Nazrul’s ‘Aamar Shyamla Boron Bangla Mar Roop’(The Dusky Beauty of My Mother Bengal) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Who can Blow Out the Sun?, a Balochi poem by Ghulam Hussain Shohaz, has been translated by Fazal Baloch. Clickhere to read.
Chapter 3of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne,has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click here to read.
Half-a-beat Behind, a poem, has been written by and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.
Pothik (Traveller), a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Art by Salvador Dali (1904-1989). From Public Domain
Humans for a long time lived in a world that was centred around them. The planets, plants, animals existed to serve them. The resultant effect was not exactly what could be called ‘pleasant’. Climate change and extinctions are proof of that. One cannot of course be held responsible for the extinction of giant dinosaurs for they were long gone before us. Would we have existed in our current form if they had not become extinct?
Perhaps, part of evolution is extinction of the old and birth of the new. However, we are the only species to have used the planet to suit our own needs. We evolved technology. Technology birthed computers and eventually, artificial intelligence. Almost a century ago, Isaac Asimov spun out science fiction about robots terraforming worlds for men. In these novels, he had instituted the laws of robotics, so that they would not harm humans. His robots were humanoids with AI.
As humanity races towards a tech savvy existence with AI taking on roles which were essentially human tasks, perhaps, we have to ask ourselves some salient questions. Ravi Varmman K Kanniapan has voiced such valid concerns over the deployment of AI in his essay. He writes: “The question should not merely be whether artificial intelligence can make institutions faster, cheaper, or more productive. The deeper question is, for whom?” While pondering over this issue, if we take a look at Farouk Gulsara’s experiences pedalling through Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan, one wonders if AI impacts the whole world or will it deepen divides between technocrats and people who live closer to nature! Sailing through the Australian seas, Meredith Stephens takes us on an adventure to Port Hedland. Her narrative is accompanied by beautiful photographs by Alan Noble.
While Suzanne Kamata introduces us to mores on the artistic ethos of Japan, Jun A Alindogan expresses concerns over linguistic forays. Saeed Ibrahim steps into nostalgia taking us to a tiny town called Deolali and Kuldip Raj Chopra muses philosophically gazing back and forth to reflect on life lessons. In a contrary vein, Devraj Singh Kalsi splashes comic frivolity as he describes his attempts at purchasing bedsheets!
Niaz Zaman has shared a learned essay on women writers in Nazrul’s magazine, Dhumketu (Comet), in the early twentieth century, while Professor Fakrul Alam has translated the lyrics of a song by the poet from Bengal. Fazal Baloch has brought to us a powerful Balochi poem by the late Ghulam Hussain Shohaz in English. Isa Kamari has shared the third chapter of his self-translated Malay novel, The Throne, weaving in life in the newly-minted Singapore of the mid-twentieth century. Ihlwha Choi has translated his own Korean poem on how he found poetry. Winding up the translations, is a poem by Tagore called Pothik (traveller).
We have an interesting excerpt from a ‘The Brown Hand’, a spooky story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from The Raj in Ghostly Light, edited by B.C.Dutt. One has to realise while reading such stories that what is seen as a controversial attitude in today’s world could well have been an accepted norm a century or two ago. We have another excerpt from a more modern non-fiction — Bhaskar Parichha’s recent translation from Odia of Janaki Ballav Patnaik: An Unfinished Memoir. Describing the art of tattooing is yet another excerpt from a story by Hannah Stevens, a writer shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize, which follows her conversation with Keith Lyons.
Short stories have wound their way into our reviews section too. Somdatta Mandal has discussed Geetanjali Shree’s Once Elephants Lived Here: Stories, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. Mandal writes: “The book…presents a great challenge to the layman reader who cannot simply pick it up and start reading at leisure. One must read meticulously, ponder over the distortion of the usual short story genre, keep track of the convoluted or sometimes half-finished sentences and wonder where the narrator or the protagonist of the story is leading you – sometimes round and round and without reaching a denouement. All said and done, one must pick up this book to savour how post-modern storytelling can become an art in itself.” Rakhi Dalal has written about Teresa Rehman’s Her Hajj Story: Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assamwhile Farah Imam elaborates on Raina/Rituparna Khan’s Her Story: Beyond Dimension. Parichha has brought to us Reetika Khera’s Freebies or Rights: Rethinking India’s Social Policy. He writes: “Freebies or Rights presents a case for seeing social protection not as charity, but as part of the infrastructure of a democratic society. Its central message is both simple and consequential: dignity cannot be secured by economic growth alone. For millions of Indians, it also depends on whether the state can make basic rights real in everyday life.”
Though we reflect on diverse themes in this issue, the collective concern is for the welfare of our species, our planet and our very existence, occasionally drizzled with humour. Do pause by our contents page to browse on our October issue.
