Swopno (Dream), a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, can be found in his collection, Kalpana (Imagined, 1900).
Art by Sohana Manzoor
DREAM
Far, far away, In my dreamworld, I travelled to Ujjainipur. I went to the banks of the Shipra River To look for my last life’s first love. Her anklets jingled as she walked Powdered with pollen, holding a lotus, Jasmines in her ears, Jhanti flowers in her hair, dressed in red. I had returned one spring, Finding the path, traveling from afar.
In the temple of Mahakal, Evening prayers were being chanted. The market was deserted. A streak of light Irradiated the darkness above the palace.
A serpentine, narrow, lonely path Led to my beloved’s home. On her doors, framed by two saplings, Were painted a conch and a chakra. On a white marble arch, Sat a statue of an arrogant lion.
My beloved’s pigeons returned home. Her peacocks slept on golden rods. Meanwhile, holding a lamp, Descended my Malavika. Between the staircase and doorway, The evening star peeped in. The fragrance of her body and hair Filled my breath with agitated yearning. Her garments rustled to reveal a motif With sandalwood paste on her left breast. Like a deity she graced the gloaming. The city’s rumour mills stopped silent.
My beloved Placed the lamp slowly by the door. She came to me, held my hand in hers, Silently, asked with melancholic tenderness, “Oh friend! Are you well?” Gazing at her, I wanted to talk but lost my words. I forgot my eloquence as together, We dwelled on each other — I cannot recall— We both longed for togetherness As our speechless tears flowed endlessly.
Together, we pondered by the saplings. I do not know what came to pass but her soft hands hid themselves in my right one like a young bird seeking its nest in the dusk. Her face bowed like a lotus stem on my chest with sad restlessness. Pensively, we met with silent breath.
In the darkness of the night
I lost myself in Ujjaini completely. The lamp by the door Was blown off by a distant breeze. By the banks of the Shipra River, The worship stopped in Shiva’s temple.
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input by Sohana Manzoor.
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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).
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Narrative by Kallol Lahiri: Translation from Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
What if someone were to ask me, where is your desh[1]? Quite naturally, I would reply, “Why? It’s India, isn’t it?” If I were to ask my snack-vendor, Ramesh, “Where is your desh, Ramesh?” As he weighs out fifty grams of hot peanuts to mix with roasted chira[2], he’ll say, “It’s Samstipur, Dada.” Isn’t India your country then? Ramesh would give me an exasperated look as he stirs the chira.
There was more of a crowd at his shop at this time in the evening. The train coming from Howrah drops people returning from work at the station. Many of them then walk home chewing peanuts, gram and muri[3] on the way. Ramesh’s hands work like a machine then. Handing the paper packet to me hurriedly, he says, “Arrey, all of us belong to India. Does one have to say that separately? My village is in Samstipur. Our house is there. I feel happy when I go there, Dada[4]. Does everyone have a desh like that?” That’s correct, not everyone has a desh, or a village. The desh which actually does not refer to the state called India – a place which does not shackle you with law and order, for which one does not have to prove one’s patriotism at every step. The desh which actually becomes sujala suphala shasya shyamala, abundantly watered, fertile and lush green with crops, and makes your heart wistful. Which beckons you to return home. That desh and the state are not the same. And so, while Ramesh refers to his village as desh out of an attachment, I cannot find any place with which I am similarly attached. Because I do not have a village like his. I only have a concrete, solid state.
There are many places to go on a holiday to, scattered all over. Arbeliya, Noyagram, Shibhati. But my own village? Which is one’s desh, in Ramesh’s language? As soon as I feel wistful, the bank of a pond, an earthen veranda, Orion in the night sky. The village beneath whose soil the ribs and bones of fourteen generations lie hidden, with which there is an umbilical tie? I cannot find one even after a lot of thought. The April sky feels heavy and stifling atop the attic in my Uttarpara. One can no longer see even a sprinkling of stars. It is only the lights of the teeming apartments that sparkle far and near.
