Tag: Walter Benjamin

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Essay

On Both Sides of the Border: The Techno-Political Erasure of Bureaucracy, Memory, and Refugee Lives

By Rengin Uçkan

For over fourteen years, government paperwork piling up in back rooms, relief boxes stacked in chilly warehouses, the blue glow of fingerprint scanners, and temporary numbers stamped onto ID cards have painted a stark picture of a system that reduces human survival to raw digits. This isn't just about lines drawn on maps between countries. It’s the unyielding reach of state power, stretching from the breathless textile sweatshops of Bursa to the quiet stone courtyards of Mardin, treating flesh-and-blood people as mere case files. When the civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, it triggered one of the largest mass displacements in modern history, sending shockwaves through global politics and everyday human lives alike.

Historians will likely look back at these years through the lens of high-level summits, treaties, and diplomatic rows. But down on the ground, where poverty and memory actually live, people remember this era by far more mundane and exhausting objects: scanners casting a pale blue light over fingertips, plastic ID cards that have to be renewed every single year, cardboard boxes stamped with donor logos, and quiet crowds waiting out in the cold outside provincial migration offices. The shockwaves that rippled out from the first protests in Daraa back in the spring of 2011 hit Turkey’s legal and social landscape with a force that went far beyond a simple logistical puzzle or a temporary surge in arrivals. No one back then could have predicted where things would end up. As the Syrian conflict dragged on year after year, millions spilling across borders turned into a permanent humanitarian and governance crisis—one that continually stretched the limits of international law and domestic administrative muscle.

The daily grind of young people working off-the-books in the hot, unventilated textile shops of Bursa, or large families trying to hold things together in the shadow of Mardin’s historic stone houses, never quite lined up with the neat spreadsheets put together by ministry officials in Ankara or international aid agencies. Over the years, local and global players built a massive, heavy-handed bureaucracy to manage the fallout. On paper, it looked like a lifeline, but in reality, it stripped people of any real say in their own lives, turning them into passive recipients waiting for handouts. Even when the initial intent was simply to cushion the blow of the crisis, the resulting programs routinely missed what people actually needed on the ground. The bleak warnings Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) once wrote about statelessness, legal limbo, and losing the protection of the law are playing out all over again through the automated rules of the modern state. Instead of being seen as individuals with inherent rights, people have been reduced to paper files waiting on the grace of state-approved assistance.

As Michel Foucault (1926-1984) noted, modern power doesn’t just rely on physical borders; it works through systems that constantly track, categorise, and log bodies into official databases. The temporary protection framework set up across Turkey following the arrival of Syrian refugees is a textbook example of this tight surveillance net. From where someone is legally allowed to rent a home to what kind of healthcare they can receive, every detail is dictated from the top down. Unlike the exiles or refugees of earlier centuries, today’s displaced populations live out their uprootedness under the cold, watchful eye of digital databases. Much like the angel of history Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) saw in a Paul Klee (1879-1940) painting—driven backward into the future by a storm while wreckage piles up at its feet—refugees find their individual voices and political demands completely drowned out by the noise of the machinery around them. Echoing the unprotected figures of ancient Roman law who stood outside standard statutes yet weren’t criminals but millions of people who have been pushed into a legal blind spot, their lives stripped down to pure survival within the cogs of a sprawling bureaucracy.

What started out in the early days of the crisis as an urgent, compassionate response by local and international groups gradually hardened into a long-term control apparatus. Over time, the primary goal stopped being about helping people in trouble as the focus shifted entirely to managing and containing the influx. The complex digital networks set up by migration authorities log every move a refugee makes, locking them into a state of strict dependency rather than granting them genuine freedom.

Standardised projects drafted by international donors often look brilliant in air-conditioned meeting rooms, but once they hit the messy reality of the streets, they turn into abstract paperwork with zero practical impact. From child protection schemes to integration workshops, none of it carries much weight for a family struggling to survive in the dust as seasonal farm labour or in the poorest corners of the city. The speed at which institutions push data back and forth has long since outpaced the actual help reaching human beings. Much like the endless corridors in a Franz Kafka (1883-1924) novel, human lives get ground down in a system where stamps, signatures, and forms swallow everything whole. People are left to navigate a bewildering maze without knowing which office to visit or which paper to sign—mostly because procedures are rarely explained in terms they can actually grasp. Left to fend for themselves in this administrative labyrinth, grassroots organisations that should have been amplifying local voices ended up squeezed into compliance, effectively turned into field clerks for the state machinary.