We are hugely grateful to all the contributors, our team who step in to help create the content and put it before all our readers, especially Sohana Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. We remain thankful to all our readers without who our efforts would be in vain.
The lyrics of Nazrul’s ‘Aamar Shyamla Boron Bangla Mar Roop’ (The Dusky Beauty of My Motherland, Bengal) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam
Painting by Jamini Ray (1887-1972)
Come, come behold my evergreen Bangla motherland’s beauty. Its loveliness is hued across green hills, gorges, forests and expanses. The view of paddy fields and forest enhance my green mother’s beauty! At dust-coloured bends of the road, a mendicant lute keeps playing. Anxiously, a belle walks in the village on her own. Across a deserted village field, she lays loam, straw and wet clay And then spreads dewdrops with a brush made of mercy. The lotuses on the dark pond water reflect her lotus-hued face. Wildly, the girl keeps playing with tigers and bears in the forest. Dancing to storm beats she makes snakes dance like a bede woman. In the river’s currents, her bracelet made of pebbles keep sounding. With a dotted forehead, she stands in a balcony amidst evening stars While in the early morning she ambles to the stream side to fill her pitcher.
Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam(1899-1976) was known as the Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs.
Nazrul’s lyricsof Mor Ghumogore Elo Monohor (In my sleep, came the one who won my heart) have been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam.
From Public Domain
Enchanting one, I was deep asleep when you came I saluted you then, reverentially, again and again. In Sravan’s monsoonal cloud, the great Dancer danced Torrentially. From up above, you caressed my eyes softly Possessed by the touch of the beauteous, charming one, My whole body bloomed. For you, my Lord, I filled my tray with flowers blooming in my garden. But alas, and what a shame, you wouldn’t take any! What you did was undo my bun and take from it a flower. How could you leave for what I said in my dream? Now that I’m fully awake, I weep and weep and keep calling you— Oh dear, dear one!
Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam(1899-1976) was known as the Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriexplores how Nazrul transformed a Persian musical form into a distinctly Bengali expression of love, devotion and cultural coexistence
Nazrul (1899-1976) teaching Nazrul Sangeet. From Public Domain
The journey of the ghazal into Bengal is, in many ways, the story of India itself: a form travelling across languages, faiths, courts and cultures, losing something of itself at every crossing and acquiring something new in return. Born in Arabic poetry, refined in Persian, transformed in the Hindustani world and eventually absorbed into several Indian languages, the ghazal was never a form that remained untouched by the cultures through which it passed.
In Bengal, its most remarkable transformation came through Kazi Nazrul Islam.
Nazrul did not merely introduce the ghazal into Bengali. He made it feel as though it had always belonged there. That achievement becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that Bengali already possessed a rich and deeply individual musical-literary tradition. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had produced the great poet-composers who came to be remembered collectively as the Panchakabis[1]: Dwijendralal Roy, Rajanikanta Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Atulprasad Sen and, the youngest of them, Nazrul. They wrote their own lyrics and generally composed their own melodies, creating a modern Bengali song tradition that combined literary sophistication with music. Unlike the privileged urban backgrounds of most of his predecessors, however, Nazrul came from poverty and rural Bengal. His childhood and youth exposed him to worlds that the emerging Bengali middle class often experienced as separate: Islamic learning, Persian literature, Hindu mythology, Vaishnava poetry, folk theatre and the songs of rural Bengal. This plurality was not an intellectual position Nazrul adopted later in life. It was the atmosphere in which his imagination was formed.
The ghazal itself had already travelled an extraordinary distance before reaching him. Its origins lay in Arabic poetry, but it acquired much of its classical identity in Persian literature. Persian poets such as Hafiz, Rumi and Saadi gave the form its characteristic world of desire, intoxication, separation, beauty and mystical longing. When the ghazal entered the Indian Subcontinent, it encountered local languages and traditions and changed again. Amir Khusrau and, later, Wali Daccani were among those who helped transform the Persian form into something increasingly Hindustani. In India, the ghazal acquired new vocabularies, new images and new musical possibilities.
At its simplest, the ghazal consists of a series of couplets, each capable of standing independently while being held together by a common metre, rhyme and refrain. Yet the formal structure is only half the story. The real unity of the ghazal is emotional. Its verses circle around longing, often without resolving it. The beloved may be a woman, a man, God, beauty itself, an absent homeland or an impossible ideal. In the Sufi imagination, earthly and divine love can become indistinguishable.
That ambiguity was perfectly suited to Nazrul.
Bengal had experimented with the form before him. Atulprasad Sen is generally credited with the first substantial Bengali experiments with the ghazal. But Nazrul took the experiment much further, turning it into a popular musical form. He did not approach the ghazal merely as a literary structure to be reproduced in another language. He understood that it had to be made to breathe in Bengali.