Although Dada or I do not have a desh, or village, like Ramesh does, my Baba’s elder sister, Boro Moni, had a desh, a village from where she had to come away — almost all of a sudden, without any real preparation. But from time-to-time, Moni used to go off to a desh all by herself — especially when the first raw mangoes of summer arrived from the market; some special vegetables — banana flowers, banana stems, figs, spinach of taro. Observing those, and assessing their quality, she was not very satisfied. Even though she did not say anything, she seemed to be lost somewhere. She was not easily available then. She was going around, wandering, right in front of us, and talking and yet it was as if she was somewhere else. She had to be called twice for her to respond. She forgot to add salt to the cooking. She sat fixedly for a long time in a meditating posture as if she had nothing to do with this bank or the other bank, with any shore. She seemed to have left the boat of her body and become immersed in the ocean of attainment. But it was also true that even though all of us were around her, Moni did not really have anyone.
Moni was the solitary resident of a piece of desh where others other than those she led by hand were forbidden entry. You would not be able to enter the main door of that house even if you tried a hundred times. Ordinarily, Moni was busy all day attending to work. She did this and did that. If there was no work at hand, or if it was all done, she turned over the clothes put out to dry in the sun. She washed the baskets, floor-seats, and utensils with water, and left them face-down. After water had drained out of those, she put them back in place. When all these tasks were completed, if there was time, she broke coal into dust. She smeared lumps of coal dust with rice starch and made briquettes. If it had turned dark by then, Moni lit the evening lamp. And then it was time to cook dinner.
Who did Moni do all this work for? For a family — the family, which was actually not hers, but her brother’s. This never occurred to her. And even if it did, there was nothing to be done. The ambit of the narrative knew a bit about all these unspoken, unpronounced things. The characters around her knew. Family existed for this person and yet did not exist — living in a home and yet not having a home. The agony of not having a desh although she had a country – it was named Moni. That was why Moni worked without a word. She chatted with us. She used to talk to no one in particular. She filled up her spare time in her own ways.
Moni used to do various other things. If someone in the neighbourhood got a stiff neck, or got hurt on his leg, or had a bad dream just before dawn, or if a strapping boy wet his bed in his sleep, Moni performed faith healing with ritually consecrated water and oil. She used to recite mantras in whispers into ears. Blow on the head. She used to massage a stiff neck and undo the crick. She used to run her hand over an ear and soothe a piercing earache.
Dada used to say that Moni knew magic — the magic with which Moni floated oil in water and blew, muttered to herself in darkness. It wasn’t just that, so many familiar people as well as strangers came and poured out their heart’s woes. Moni listened. She chanted while counting on a finger. Blew on the head. She had no ishta devata[5], performed no pujas, had no excessive restraint when it came to conduct or judgement.
“What do you say as you blow, Moni?” I had once asked her. Widening her eyes, she had said, “All that is not for your ears.”
Why not? What if I did hear? As she waved the palmyra-leaf hand-fan over my head, she had said, “A sonless man will have no sons. The destitute will not gain wealth. The homeless will not have a home. He has to become completely alone. All his life.” Had Moni become alone after learning the mantras? Why did she learn such mantras then? Who taught her? Moni scrambled up hurriedly. The power is back. Baba’s students too had left a long while back. The newly purchased wall-clock chimed ten o’clock. A shotoronchi[6] would now be spread lengthwise on the long veranda. The radio would be on.
Everyone would listen as they ate. They would talk. After that, each one would go off to sleep as they chose. Like every day, another day would come to an end. But would it really end? If one woke up in the dead of night, wouldn’t Moni be audible? Either sitting in the veranda, or while asleep, she would be blabbering. With whom? Apparently, Moni used to have a lot of people. They were not visible. They were like shadows. Who used to crowd around Moni? Were they the memories of old days left behind? Or were they from the present? Those for whose stories Moni had to sit late at night with her legs stretched out on the small veranda beneath the patch of sky? Hearing all this gave many people the creeps. But I was not the least bit frightened of Moni. Tell me, who would pat you affectionately on the back in the way she did? Who would fan you with the hand-fan when there was a power cut, recite mantras and blow on the hand before an exam so that an entire essay on a cow could flow out of the pen?
After the mistress of the Bhattacharjee household next door took ritually consecrated water for her grandson and gave five rupees, who would immediately order milk from the Haringhata milk supply? The milk with which rabri[7] would be prepared according to Thamma[8]’s recipe. The entire household would wait in front of the stove for the thick crust to form over the milk set to boil on a low flame.
