by scheming bureaucrats. Allana brings out how Alkazi passionately believed that an artist belongs to no political party, and has no religious ideology. An artist has to distance himself from each one of these in order to see each one of these objectively. “And finally, he has to distance himself from himself.” He wrote: “ It is our duty and moral responsibility to study history dispassionately, but with a passion for the truth, with humility and with a profound sense of responsibility and to ask ourselves seriously: What is the legacy that we shall leave behind?”
[6] A 1964 Kannada play by Girish Kannad, translated to Urdu in 1966 in NSD and most famously performed for in Purana Qila, New Delhi, in 1972
Satya Narayan Misra is a Professor Emeritus and author of seven books. The latest, Against the Binary, waspublished in December 2024. He is a regular columnist and reviewer of books for several leading newspapers in Odisha and digital platforms likeScroll.in and The Wire. He was associated with the NSD in the 70s.
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Malavika Rajkotia is a prominent divorce attorney based in Delhi. She has collaborated with numerous non-governmental organisations addressing civil liberties and human rights concerns. Additionally, she has a strong background in theatre, participating in approximately thirty productions in both Hindi and English. She has also served as the host of Shakti, the inaugural television talk show in India dedicated to women’s rights.
Her memoir, Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story, is a complex tale that intertwines the history and current experiences of a family following the Partition. Jindo, Malavika Rajkotia’s father, arrives in India amidst the chaos of the Partition riots. He is allocated a piece of desolate land in the small town of Karnal, where he must clear and cultivate the land to reclaim his role as landlord and patriarch. However, devoid of his past and confronted with an uncertain future in a place where the language is foreign to him, he undergoes a significant transformation. Rajkotia intricately weaves a narrative around this generous, humorous, loving, and increasingly despondent figure, delving into her family’s history and present.
The story explores themes of yearning and belonging, the nature of privilege and its loss, while reflecting on the resilience of a people stripped of their autonomy. Through her evocative and lyrical writing, she leads readers through the challenges faced by a large family—comprising uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, and esteemed figures—who are all in pursuit of recognition, identity, and stability.
Rajkotia fearlessly confronts her milieu, whether navigating the radical Khalistan movement, the tensions between the Sikh faith and Hindu nationalism, or the pervasive cynicism of Indian politics. Her vivid, meditative, finely detailed portraits of a rich family life are filled with moments of tears, laughter, and music, and a diverse array of characters who are immensely relatable. Ultimately, this brave and moving book is about the enduring quest for meaning and fulfilment that transcends cultural boundaries.
Narrates Rajkotia: “The diffused light of dawn lit a dull, flat landscape cut by the highway, gleaming under randomly spaced streetlights. Until about thirty years ago, this single carriageway witnessed an almost daily carnage that left heavy and light motor vehicles, bicyclists, and bullock carts in confused mangles. Everyone had a personal story of loss on this road. Three of my family was killed in two separate accidents. A splintered windshield glass lodged in a young girl’s throat. An aunt and cousin died when their car rammed into a truck to avoid a cyclist.”
She has a detailed account of the road in Karnal town thus: “For over 2,500 years, this road has streamed with traders from Central Asia, scholars from China, adventurers from Europe, sadhus from the Himalayas, and armies coveting Hindustan. This portion of the road was the battlefield of the story of the eighteen-day Mahabharata war, marking the cusp of the end of the Dwapar Yuga and the rise of the Kali Yuga. Eighteen days of soldiers’ cries and trumpeting elephants and neighing horses, each ending with sunsets blackened by smoke from the funeral pyres hanging heavy until impelled by the sounds of wailing women.
“From myth, we come to somewhat recorded history in 300 BCE, when Chandragupta Maurya built this road to connect his fast-growing kingdom, spanning the north of the subcontinent from the source of the Ganga to its northwestern limits. The road was developed by Sher Shah Suri. My father remembered the time when it was called ‘Jarnailly Sadak’ under the British, and then GT Road, its official name, The Grand Trunk Road. The government of independent India called it Sher Shah Suri Marg, the Sanskrit ‘marg’ guillotining the English ‘road’ and the Urdu ‘sadak’.”