For the past decade, the aid sector has loved the word “localisation.” But no matter how good it sounds in funding proposals, it hasn’t solved the core trap of keeping everyone hooked on foreign money. Instead of treating Syrian refugees as independent economic actors capable of working, building, and making their own choices, the systems designed to support them keep them tied to grocery vouchers, periodic social assistance, or short-term rent relief.

You can see the quiet toll of this setup in the rural development projects scattered around Mardin—a palpable sense of burnout and resignation. When people are systematically cut out of the rooms where decisions about their own lives are made, they quickly learn to keep their heads down and take whatever comes from above. Like characters in a Greek tragedy who can’t outrun their fate, Syrian refugees try to weather massive economic shifts and heavy-handed regulations that they have zero power to influence. This goes far beyond simple poverty. It is the direct result of living underneath a precarious legal label handed down from above. Through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) thoughts on what it means to truly dwell and belong somewhere, a refugee hasn’t just lost a physical house; they’ve lost that bedrock sense of safety and home. Over time, the very aid meant to keep people afloat turns into another layer of chains. Because long-term structural solutions never materialised, these barriers have only grown deeper, keeping refugees locked out of full economic and social life.

Ten years in, this ongoing intervention has long outgrown the label of a temporary emergency response. It stands instead as proof of how rigid state borders and inflexible institutions buckle under sustained human reality. Millions of personal stories have been neatly filed away behind quarterly reports, statistical tables, and budget sheets, while the centuries-old tradition of neighbours living side by side in this region quietly frays at the edges.

If this heavy-handed, rule-obsessed mindset doesn’t shift, the debates of the coming years won’t be about social cohesion or peace. We are looking at a future defined by deeply divided, alienated, and hostile communities. No technical fix that strips away human dignity, emotion, and agency is ever going to solve a crisis of this scale. Unless borders dissolve not just on government maps, but inside public laws, institutions, and everyday empathy, the scars left by these policies will take generations to heal. As Spinoza (1632-1677) pointed out long ago, any social order built on fear, instability, and a lack of trust can never produce real peace; instead, every new crisis simply builds higher walls and widens the chasm between people. Ultimately, the future of forced migration in the region can only be reframed by starting from a single, uncompromised premise: human dignity and rights shared by all.

References

  • Adıgüzel, E. (2016). Migration, Refugees and Turkey: International Migration and Refugeehood. Ankara: Seçkin Publishing.
  • Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
  • Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books.
  • Erdoğan, M. M. (2018). Syrians and Living Processes in Turkey. Ankara: Hacettepe University Migration and Politics Research Center.
  • Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Gallimard.
  • İçduygu, A. (2015). Syrian Refugees in Turkey: The Long Road to Integration. IPC Policy Brief.
  • Kirişçci, K. (2014). Syrian Refugees and Turkey’s Challenges: Going Beyond Hospitality. Brookings Institution Press.
  • Uçkan, R. (2023). The Role of Civil Organizations in Turkey’s Migration Governance: The Case of Syrian Refugees. (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). Marmara University Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul.
  • Yıldız, A. (2018). Migration Management and Refugees in Turkey. Istanbul: İletişim Publications.

Rengin Uçkan is a writer and researcher focusing on humanitarian development, human rights, and cultural narratives, with a strong interest in long-form investigative journalism and global issues.

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Essay

Epaar Bangla, Opaar Bangla:  Bengals of the Mind

Asad Latif

By Asad Latif 

If nations are imagined (but not therefore imaginary) communities, Bengal is a nation. The reality of nationhood rests on the quality of the imagination that goes into it. 