Moni never had any possessions. You could say she didn’t want any. So did Moni have no wants, no dreams? Except for the pinch of tobacco on the tip of her finger which she put into her mouth? I don’t know. I only know the pull of the house which people returned to. They worked extremely hard all day long. With the money from that hard work, they sat together at the end of the day to eat, chat, and the joys and sorrows of domestic life fell gently around the people, like drops of dew. Although all that kept Moni enclosed, Moni was very far away from this world of illusion. We knew, yes, even at that very young age, we knew, that actually Moni had no one. No home, no husband, no children, no family, and for that matter, no desh either.
Even after much searching, I could not find a picture of Boro Moni by herself. The pictures I had were all group photos. With everyone. No solo pictures. Perhaps such a picture of Bijonbala was not even supposed to be there. And so, I had to cut and crop and take out Moni from the group of people. Did Baba’s Yashica camera never find his elder sister Bijon alone then? Or had he and yet never felt the urge to put her in a frame? Or was it that after having begun my archaeological excavation so many years later, I was unable to find Boro Moni? After all, I could not print all the negatives. Some had got lost. Many more had been destroyed. Yet, Thamma, Handa are all there in whatever there is, so why is there no photo of Moni by herself? She sometimes found a place, like an extra, within the frame, in a corner, amidst a tangled, jostling group of people. Why had Thamma and Dadu[9] given such a name to their first-born? After all, “Bijon” meant alone. Devoid of people around her. How did a person’s name match her life?
In truth, she was alone all her life. Although she had her Baba, Ma, and siblings around her. Her husband’s home after she got married. And yet Bijon had to return to her mother. She did not get to live with her husband. Why not? Did her husband not like her? Had there been a quarrel? Had they driven her out? After all, much later, after coming to this side of the border, Moni had to wipe off her sindur[10], discard her conch-shell, iron and coral bangles. She had to wear a widow’s garb. Some people had apparently searched for the house and conveyed the news of Moni’s husband’s demise. How on earth did those who never kept in touch with a person come to dress her in window’s garb? Even after all these days, when I think about all this, I feel astonished.
I want to know about a lot of things. But not everything can be known. The youngsters at home were not supposed to know everything. With whatever is whispered, and more than that, with whatever one hears, they create an imaginary world. Even if there are smiles on the faces of the people in those worlds, those who roam around the house, it is understood that they are sorrowful for some unknown reason. Even if they never said anything, they went around hiding something in the depths of their hearts which they would never tell anyone. Like Indir Thakrun[11], sitting in the terrace of Sarbajaya’s kitchen, even if she asks in gasps for some water, she would never be able to convey her immense hunger.
Gazing at the plate of rice, her eyes would rain tears. And yet, she would drink a bit of water from the pot, sprinkle the rest on the saplings in the corner of the courtyard and go far away to the bamboo thicket, hoping to count the coins for the final crossing. If Sarbajaya had wanted, could she not have called Indir Thakrun that day? What would have happened if she had fed the old woman a couple of mouthfuls of her own share of rice? Sarbajaya did not perceive at that moment the contentment derived from feeding a starving person. As if it had all been masked by an all-devouring hunger. Was it really that? Or could Sarbajaya herself see that it was her own future sitting opposite near the steps of the terrace? A feverish body. The evening train too had gone by. She thought someone called out to her, “Ma,” from the door. After all, it had been a long time since she had heard being called “Ma”.
Was it Apu? Have you come, Apu? She rushed and opened the main door and saw there was no one anywhere. Infinite emptiness. Sarbajaya had to go away forever, all alone, from a desolate house in a completely unknown village. Indir Thakrun had at least been found lying in the bamboo grove by her small niece and nephew, Durga-Apu. None of Sarbajaya’s close kin found her. Apu had come and seen an empty homestead. His Ma was absent. The Ma he had learnt to manage by sending letters. Apu had not left behind any token of memory of his Ma in that house. There was nothing to speak of in Sarbajaya’s existence, except for a bundle, like with Indir Thakrun.