His preparation for this was unusually rich. He learnt Urdu from his uncle Bazle Kareem and encountered Persian more deeply during his years with the Bengal Regiment in Karachi, where he studied the language with a Punjabi maulavi. He read Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Hafiz, and the attraction was immediate. The Persian poets gave him a vocabulary of intoxication, rebellion, sensuality and mystical desire that seemed to correspond naturally with his own temperament. In the early 1920s, he translated and adapted Persian and Urdu material into Bengali. But it was towards the end of the decade, with greater maturity as both poet and composer, that he began creating original Bengali ghazals in earnest. These compositions were published with musical notation and eventually travelled through gramophone records and radio.
That technological development is important. The Bengali ghazal might have remained an interesting literary experiment had it been confined to printed pages. Gramophone and radio changed its destiny. Nazrul’s songs entered homes, tea shops, theatre halls and public gatherings. A form associated with the Persian and Urdu world could now be heard in Bengali by listeners who might never have encountered its literary ancestry. The ghazal became something to sing and listen to before it became something to analyse.
Nazrul’s great innovation was to make the Persian inheritance sound Bengali without stripping it of its Persian character. Listen to the vocabulary of his songs. Words such as ishq, dil, mahfil, gulshan, bulbuli and gulbahar enter the Bengali lyric naturally. They do not sit there like foreign ornaments. They become part of the emotional vocabulary of the song. The Persian garden begins to coexist with the Bengali landscape.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of Nazrul’s ghazals. He could summon the rose garden of Persian poetry and, almost in the same breath, evoke Bengal’s rivers, spring winds, flowering trees and muddy pathways. The imported image does not erase the local one. They inhabit the same poem. Consider the rose and the nightingale, perhaps the most familiar pair in Persian and Sufi poetry. Nazrul gives them an intimacy that is unmistakably his:
Mohammad naam jopchhili bulbuli tui aage, Tai kire tor konthe aaji emon modhur raage. Ore golap niribili, bujhi Nobir kodom chhuye chhili, Tai tar kodomer khoshbu aajo tor atore jaage.
*
O nightingale, surely you once whispered the name of Muhammad Is that why such sweetness dwells within your song? O rose, perhaps, in secret, you once touched the Prophet’s feet; That is why, even today, the fragrance of his footsteps lingers in your attar.
The rose and nightingale are ancient Persian symbols. But Nazrul does something wonderfully intimate with them. The Prophet is not invoked through theological abstraction. His presence survives as fragrance, birdsong and touch. Devotion becomes sensory. The sacred enters the ordinary world through things one can smell and hear. This ability to make different traditions converse is at the heart of Nazrul’s art.
Nazrul was writing at a time when Bengal’s cultural life was being increasingly marked by communal anxieties. The Bengali Muslim community, despite its demographic importance, often found itself culturally marginalised within a literary establishment shaped substantially by the Hindu bhadralok[2]. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals offered Bengali Muslims a literary and musical vocabulary drawn from their own Islamic and Persian inheritance while simultaneously keeping them within the larger Bengali cultural world. That is why his Persianised diction matters. It was not merely decorative exoticism. It helped create a cultural space in which Bengali Muslim listeners could hear themselves without having to abandon Bengali identity.
At the same time, Nazrul was introducing the Hindu listener to an Islamic world that Bengali literature had often treated as something outside the mainstream of its cultural imagination. His ghazals therefore worked in both directions. They gave Bengali Muslims a sense of cultural recognition while inviting Bengali Hindus into an unfamiliar but deeply embedded part of Bengal’s history.
The scholar Dr Pushpita Mitra identifies three broad tendencies in Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals, and this distinction helps us understand the extraordinary range of his achievement. In some compositions, he brought Urdu words and phrases directly into Bengali, creating an idiom that consciously mediated between the two languages. In a second group, he used Persian imagery – gulbahar, gulbagicha, bulbuli, gardens, flowers, seasons – to evoke the landscape of Persian poetry while allowing it to overlap with Bengali nature. In a later phase, his ghazals became less dependent on obviously Persian or North Indian vocabulary and forms and increasingly absorbed his own mature musical and lyrical personality.
One of the most delightful examples of the first tendency is a song that moves between Bengali and Hindustani with a playful sensuality:
Alga koro go khopar bandhan Dil wahin mera phans gayi Binod benir zareen fitay andha ishq mera kas gayi. Tomar kesher gandho kokhon Lukaiye ashilo lobhi amar mon, Behosh hokar gir pari haath mein, Baaju-band mein bas gayi.
*
Undo the knot of your hair My heart is caught there still. In the golden ribbon of your braid, My blind love has tightened its hold. When did the fragrance of your hair Slip secretly into my heart? Before I knew it, drunk and helpless, I fell into your hands And made my home in your armlet.