The memoir stands as a testament to the power of storytelling in bridging gaps between cultures and generations, ensuring that the voices of those who experienced Partition are heard and remembered. As part of the growing body of literature on this subject, it encourages further exploration and discussion, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding Partition and its enduring legacy.
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of 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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Poetry which goes beyond the boundaries of words and speaks for a greater cause calls for a captivating read. The lines become more significant when the verses address multiple socio-politico-cultural issues, aesthetically and without didacticism. Poet and academician Sanjukta Dasgupta’s latest book of poems Ekalavya Speaks is not merely a gathering of words, they rather, “[…] spread out their wings untiring/ And never rest in their flight” (Yeats) and attempt to hark at deaf ears and represent unheard voices. She is a strong voice for the otherized, marginalised sections raising issues from multiple spheres of life. Caste, gender, myth, history, pre-history, and technology all find space in her chosen selection of poems. The very last lines of the first poem, ‘Accident of Birth’ says,
“No accident could be More catastrophic than The accident of birth, alas.”
This sets the tone of the whole collection, bringing out the angst of not one voice or one poet but an entire nation. The poet is a strong voice, at times ironic as she says in her titular poem ‘Ekalavya Speaks’-
“The Sun also Rises for us I may claim your thumb some day.”
These lines are from Dronacharya, the tutor of the royal princes who asks his disciple to gift him his thumb after lopping it off as a fee to maintain his allegiance to the throne. Ekalavya, the tribal prince could not question the ‘guru’ in the Mahabharata, whereas the poet in the surreal space gives him the voice to speak for the treachery of the great guru. The guru reappears in the poem ‘Dronacharya: The Teacher of Princes’ where questions are thrown at the intentions of a biased guru who was “The glamourised bonded labour/ Leashed to the regal court.”
Her poem, ‘Kurukshetra-The Killing Field’, goes beyond the boundaries of territories and is akin to any war where lives are lost. At once Kurukshetra becomes the battleground of Ukraine or Gaza where humanity is killed every day. The crying mothers and wailing children are the same everywhere and they are representatives of the universal sorrow of pain and loss and how peace is a mere myth as “Peace was restored at the price/ of rivers of blood […]”. In fact, ‘In the Holy Land’, she talks of dying children and the toxic air of war-trodden Gaza; of the grief-ridden Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
In her greater narrative, Ekalavya and Karna unite to quest for justice, for a space in the mainstream, and for a better liberated world. In Dasgupta’s poetry, Ekalavya, Shambuka or Shikhandi are not figures from the great epics, they represent the backwards sections of society who perhaps after eons of silence they have now found the time to come out of death, saying– “ I rise from my ashes/ Resurrected!”
With Shikhandi, Draupadi’s brother in the Mahabharata, who was born a female and exchanged gender with a yaksha (nature spirit) for that of a male, Dasgupta brings in the suffering caused by gender identity. She sensitively writes about Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality in her poem ‘The Poet In Reading Gaol’. One’s sexual orientation can ironically be treated as a heinous crime. Heterogeny is also a kind of capitalism as the poet strongly urges and questions progressiveness and maligning of human rights.
In her earlier books Lakshmi Unbound, Sita’s Sisters, and Indomitable Draupadi. Dasgupta has primarily addressed the feminist question. Her latest includes poems like ‘Bapu’ and ’Manipur’. In ‘Bapu’, she talks about the rape of a 12-year-old child in the name of religion in India with sensitivity.
‘The Coffee Shop’ is an interesting and ironic poem. Dead leaders meet in a surreal space where neither murderer nor violence can touch them. They are ‘immortals’ and ‘martyrs’ and, now, are even invincible. It is utopian when Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther, and Julius Caesar meet each other. Religion and politics, peacemakers and warriors, all blend in a higher realm of understanding. The flavour of this poem is unique and different from the rest of the poems in the collection and yet thematically it stands out as a statement against violence and death. Death cannot bring an end to the ones whose deeds and ideals are immortal. The same can be said about another visionary poem, ‘Shakespeare and Kalidasa’.