There was a huge crowd in the field beside the Ganga that day. A mobile cinema van had come from the Information and Culture Department of the Government of West Bengal to screen a film. They came from time to time. They screened this and that. The government wanted to make people aware by screening educational films. Before that, the dadas and didis[12]of the neighbourhood gathered together and sang, “Ora amader gaan gaite daey na … shilpi songrami Paul Robeson, They don’t let us sing … artist, fighter, Paul Robeson.” We too nodded our heads and kept the rhythm. Once the tarpaulin sheet was spread on the ground, I tried to find a good place in the first row.
Dada came and whispered in my ear, “You watch films from the rear, stupid. No one sees it from the front.” I raised my thumb and showed him a banana. Ghenchu. Nothing. He was jealous because I had found a good place. He went to the rear. Moni asked people on the two sides to move and sat down beside me. She covered my tiny feet with the shawl around her so that mosquitoes wouldn’t bite me. The field was full of people by then. Was a film screening a trivial thing? In the time I am talking about, except for one or two people, nobody in the neighbourhood possessed a television set. No telephone. There were power cuts all of a sudden. As soon as it went off, the elderly uncles of the neighbourhood sitting in the roak, the spot where they hung out, would laugh and say, “There goes Jyoti Babu.” That was why a generator set had been rented as a special arrangement.
Indir Thakrun was now on the white screen beside the Ganga. She was taking something furtively from Sarbajaya’s kitchen. Moni seemed to huddle up and stiffen herself all of a sudden. She had only recently begun to lose her health then. She brought her face close to my ear, and said, “Shall we go home? Come.” What was this! Why did Moni want to go back home? After all, I had seen so many plays with Moni before this. Seen jatras[13]. Seen Tarun Opera’s “Ami Subhas Bolchhi[14]”. When Shantigopal comes on stage in Subhas costume to the accompaniment of tumultuous orchestral music and lighting, and says, “Give me blood, and I shall give you independence”, I have seen a few thousand people break into explosive applause. Moni had folded her hands in pranam[15], and said, “Please come back. Join the two countries together.”
Moni believed that if Subhas had been there, the Partition would not have taken place. Moni would never have had to leave her village, leave her desh, and come away to this side of the border. Moni loved seeing jatra performances and plays so much, so why did the very same Moni not want to watch the film today? She had seen plenty of films before this — how, thanks to the boon of the king of ghosts, Goopy and Bag[16] had travelled to so many countries, eaten so many kinds of food, punished the wayward king. For that matter, finally they got married to princesses too. Indir Thakrun had just been caught red-handed on the screen in front by Sarbajaya. There was unease on her face. She was desperate to hide herself. And Moni’s eyes were streaming tears then. For whom? For herself? Or was it for those who stayed around like shadows out of compassion and fondness?
Moni felt like eating a lot of things in her final days — all that she had never eaten in her life. What a fierce hunger she had! How would a household that was itself hand-to-mouth obtain so much food? And yet Baba tried very hard. Towards the very end, she took a fancy to eating fish. How she loved to eat fish.
On the other hand, could a widow in a brahmin household eat fish? Nothing would remain of caste and religion! Harm would befall the family. Food then consisted of rice provided by the ration shop, a vegetable preparation, milk that was either available or not, and after lunch, it was the same at dinner, with ruti[17]. What would so many people eat in between? And where on earth would they get that from? In addition, there were, of course, the ekadashi and various other occasions for fasting. There was ambubachi[18] once a year. And of course, many people in the neighbourhood used to give out one or other kind of food in order to earn merit for themselves. Relatives too either sent money, or fruits and suchlike. But that did not benefit the widows in the household at all. However, there were no limits or bounds to the joy of kids. An abundance of fruits, sweetmeats, and chire, muri.
Moni complied with all the strictures. But in her final days, everything was turning topsy-turvy. Not only was she devoured by an all-devouring hunger, it also pushed her to greater ill health. It so happened that Moni began to eat fish furtively. After all, there was a count of the number of fish pieces on the table at home. Ma knew everything. She used to move aside her share of the fish in such a way that it seemed to be extra. Moni used to eat that bit of fish in secret. I had covertly espied one afternoon how contentedly she ate that. Even now, when a lot of fish is brought home, I remember Moni. A person sitting with her back turned around and cautiously eating fish, averting everyone’s gaze.