Calcutta, where I was born in 1957, provided me with a cartographic point of entry into the imagined geography of Bengal. My Bengal began with West Bengal, within which lay a rough face-to-face society rich in visual and oral provenance. The everyday homeliness of rural thatched mud huts were reflected in the high gabled roofs which contoured the spiritual skyline of Dakshineswar. Minstrel bauls walked through the soul, half-starved on their way to seeking salvation for everyone. The very soil of Bengal broke out in bhatiali song. The chau dancers of Purulia dramatised Hindu epics in a language emotively accessible to all. The energy of santhali dances invoked the performative agency of a tribal culture that refused to let pre-industrial and pre-state time lapse into contemporary irrelevance.   

Agricultural West Bengal encompassed the legacy of a land whose grasp was much longer and larger than the social circumference of middle-class life in Calcutta. In my own ancestral village in Hooghly district, a short train journey from Howrah station, boys my age could climb trees and run barefoot and naked across scorching soil, outpacing the shy urbanite in me. Young women, taught to avoid the roving gaze of male strangers, lowered their eyes to the ground in modest contemplation when men passed by. Farmers could bend unbearingly long to till the land, standing upright for only a few minutes before they resumed their toil. No one spoke English. No one needed to. No one needed me. I needed them.

To the west of West Bengal lay the rest of India. The “rest of the Indians” were decipherable. In Bihar and Odisha, once a part of Bengal Presidency, rump Bengal lived on in the linguistic and cultural traces of the colonial past. Farther west, West Bengal vanished into an eclectic Indian nationalism. I must say, though, that on a long train journey from Calcutta to Cochin in Kerala as a teenager, I thought (rightly or wrongly) that the particular shade of green found in the vegetation of West Bengal was lost till it was found in Kerala again. The renewed connection between Calcutta and Cochin made it possible for me to extend my Bengali-ness vicariously all the way to Kerala, making me quite a pan-Indian Bengali, I suppose. The connective nationalism of Indian Railways (like that of the State Bank of India) plays no small part in protecting the unitary reality of contemporary India. 

Farther to the west of the rest of India lay the lands of Islam. They began with forbidden territory: Pakistan. Pakistan embodied the Partition of India, the departure of space from Indian time. For me, West Pakistan was unknown terrain: No one I loved or hated lived there. But if, indeed, there was an “Islamic world”, then I certainly inhabited it subliminally. I was (and am) a Muslim. I belonged to the global efflorescence of a great faith that had spread into my birth and self-recognition. West Pakistan had nothing to do with it. My mother was a practising Muslim (after a fashion), my father was a practising atheist. As a five-day-old, I had been “adopted” by a childless Hindu couple who lived in the same block of flats as my parents. Nilima Kurup (née Bose) took me to temples, and Parameshwara Raghava Kurup, well-versed in the Vedas, stayed away from the Puranas. But no one made me anything but a Bengali indebted forever to the Islamic religiosity of South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. Certainly, I belonged to the lands of Islam. There was nothing vicarious about this. It is just that West Pakistan had nothing to do with my identity. I respected its existence even as it stayed indifferent to mine (since it had no idea that I existed). That was all.   

East Pakistan was different. I had relatives there on both my mother’s side and my father’s. I remember a childhood visit to my paternal uncle’s home in Narayanganj. It was raining. Unlike West Bengal (where rain falls on people), the people of East Bengal fall on the rain. A female cousin, all of six years old, made an excuse of going to the bathroom: instead, she took a bath in a roomful of rain as wide as the skies outside, within sight of the elders, dancing with the abandon of the water that flowed through her tresses, kissed her eyes, drenched her frock, and caused an uproar that led her to be dragged back to lunch, laughing unrepentantly. Meanwhile, her elder brother wanted to go to the “bathroom” as well. He was held back by his hair and resisted violently, raining cries of recrimination on everyone. Watching my wild bangal (native East Bengali) cousins in righteous ghoti (native West Bengali) awe, I decided that East Pakistan was too Bengali for me. 

But it was not to be. 