In all the poems, the poet comes across as a strong, sensitive voice whose pen cuts across dogmas, blind faiths, violence and otherization. At the same time, she speaks for the cause of humanity. There are personal poems, like ‘I can’t breathe’; a brilliant poem describing psychological claustrophobia in a world where no peace or no prayers can end the suffering of souls. ‘The Exit’ or ‘Loss’ add richer gravity .
As a poet Dasgupta’s language is lucid and she draws her allusions and examples from the myths, from the past and the projected the future. She strongly voices her opinion. As an educator and as a responsible human being she becomes the voice of the many. Each poem unfolds a story to guides our way through obstructions, which are not physical but mental barriers from which one must liberate oneself. As I read her, I am reminded of a few lines by the great Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who wrote:
Speak, your lips are free. Speak, it is your own tongue. Speak, it is your own body. Speak, your life is still yours.
Swagata Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of English at a state-aided college under Vidyasagar University. She is an academician and a keen reader.
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Over the last two or three decades, the Indian American writer, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, has managed to carve a niche for herself by regaling in stories of cross-cultural issues prevalent in India and the United States with special emphasis on experiences of diasporic immigrant women. Though most of her stories are women-centric, with time one notices a gradual tectonic shift in her selection of themes. Initially she would write on problems of immigration and culture clash plaguing Indians in the New World. In Palace of Illusions, she went back to the Indian epic and narrated the story of the Mahabharata told from Draupadi’s point of view. In her novel The Forest of Enchantments, she brought Sita at the centre of the epic narrative The Ramayana and accorded her parity with Ram, revealing her innate strength. Then she took recourse to Indian history and rebuilt the story of Maharaja Ranjit’s Singh’s empire in Punjab narrating it from the viewpoint of Rani Jindan Kaur, his last wife as one of the most fearless women of the nineteenth century. Apart from the available historical data, she filled in The Last Queen by imagining many things Jindan would have said and done and thus painted a complete picture of a woman from all perspectives. A perfect blending of fact with fiction, the novel interested all categories of readers, serious and casual alike.
Now with Independence, Divakaruni widens her canvas to tell us the story of a doctor’s family and his three daughters against the freedom movement in India, particularly Bengal, beginning from August 1946 till the epilogue in 1954. The story of India’s independence is narrated through the eyes of three sisters, each of whom is uniquely different, with her own desires and flaws. They live in a rural village Ranipur and right at the beginning of the novel, which is divided into five parts and an epilogue, the author manages to give us the idyllic ambience of the place in very selective poetic language:
“Here is a river like a slender silver chain, here is a village bordered by green gold rice-fields, here is a breeze smelling of sweet water-rushes, here is the marble balcony of a grand old mansion with guards at its iron gates and servants transporting trays of delicacies up the stairs, here are a man and a woman on carved teak chairs. Here is the country that contains them all.
“The river is Sarasi, the village is Ranipur in Bengal, the mansion belongs to Somnath Chaudhury, zamindar. He is playing chess with Priya, daughter of his best friend, Nabakumar Ganguly. The country is India, the year is 1946, the month is August.
“Everything is about to change."
Doctor Nabakumar Ganguly is an idealist and with his practice in their native village Ranipur, where the family resides, he also treats patients in a slum region in Calcutta. He is highly regarded but earns little as he refuses to charge patients without sufficient means. His wife Bina complains about this but supplements the family income by making exquisite quilts for sale and gifting them to those in need. Among the three daughters, Priya is intelligent and idealistic, and resolved to follow in her father’s footsteps she wants to become a doctor, though society frowns on it. She is fortunate to have the support of zamindar Somnath Chowdhury, her father’s best friend. The eldest daughter Deepa is very beautiful and is determined to make a marriage that will bring her family joy and status. The third daughter, Jamini, is devout, sharp-eyed, and a talented quiltmaker, with deeper passions than she reveals.