During tarpan[19], after making offerings of water to one’s deceased male ancestors, it is the turn to appease their wives with offerings of water. And after that come those whom the one offering the tarpan wishes to make offerings to. Dada made ritual water offerings to Moni every time. To Handa. He made offerings of water to all the people who had no one else to do that for them. Those who truly never received water when they were dying. I pour that water with black sesame seeds floating on it into a flowerpot.
The morning of Mahalaya turns into something different instantly. Standing in the middle of the sunny terrace of Dada’s flat, I like to think, what if Moni was around today? If Handa was? And Baba? Who would sit where with their back turned in this sunny terrace then? Who would put mangoes for the kashundi[20]out to dry, and where? Who would stock freshly made paper packets from the teashop and the damp copy of the last volume of the collected works of Rabindranath Tagore?
Following Moni’s return to her own mother a few years after her marriage, she never returned to her husband’s house. And so, when everyone was coming away after being uprooted from their desh, Moni’s Ma was unable to leave her own daughter behind. She had brought her along too with her. Or else how would we have got Boro Moni? Eaten her mango-mustard kashundi? Who would have taken Dada and me to a house in a village on the nights when the power went off after we had finished our studies, to an earthen courtyard, beneath a tulsi pedestal, to the round-the-clock devotional chanting of the name of Hari, the sacred offering there of rice in a clay bowl? Who would hold the hands of the two of us and walk along that dew-drenched path on the bank of the pond and stop beneath the falsa tree there?
The village floating in the early morning sunlight that we had never laid eyes on which Moni conjured up on the nights of power cuts, was Moni’s tiny piece of desh. The desh Moni left behind to never be joyful again. Was it because she was sorrowful that Moni told us stories like they were fairy tales? We used to fall asleep as we listened to those stories. A beautiful village stayed awake all night long right in front of our eyes. The village that did not belong to Ramesh, or to Dada or me, but only to Moni; the village from which, under the cover of nocturnal darkness, three women had crossed two rivers, countless villages and a vast expanse.
The place they arrived at, where they were eventually able to stand on their own feet, was then another country. A place that belonged to other people. And people became refugees in their own birthplace, their homeland, on their own soil, who, having been rendered surplus, made a fresh start in the hope of survival.
Many years later, when I was able to meet all those people, they had lost their health and reached the final stages of their lives. And yet, such élan vital. They had guarded and protected Dada and me with that infinite and inexhaustible vitality. Not just that – the narrative that had been enacted before us over a long time, even after crossing so many winters, summers, rainy seasons, autumns, late-autumns, has not faded; rather, like Baba’s Yashica, it remains hanging in the form of a photo-frame in the inner sanctum of one’s mind. And it is because it’s hanging that the residence in Bally seems to me, from time to time, like a fairy tale. And those days become Thakumar Jhuli, a grandmother’s bag of stories.
In the kitchen of the Bally residence, something special is being cooked. Ma is in the foreground. Moni is behind her. Half of the rolling pin and board for ruti in the middle is visible. Perhaps Ma had turned towards the door to do something in the middle of rolling out the rutis. One can’t make out what she is doing. Was she washing her atta-covered hands? Baba is on this side of the door. Looking through the lens of the Yashica, capturing very casually the door on the left and the wall on the right like a frame-within-frame.
Visible among the few items in the kitchen is the floor-seat. Moni seems to be in a hurry to remove something from the stove. Was someone supposed to come home that day? Or was it just like that, all of a sudden? Was something special really being cooked? Or was it merely ruti and soyabean curry? Ma is radiant with her smile even amidst all that. The moment comes to a standstill right there. But the stream of life flows ceaselessly past that. The day of that photograph and the present day seem to be separated by the vast distance of a nebula. Yet, was it not along that very path that an endless dialogue unfolded within the mind? The very dialogue whose echoes are woven into this piece of writing, all those unprinted negatives, piles of letters and the weight of memories of a long time ago.
Towards the end, Moni had become one with the bed. You could not distinguish Moni from the bed. She used to scream for food all the time — food which she could not digest at all. And so, the whole bed used to get soiled seven or eight times a day. There was shit smeared all over her body, like bedsores, Ma used to clean up all by herself, with her own hands.