What makes the song so charming is not simply its sensuality. It is the linguistic play. Bengali and Hindustani rub against each other, creating something that sounds at once theatrical, folkish and unmistakably Nazrul. The Persian vocabulary is not being displayed; it is being lived.
The second tendency in his ghazals is equally revealing, as Dr Mitra points out. Consider his evocation of spring:
The poem begins in the Bengali spring – the season of phagun, flowers, southern winds and the stirring of the heart – but Persian imagery soon enters the frame:
Spring has come, the season of flowers, And every grove is suddenly awake. The southern breeze moves through the blossoms, And the heart begins to sing and dance. The rose-garden spills its colours Over the branches and vines; The cuckoo calls from somewhere within, And sleep and languor open their doors.
The Persian garden has entered Bengal, but Bengal has not been Persianised. The two landscapes overlap. That is perhaps the most important thing Nazrul achieved with the ghazal: he did not translate one culture into another. He allowed them to meet.
And the emotion was never confined to romantic love. Nazrul could move from sensuality to devotion, from devotion to rebellion, from rebellion to loneliness. His ghazals contain lovers, mystics, intoxicated wanderers, flowers, nightingales and gods. Their beloved is often deliberately elusive. Is it a woman? God? Memory? Death? Desire itself? The uncertainty is part of the pleasure. This is where Nazrul’s Islamic inheritance meets the Bengali Vaishnava tradition of biraha, the spiritualized ache of separation. In both traditions, absence can become more powerful than presence. The beloved’s physical absence intensifies his or her presence within the imagination. Nazrul understood this instinctively. His songs rarely hurry towards resolution. Longing is allowed to remain longing.
Consider this:
Bagichay, bulbuli tui phul shakhate disne aji dol, Ajo tar phul-kolider ghum tuteni, tandraate bilol. Ajo hay rikto shakhay uttori bay jhurche nishi-din, Asheni dakhine hawa, ghazal-gawa moumachi bibhol. Kobe se phul-kumari ghomta chiri, ashbe bahire re, Shishirer sparsha-sukhe bhangbe re ghum, rangbe re kapol. Phaguner mukul-jaga dukul-bhanga ashbe fulel ban, Kurider ostho-pute lutbe hashi, phutbe gale dol. Kobi tui gandhe bhule dubli jole, kul peline ar, Phule tor buk bhorechis, ajke jole bhar re aankhir kol.
*
In the garden, O bulbul, do not set the flowers swaying on their branches today; The buds still sleep, their slumber has not yet been broken from their drowsy dreams. Alas, even now, the empty branches tremble day and night in the northern wind; The southern breeze has not yet arrived, nor the honeybees, intoxicated with the ghazal of flowers. When will she come, the flower-maiden, tearing apart her veil and stepping outside? When will the touch of dew awaken her from sleep and paint her cheeks with colour? When spring comes, when buds awaken and the banks overflow, a flood of flowers will arrive; Laughter will spill from the little buds’ lips, and dimples will blossom upon their cheeks. O poet, bewildered by fragrance, you have plunged into the waters and can find no shore; You have filled your heart with flowers, but today, fill the hollows of your eyes with tears.
This ghazal unfolds as a delicate allegory of waiting, awakening and loss. At first, its world seems entirely pastoral: the garden, the bulbul, sleeping buds, empty branches, dew, the southern breeze and intoxicated bees. Yet beneath these images lies a deeply human longing. Spring has not arrived; the flowers remain asleep, the branches shiver in the cold northern wind, and even the bees that will eventually turn the garden into music are absent.
The ‘flower-maiden’ becomes the central image of this anticipated awakening. Her emergence from behind her veil, her cheeks coloured by dew, and the laughter and dimples appearing on the buds transform nature into a living feminine presence. Spring is imagined not merely as a season but as a moment of emotional and sensual renewal.
The final couplet dramatically changes the mood. The poet, intoxicated by fragrance, has plunged into the waters and lost the shore. The flowers that once represented joy now coexist with tears. This movement from expectation to intoxication and finally to sorrow gives the ghazal its poignancy. The poem’s greatest beauty lies in this tension: spring promises fullness, yet the poet discovers that beauty and grief are inseparable. The garden blooms outside while the heart fills with tears within.
In another ghazal, the poet says:
Bosiya bijone keno eka mone Paniya bharone cholo lo gori Cholo jole cholo kande banatal Dake chholchhol jol-lahori. Diba chale jay bolaka-pakhay Bihoger buke bihogi lukay. Kende chokha-chakhi magiche biday Barowa-r sure jhure banshori. Ogo be-dordi o ranga paye Mala hoye ke go gelo joraye. Tobo sathe kobi porilo daye, Paye rakhi tare na gole pori.