Theirs is a home of love and safety, a refuge from the violent events taking shape in the nation. This idyllic setting changes rapidly, as the violence of Direct Action Day in August 1946 takes Nabakumar’s life and introduces fear and a communal bitterness in the once largehearted Bina’s veins. Soon their neighbours turn against them, bringing the events of their country closer to home. Deepa is estranged from her mother and eventually isolated on the other side of the border in what becomes East Pakistan, when she falls in love with Raza, a Youth Leader at the Muslim League. As Priya is determined to pursue her career goal, her attempts to get into medical school in India are thwarted by a gender bias, and she finds herself at a college in America. But due to several reasons she cannot complete her degree there and comes back to India to run the clinic where her father worked. And Jamini attempts to hold her family together, even as she secretly longs for the handsome Amit, her sister’s fiancé. When India is partitioned, the sisters find themselves separated from one another, afraid of what will happen to not only themselves, but also each other. It is only then that they understand what it means to be independent, and the price one must pay for it.
After a lot of twists and turns to the story, including smuggling of arms and rescue mission on the Ichhamati River dividing the two Bengals, Amit shot to death, by the time we come to the Epilogue it is 1954 where we learn about Deepa’s daughter Sameera, Jamini’s son Tapan, Deepa managing the zamindari estate and Manorama and Somnath eager to find a suitable match for Priya when she tells them that she is happy as she is now. Feminism, communal amity, empathy, and self-growth are among the requisite qualities Divakaruni identifies for both a country and a human being to be truly independent. Though set in households more than seventy years ago, towards the end we still find some hope. The Postscript to the story is rather interesting as it comes even after the epilogue. It reads thus:
“Here is a river. Here is a wind rising. Here is a village. Here is the year.
“The river is time, ebbing, flooding. The wind is memory, it can carry flowers, it can carry flames. The village is the world, and you are at its centre. The year is now.
“What will you do with it? What will you do?”
As a Professor of Creative Writing in an American university, Divakaruni has gained the expertise of playing her cards well – her narrative technique in each of her novels and short story anthologies preaches what she teaches – the saleability and marketability of a book in this electronic age should be of utmost concern. Like her earlier novel The Oleander Girl, which seemed to have been written as a sort of film script in mind, (incidentally two other novels are being made into motion pictures at the moment), Independence too seems to follow suit with the right amount of ingredients necessary for promoting the book to different kinds of readers and in different forms as well. One is therefore taken by surprise to find a QR code even before the Contents page which tells us to “Listen to the soundtrack for Independence. A playlist of songs that inspired the freedom movement.” For her Western readers, Divakaruni managed to blend history and fiction very well where along with the fictitious characters we get to read about Mahatma Gandhi and the Noakhali riots, Sarojini Naidu, Nehru and others as they played their parts in the freedom movement. Here we find Priya actively engaged in conversation with Sarojini who gives a letter of recommendation to Bidhan Chandra Roy to help Priya to run a clinic.
One praiseworthy aspect of the novel is how Divakaruni manages to give us details of the streets and sounds of Calcutta – the Calcutta of the 1950s with her double decker buses, the shops at New Market, the quaint little restaurants with curtained cubicles to maintain privacy in a public place – all brought back from memory of the city in which she was born and brought up. The novel is also full of translations of several patriotic songs in Bangla which the swadeshis sang during that period. Several lines from Tagore’s songs are also interspersed to express the moods of characters – a technique used by Divakaruni in some of her earlier fiction as well. The exoticism of India, especially rural Bengal of the time is deftly portrayed through many other incidents of killing and looting at different regions of undivided Bengal. As for her Indian readers we are given the story of Priya’s brief stay in America to study medicine at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia where along with her homesickness, we have Arthur, a lovelorn American doctor, who lends her support and patiently waits for her to come back to him as “his heart has been empty” without her.
Despite such manipulations to the story to bring in as wide a canvas as possible, including sufficient examples of Hindu-Muslim amity and hatred as well, the novel remains a page-turner no doubt and can be recommended for its lucid and racy style of narration, something that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni excels in.
Somdatta Mandal, author, critic, and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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