Dada and I were very small then. We were in merely two rooms. So many people. Gradually, Ma too began to fall ill with that kind of terrible, inhuman toil. Right next to us was Doctor Kisku’s dispensary — our Doctor Kakima[21]. She visited us so frequently and was so fond of us that she had become like a member of the household. She attended to Moni with much care for a long time. It was because she was our family physician that she had everyone’s details at her fingertips. She warned Baba, “If this sick person remains at home like this, everyone will fall ill.” Where would this sick person be taken then? Would a public hospital take her? They tried very hard. No assurance of getting admitted there was forthcoming. Who would admit a sick person who was on the verge of death? In the end, Doctor Kakima found a way, which remained a permanent witness to a heart-rending incident in our family. It was Doctor Kakima who arranged everything. Moni was left at Mother Teresa’s “Nirmal Hriday”.
Mother Teresa had established her Nirmal Hriday for all those people who had no one, who lay on the street and waited for their final day. Nirmal Hriday provided shelter to these dying people. They spent their last few days peacefully in the land of slumber. But, after all, Moni was not lying on the street. She had everyone — brother, sister-in-law, nephews, niece and various other relatives. And yet she had had to become an unidentified person without any family and enter Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday.
Even today, it is as if I can clearly remember the day Moni left home. Ma bathed Moni and dressed her in a new sari. Moni’s favourite pulao and fish curry was cooked that day. Ma fed Moni. Dada and I were standing quietly beside her. Moni acted as if she was impatient to go to the hospital. For the last few days, she had driven everyone crazy saying she wanted to go to the hospital. She believed that she would get well as soon as she went there. And once she was well, she would go to her village. How would she go? Who would take her? That was not certain. Meanwhile, a yellow-coloured taxi had arrived in front of the house. Baba carried Moni in his arms and got into the taxi. Gora Kaka[22] as well.
Moni seemed to have shrunk somehow in Baba’s arms. She gaped wide-eyed. Dada and I were at the taxi window. Ma too came and stood behind. We were saying goodbye to Moni. The taxi engine started. We heard the sound of that. Did a stream of compassion finally flow from her eyes at that moment? Yes, Moni gaped at us in astonishment and wept. “Why are you crying, Moni?” Dada ran behind the taxi. I did too. The taxi was going along the G.T. Road, becoming more and more distant. Dada screamed out, “Why are you crying, Moni?”
No reply came wafting. Once the taxi went past the bend at Kablikutir, it was no longer visible. We too never saw Moni again after that. Within a week of being admitted to Nirmal Hriday, Moni had passed away. Where did she go? To that tiny piece of homeland? The village that she had dreamt of going to after returning from the hospital?
If ever I woke up in the dead of night, I used to keep my ears pricked – could I hear Moni’s voice? Talking to herself? No, I never heard anything. Once someone leaves, they don’t return. All of us seemed to become quiet somehow after that. Baba did not utter a single word to anyone for quite a few days. When we had to find a picture for the sradh[23] ceremony, it was taken from a group photograph and framed. When the purohit moshay[24]objected to fish being offered at a widow’s sradh, Ma had told him, “Isn’t the peace of the soul the law in that book of yours?”
He could not say anything. Dada and I carried that fish head in the ritual clay pot with the lump of rice and floated it in the Ganga and walked back without looking back even once. There was no longer anyone at home that day to return to for protection. Was there truly no one? After all these years, when I look back at that road, I realise there was. There was an earthen house, atulsi pedestal as well. There was a falsa tree at the bank of a pond. There was a village awash in the morning sunshine. And there was that tiny piece of homeland that belonged to Moni, which we never set eyes on, but only kept in our dreams, like Aladin’s amazing lamp.
(This is an excerpt from the ongoing translation of Baba’s Yashica Camera: A Photographic Memoir of a Refugee Family, by Kallol Lahiri. All the photographs have been provided by Kallol Lahiri.)