*
Sitting alone in solitude, Why do you linger there by yourself? Come, fair one, come to fetch the water; Come, let us go to the water. The forest floor weeps; the rippling waves call out to us. The day slips away on the wings of the cranes; within the bird’s breast the female bird hides. The chokha-chakhi, the loving pair, weeps and bids farewell; To the plaintive strains of Barowa, the flute languishes. O heartless one, at your red feet, who has gone and entwined herself like a garland? The poet, bound to you, is caught in a dilemma: shall I place her at your feet, or wear her around my neck?
This lyric unfolds as a gradual movement from invitation to longing, and finally to surrender. Its opening image, a young woman sitting alone and being invited to fetch water, places desire within the familiar pastoral world of Bengali song. Water becomes both a literal destination and an emotional metaphor: ‘come to the water’ suggests movement from solitude towards intimacy.
The second stanza deepens the mood through nature. Day departing on the wings of the balaka, birds seeking one another, and the chokha-chakhi bidding farewell create an atmosphere of separation. The mention of Barowa and the languishing flute introduces the classical-romantic vocabulary of Indian music, where melody itself becomes an expression of yearning.
The final stanza transforms pastoral romance into personal devotion. The mysterious figure who ‘entwines’ herself around the beloved’s red feet as a garland evokes both surrender and erotic attachment. The poet’s dilemma, whether to place the garland at her feet or wear it, is deliberately paradoxical. Love has erased the distinction between worship and possession. What begins as a simple invitation to the water thus becomes a meditation on desire, separation, devotion and the inability to decide whether love is an act of surrender or an act of embrace.
His later work makes this even more poignant. The death of his young son, the illness of his wife Pramila and the devastating illness that eventually silenced Nazrul himself cast a shadow over the later part of his creative life. The rebellious energy never entirely disappeared, but the songs increasingly turned towards loss, memory, mortality and mystical yearning.
My heart is full; I listen for a song Perhaps today my beloved will come. Dreams are folded into golden wings, And some restless bird of the heart flies away into the sky.
The poem then moves towards the riverbank, the muddy path, the approaching beloved and the drifting scent of the wind. Who is coming? Nazrul never tells us. That is precisely its power. The beloved may be a lover remembered, a divine presence, an apparition from the past, even death itself. The song does not close the door on any possibility. It leaves us waiting on that riverbank.
This late Nazrul is very different from the young ‘Bidrohi Kobi’, the Rebel Poet who thundered against empire, oppression and communal divisions. Yet the two poets are not really different. The same refusal to accept boundaries lies beneath both. The poet who would not accept the separation of Hindu and Muslim traditions would not accept the separation of love from devotion, the sensual from the spiritual, or beauty from sorrow.
This is also why his use of Hindu and Islamic imagery could be so radical without being merely provocative. Nazrul could write of Krishna, Shiva, Kali and Durga with the same intensity with which he invoked Islamic devotional imagery. His Hindu devotional songs, particularly his Shyamasangeet, became an important part of Bengal’s musical heritage. His ghazals, meanwhile, brought Persian and Islamic imagery into Bengali popular music. His artistic universe was not a collection of separate compartments; it was a single, restless landscape.
There were critics who found this troubling. Some conservative Muslims objected to his Hindu imagery; some Hindu critics were uncomfortable with his Persianised diction. Nazrul belonged fully to neither camp because he refused the premise on which both positions rested: that cultures preserve themselves by remaining apart. For him, Bengal had never been culturally pure. Its languages, music, metaphors and religious traditions had been meeting one another for centuries. The Bengali ghazal is perhaps the most beautiful evidence of that history.
What Nazrul finally created was not a Bengali imitation of an Urdu form. Nor was it Persian poetry dressed in Bengali clothes. It was something new: a musical-literary language in which Persian imagery, Arabic devotional vocabulary, Bengali lyricism, folk symbolism, Vaishnava emotionalism and Hindustani musical traditions could exist together without apologising for one another.
And this is where his importance extends beyond the history of the ghazal. Nazrul’s Bengali ghazals were part of a larger cultural intervention. In the Bengal of the 1920s and 1930s, when communal identities were hardening and the colonial political order was encouraging competing claims of belonging, he offered another possibility. A culture could be Muslim and Bengali. It could draw from Persia without ceasing to be Bengali. It could invoke Krishna and Muhammad without treating the two as mutually exclusive. It could be modern without severing itself from folk memory.
The political message was sometimes explicit in Nazrul’s journalism and poetry. In the ghazals it was often quieter. It resided in the very sound of the songs – in their vocabulary, their imagery, their musical forms and their refusal to remain inside a single cultural enclosure. The effect could be political without the song ever becoming a political slogan. Perhaps this is why Nazrul’s ghazals continue to feel so alive. Nearly a century later, his Bengali ghazals remain part of the musical lives of Bengal and Bangladesh. They continue to be sung, recorded and reinterpreted. Their survival is testimony not simply to the durability of Nazrul’s melodies but to the emotional generosity of the world he imagined.