Kallol Lahiri teaches cinema, makes documentary films, writes screenplays for films, television and OTT series, and writes blogs of various flavours in between. He is the author of four novels, Gora Naxal (2017), Indubala Bhater Hotel (2020), 1990, A Love Story (2022) and Ghumiye Porar Aage (2024), and a memoir, Babar Yashica Camera (2021). He was awarded the Sadhana Sen Memorial prize in 2021 for the novels Gora Naxal and Indubala Bhater Hotel by the magazine Bhumodhyosagor.
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V. Ramaswamy is a literary and nonfiction translator of voices from the margins. His translation of the novel, The Struggle, by Showkat Ali, was published in 2025.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Jhor(Storm) by Rabindranath Tagore was first published in his collection called Kheya (Ferry) in 1906.
Art by Sohana Manzoor
STORM
The downpour shatters the sky As the storm rages today — The mridanga drums in rhythm With thunder and lightning-strikes. What ragini would suit this weather? What tune would you hum? The darkness has cindered The blue with shadows.
Herds of cows call out In the meadow hazy with rain. Under the tall palmyra trees, Dark pools shiver. The wind whooshes screaming Through a broken burnt home. The opposing borders of empty fields Shout out to each other.
Who looked for me today While traversing the path? They would have had water Dripping down their locks. My heart dances to the tune Of the raag Mallar Who returned from my door Without singing their song?
Come all of you to my home. Sit near me. Today my mind is focussed In meditation. The empty wind rushes Through land and water. After the storm, my mind Flies with the Northwind.
Who’d be crazy enough to come In this torrential downpour, From beyond Which shore? You will arrive with the cry Of wet woods And the perfume of Garlands of gandharaj.
Oh, today after many days, After many journeys, My gathered sorrows seem to have broken Out of their cage to run to an unknown place — In the shadowy groves of endings, From the forgotten lands, Created or broken, At the end of every song.
The dark clouds whip Wayward thoughts. Haphazard conversations waft In haphazard wild winds. In the distant forest, branches swing. The rain falls hard. The thunder arouses A strange restlessness.
*ragini is the female form of raga or raag. Mallar or Malhar is the raag associated with rains.
Gandhraj flower
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input by Sohana Manzoor
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
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.
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.
Barashar Dine (On a Rainy Day) was published in Tagore’s collection, Manasi (Born of the Psyche,1890) as a poem.
Art by Sohana Manzoor
ON A RAINY DAY
What a day it is, What menacing rain! Amid clash of thunders clouds pour. It’s cool and dark. No one will hear these sounds As it’s solitary all around. Facing each other are two sad people. The sky streams water incessantly. The world seems to be empty. Society, world, the noise of living Are all reduced to insignificance. What remains are these flowing eyes. Sip the cup of heartfelt sensations. The rest has dissolved in the dusk. Your own voice will remain unheard. Your life will seem to have faded. Words will dissolve slowly in tears In the midst of these clouds. Both lives will mingle with these words. Who would be harmed by these If they rid the heaviness of minds? In the downpour in a nook of the home, If we confide in each other, How would it matter to anyone? During the forthcoming twelve months, There’ll be many conversations, laughter. Many will come much of sorrows-joys too, Will these confidences ever be destroyed? The world will go on forever. The wind blows with agitation. Lightnings strike every now and then. The words that remain unsaid In this life, may they be spoken In this thundering monsoon shower.
Written in 1889, it was shortened and put to music at a later date. You can listen to a rendition of the lyrics by the legendary singer Pankaj Mullick (1905-1978), who performed it on the Indian radio for the first time in 1927 by clicking here.
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input by Sohana Manzoor
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
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.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ghumiye Geche Shranto Hoea( Spent, He’s Fallen Asleep) was written and composed by Nazrul on the death of his friend, Rabindranath Tagore. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated the lyrics from Bengali.
Tagore… his last days… From Public Domain
Spent, my song’s bulbuli bird has gone off to sleep While all of dusk’s fallen flowers look on wretchedly. Singing at dawn, the bird would make flowers bloom What prohibitory arrow could have silenced it so now? Hair disheveled, a night queen weeps in the forest’s lap. From tomorrow, alas, flowers will no longer bloom Amidst these creeping plants. Whose sad breathing Can be heard in leaf after leaf? Leaving its empty nest My song bird too has flown away! No more do words Pile up in my throat as before. No more will anyone Be lured by the false light here—not even mistakenly!
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.