A rose can belong to Persia and Bengal at the same time. A nightingale can sing the name of Muhammad in a Bengali song. A river boat can carry an Islamic prayer. A spring garden can be simultaneously gulbahar and Bengal. A lover can be human, divine or simply remembered. Nazrul understood that these were not contradictions. They were the truth of Bengal. And perhaps that is his greatest gift to the Bengali ghazal: he did not merely give Bengal a new musical form. He showed how a culture can absorb another culture without losing itself, and how, in the process, both cultures can become something larger than they were before. The ghazal arrived in Bengal as an inheritance from elsewhere. Nazrul brought it home.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriis a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Robihara 2 (Sunless 2) by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Chapter 1 of Isa Kamari’s novel, The Throne,has been translated by the author from Malay. We will be running the whole novel as serial through the year. Click here to read.
An excerpt from Aslam Dostain‘s novel, Sótkál, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
A Sudden Shower has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Clickhere to read.
Jhor or Storm, a poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, Painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner
Perhaps, the only constant that makes a difference in this ever-transforming world is how we react to changes around us. How do we interact with not just humans but our whole planet with its climate, contours, its plethora of flora and fauna? Will that impact our survival in the long run? And yet with our focus on legacies, traditions, beliefs, we tend to ignore the call to adapt to the new that might help us move towards an unpredictable future. We forget perhaps that these systems had all been made by our ancestors to ensure survival. Somewhere along the way, these have become like fences caging us into small subsets. The strange thing is we continue to allow that to happen and create enclosures which we fight to maintain. The future that we face now seems even more tumultuous with climate change, rising sea levels and global warming taking a front seat while influx of refugees from war and natural disasters have already started making themselves felt. Add to that the shortages of resources that we have taken for granted for centuries. How would we survive these?
Is it by redefining the constructs we have created or just meeting in corners and finding commonalities as suggested by Ryan Quinn Flanagan in his poem ‘Corners’?
Corners are a meeting place, they hold a room together
Our poetry section often reflects what we experience, feel or see around us. We have poems on how nature overrides human constructs by Khayelihle Benghu. In ‘Passport for the Rain‘, she writes:
If rain possessed a passport, it would read: Citizen of every place that drinks.
We also have poetry in our translations with Ihlwha Choi giving us a glimpse of Korean life. Professor Fakrul Alam has brought to us in English a Bengali poem by Nazrul written on the death of Tagore, a poem that was read out in Calcutta radio by the poet himself in 1941. Tagore’s poem, Storm, has been translated in keeping with the heavy downpours in Asia this season. Fazal Baloch has shared an excerpt in English, which reads like a short story, from Aslam Dostain’s Balochi novel, Sótkál, giving us a flavour of the hard life in their region, where self-reliance is a felt need for survival. We have mental heath issues woven into this section with Isa Kamari’s translation of his own Malay novel into English, The Throne. We will be running a chapter every month from this novel.
Book excerpts also has a translation this time with Ramananda Bharati’s Bengali travelogue, The Forest of Snow, brought to us in English by Somdatta Mandal. Aruna Chakravarti has reviewed this non-fiction for us. The other excerpt is from Hughes’ The Biscuit Thief, a book that reflects his distinct brand of absurd humour. Keith Lyons’ interview this time features an excerpt from interviewee Jayanthi Sankar’s short story set in Singapore. Mandal has written on yet another translation from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas of Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Moonlight Saga. Bhaskar Parichha has discussed Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, co-authored by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. He claims that this book is “is indispensable reading for anyone interested in literature, intellectual history, cultural modernity, or the life of a man whose vision of humanity continues to speak powerfully to an increasingly interconnected world.”
This month’s non-fiction section has trotted around the globe. We have Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan’s essay discussing how to redefine norms. His take is a bit different from Flanagan’s. He tells us, using Huck Finn, Terminator and Sangam Literature, people need to ask not, “What is right?” but “How did I come to believe this is right?” Rengin Uçkan’s writes on the need for framing rules that are compassionate for refugees. And Farouk Gulsara with his inevitable gruff humour talks of climate change while stating things as it is: “Climate change not only shrinks our summer beachwear but also makes outdoor living impossible. Additionally, it’s proving to be more expensive to consume anything…” Jun A. Alindogan narrates how typhoons have increased in number in Philippines and how it affects them while Jeena R. Papaadi reflects on her literary journey. Meredith Stephens shares her sailing adventures in Australia with stunning photographs by Alan Noble. And Suzanne Kamata has brought us a flavour of the unique Zine Fest in Kobe, where both groceries and books find a place!
Devraj Singh Kalsi hovers between fact and fiction. He has a musing which seems like a hash of dark fiction but based on his experiences. He has also shared a story that is purely fictional. Yi-jung Chen brings to us a quirky love story set in Taiwan across time and space while Brindley Hallam Dennis tells a tale about a dog who sits at a table and sips drinks with a straw! Jay Samanta gives a narrative about a modern relationship based on social media output. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao has shared a fable that talks of freeing nature. The issue is, can we really?
In Borderless Journal, we hope to create a space which will help reflect not just the times but also look forward to ideas that can move us towards surviving in a happier world, built on the basis of accepting differences, filled with love, kindness and compassion. While this may sound clichéd and repetitive, given the current climes, these values cannot be emphasised often enough and perhaps our content to an extent does reflect that, sometimes with a soupçon of humour. Do pause by our contents page for this August and tell us what you think.
Winding up this issue, we would like to thank our all contributors for their wonderful writings and photographs. Huge thanks to the Borderless team without who this issue would not have been as vibrant. Special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Thank you all. All of you together make this journal come alive.
Kazi Nazrul Islam died in the same month as his friend and mentor Tagore, only it was a different date and year (August 29th, 1976). This poem. written after the death of Tagore, has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam, who adds: “ The Bengali title of the poem, ‘Rabi-Hara‘, of course, puns on the fact that ‘rabi‘—the first part of Rabindranath Tagore’s name means the sun. To lose him, then, is to become ‘robi-hara‘ or ‘sunless’. The poem was written by Nazrul soon after Rabindranath’s death and read out by the poet himself on All India Radio, Calcutta (Kolkata).”
SUNLESS 2
The afternoon sun sags, collapsing on the roadway. Sravan’s dark clouds swarm in, Darkening the day, And shrouding the sky, Since you, Bengal’s heart, India’s bard, and the world’s sun, Have passed away! Did you not hear at all the lament of mother earth? Was that why you feigned illness and kept your eyes shut? This day the pulse of Bengal has begun to throb with pain O poet — seas, rivers, forests— all cry out for you in vain! Vedantic knowledge was yours, forever on the tip of your tongue Your writings had Saraswati’s blessings, full of learning and rhyme. In your meditations, Shiva, God of everything auspicious, resided. In your heart, Sri Krishna, the one who had even smitten Love, dallied! Durga, consort of Shiva, and source of all joy, would converse with you. How could they, deities so powerful, not feel the extent of our loss? How could they snatch away what they had given so sympathetically? After all, you were Bengal’s beacon of hope, lighting us up eternally! We took pride in your glory; you made us feel earth was our only need. You made us forget our afflictions—timidity, hunger, misery, and ruin! You shone over our heads every day—like your namesake--the sun! You made us proud; you made us feel we would never be undone! You’ve bestowed much love on this land -- on India and Bengal, How have we offended to have made you, thus, leave us all? Tell me -- who else is there to bless those who dare to blaze? Who else can protect the pride of the ones that are frail? Behold, the whole of Bengal laments, unfurling its tresses. See in this lunar fortnight the distressed moon hiding itself! Screened by Shravan’s rain cloud, the sun weeps in the horizon In house after house men and women cry out, “O poet, return!” Alas, India’s fate blazes on a pyre, the body no longer visible. This day, the vermilion marking Bengal’s beauties too is invisible! Today Saraswati’s lyre and Bengal’s poetic soul know only silence And funeral flames have scorched even the moon’s radiance! Till now none knew how close you had become to everyone All roads now hold millions of people -- all overcome with grief!
After you return to the rasa-filled realm from which you had come To give us delight, won’t you miss us and lament your earthly home? Your lyrical messages had made you this land’s dearest soul But it was not merely its loveliness-- you had loved all of Bengal! Assure us, O poet dearest to our heart, responding to our love You will return once more to your people from up above. Full of the rasas, you cried out soulfully for our suffering race Why did you enamour us so? Now we’ll rue forever your loss! I believe that if the sun is put out, the entire solar system will go. Bengal’s sun set forever today; what we’ve lost only we will know! No one besides Bengalis will feel the extent of their deprivation Nowhere outside Bengal will be heard such loud lamentation! The sun that shone over us has left, leaving us all benighted In Bengal’s heart the one light blazing is your funeral pyre! The rest of India envied Bengalis their good fortune and wondered How had the sun deigned to descend on Bengal’s thatched huts? Will Bengal get such a great, world-conquering superman again? Can this poor land ever again dream of the kind of happiness You gave us? And so, Kobi guru, our beloved muse-teacher, We grieve, finding no consolation, no solace whatsoever! We had thought of you as God’s blessing given to us eternally. Let not death’s torpor make us forget forever heaven’s bounty. As you depart from us, let us plant on your feet farewell kisses. No matter where you are keep these ill-fated people in your wishes.
Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam(1899-1976) was known as the Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs.
Charudutta Panigrahi introduces us to to the eighteenth century literary giant, Upendra Bhanja, who gave up his crown for the love of words. Click here to read.
Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan highlights the contemporariness of Sangam Literature with discussion about a narrative based on trust and power politics. Click hereto read.
Art by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). From Public Domain
Floods, heatwave, hurricanes and storms — wild weather rips parts of the earth. While experts attribute these to El Niño and climate change, one wonders if peace and lifestyle choices could have any impact to reverse the changes on our home planet. Do wars add to our deep distress? We lose people, homes, what we nurtured and loved, the beautiful cities and structures we built, even forests, fields and rivers. The nuclear holocausts, the killing fields of the World Wars, the mined fields of Cambodia and Vietnam which continue to maim farmers… all these should have taught us to avoid wars but now when the television throws up images of war-torn zones, one wonders if those are worse than climate disasters?
In climate disasters we lose lives, homes and cities too — but people can step in to help and rebuild after the disaster. In a war setting, rescue workers are at a risk as bombs mow down terrain and destroys the tenor of daily lives. The disasters born of climate change too can be irreversible — especially with rising water levels, depleting shorelines and warmer climes ripped by storms. Which is worse — wars or climate disasters? What do you think? Could we go back to a pollution free world and reverse the darker impacts of climate change?
Just as history accepted wars and moved on, perhaps the time has come when climate change has to be accepted as a part of the new reality, and we have to find new ways of life. Exploring such stories is a book by Rajat Chaudhuri,The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire. It has been reviewed by Bhaskar Parichha who tells us: “It reminds us that the climate crisis is not solely a scientific or political problem but also a crisis of imagination. Rajat Chaudhuri demonstrates with remarkable insight that stories are among humanity’s most powerful tools for understanding uncertainty, confronting ecological loss, and envisioning more just futures.” Somdatta Mandal, on the other hand, has brought in more on environment with her discussion of Siddharth Kak’s A Fire over Mount Everest. Andreas Geisbert adds colour to this section with his exploration of Angel Ramon’s Requiem of a Lost Nation. Satya Narayan Misra has reflected on Bhaskar Parichha’s Icons of Odisha – Lives that Shaped a State, a non-fiction whose excerpt tells us much about the journey of the author to bring to us community builders in various streams of life. We also have a bit from Kanupriya Dhingra’s non-fiction about a book bazaar that flourishes despite bookshops finding it hard to survive, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi.
Our interviews this month touch upon environmental issues with Keith Lyons conversing with Helen Townsend, environmental entrepreneur and plant enthusiast who is high on sustainability and earth friendly solutions while Suzanne Kamata has interviewed Lily West who has travelled to all the countries in the world and has put it all down in her memoir, West goes East. Like Kamata, she teaches in Japan now. Kamata has also given us a humorous piece on remote controls. Humour is a sentiment that has also been wrought into our nonfiction with a flourish byDevraj Singh Kalsi too. He writes of his wedding sherwanialmost with a passion like the Dickensian Ms Havisham[1] exhibited for her crumbling wedding gown, except it has a different tone — that of wry tongue-in-cheek irony. Farouk Gulsara has a similar twinge of sarcasm as he muses on uncertainties in the future. Ian C Smith brings in a bit of the weather as he muses on a rainy day while Subramaniam Cheemalapati muses on the star-studded sky, dwelling on his anecdotal childhood experiences. Gowher Bhat introduces us to an aid worker who helps war victims. Meredith Stephens continues on her sailing adventures in Western Australia with photographs by her husband, Alan Noble. The photograph of the pink jellyfish is awesome. Do check it out!
Translations have brought in a shower of poetry with Tagore’s poem on a rainy-day hinting at shared confidences. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated Bengali lyrics Nazrul wrote for his friend and mentor, Rabindranath Tagore. Ihlwha Choi has brought to us a whiff of the Korean summer with his verses and Fazal Baloch has brought to us soulful poems from Balochi by Mohammad Hussain Anqa. Isa Kamari’s translations carry a flavour of Malay life in Singapore, and this set of verses bring to a close his book, The Lost Mantras. We are very privileged to have his entire book translated solely in our pages. Isa Kamari is an eminent literary voice of the Malay Singaporean community.
We have news about our hardcopy poetry anthology. We have had six media coverages in less than three months. Professor Malashri Lal deems: “For those of us who still believe in principles of care and compassion, humanism and amity, Wild Winds is a lifeline to keep afloat…It is especially commendable for wrapping global concerns in the fine tissue of hope.” And Mandal tells us: “Reading through these one hundred poems is indeed a pleasurable experience even for readers with a more prosaic temperament.” We are delighted that the book has had a warm welcome. Huge thanks to our publishers for giving us a hardcopy platform.
Thanks to all our contributors, readers and the fabulous team that make borderlessjournal.com come alive each month with a vibrant soul. Huge thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Do pause by our contents page for the July 2026 issue.