Bangladesh

Baker-ul Haque came to live next door to our flat in Nasiruddin Road, Park Circus, Calcutta, in 1971. A year younger, he caught up with me in historical time with vivid stories of how he and his family had escaped Bogra, trudging through forests as the Pakistani air force strafed fleeing civilians, people fell dead on the left and the right, his mother held on his elder sister’s hand, he grasped his younger siblings firmly, his father led on, and all of them made their way — to me. I doubted specific details of his heroic journey, but not his visceral courage. I witnessed it when my pet dog chased him to the fourth-storey terrace, he climbed on to the parapet and kept walking on it calmly, I held the dog back, and I implored Baker to climb down. He smiled at me insouciantly. It was only when he saw tears in my eyes that he relented. Once he was safely down, I wanted to give him a hearty kick, but settled for a rib-shattering hug instead. Epaar Bangla[1]wins when Opaar Bangla[2]is safe. 

Baker and his family lived next door, in the third-storey flat which the writer Syed Mujtaba Ali had occupied briefly earlier. Given his literary reputation, I stayed away from him, but he was rather fond of me, and I invaded his rooms whenever I found the door ajar. The family which stayed with my own family was that of Lutfar Rahman, an Awami League Member of the National Assembly from Khulna. Chachaji[3] smiled a lot but was fierce, chachiamma[4] was benign to a fault, their elder son Ornob took after his mother and their younger son Tulu (his pet-name) took after his father. Both brothers, who were much younger than I was, became mini companions on laughing excursions to the same terrace on which Baker had reduced me to tears.         

The liberation of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971 (which happily and sadly soon saw Baker’s and Lutfar Chacha’s families returning to Bogra and Khulna) was my rebirth as a Bengali. I had been born into the bifurcated mythos of Bengal, which was first partitioned administratively in 1905 in an act rescinded in 1911, and then partitioned along national lines in 1947 to produce Pakistan. The partition of that Pakistan in 1971 produced an independent Bengali nation called Bangladesh. It is only in the years to come that I would understand the reasons for the ontological security of Bangladesh: it is a sated or satisfied nation because its borders guarantee the two conditions of its existence — that it be Bengali and Muslim in co-determinate measure — with provision being made for the rights of non-Bengalis and non-Muslims within its borders. Indeed, so successful has Bangladeshi nationalism been that its majority population finds it unnecessary to seek links with West Bengal to achieve cultural completion. That attitude is reciprocated in West Bengal, whose incorporation into the Indian ethos makes Bangladesh its closest neighbour, but a neighbour nevertheless. 

Yet, to look across the border within Bengal, to see its integrity, is to un-see its divisions. Bengal is named ground: To walk on it, even vicariously, is to recover the insights of Walter Benjamin [5]on his visit to Moscow. Benjamin’s delineation of Russia as named ground (in his Reflections) leads him to proclaim that “you can only see if you have already decided… Only he who, by decision, has made his dialectical peace with the world can grasp the concrete. But someone who wishes to decide ‘on the basis of facts’ will find no basis in the facts”. The facts are always too many. The facts are contested. The facts might not even be facts. But Bengal is decidedly one — not because of its successes but because of its vulnerabilities. 

The Refugee Within

The fragile figure of the refugee straddles the two Bengals. Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s[6] poem, Udvastu[7], rendered unforgettably in the recitation by Kazi Sabyasachi[8], is a part of an aural tradition without which it is impossible to re-imagine the Bengal that existed once. What makes the refugee central to the idea of Bengal as a state of mind is that she embodies the land’s biological unity and integrity in the very act of losing her place in its stolen geography. Bearing the scars of uprooting, dispossession and exile, the refugee socialises the pain which lasts long after the immediate displacement of enforced migration has passed. To seek refuge is to pass from basha to bari. Basha is a temporary place of residence, no matter how long that temporarity lasts. Bari is an inherited abode which is both ancestrally personal and nationally interchangeable with desh, the native land. The udvastu or vastuhara[9] from East Bengal seeking refuge in West Bengal since 1947 had to contend with what Nilanjana Chatterjee calls “epistemological denial in India”, wherein those who had crossed the border were treated as an economic burden. 

The epilogue to the story of the refugees of 1947 was written in 1971, when it was the turn of Bengali Muslims from East Pakistan to join Bengali Hindus in seeking refuge in West Bengal. While the vast majority of refugees spent months in harrowing conditions, professional and other middle-class families were often hosted by middle-class families in West Bengal who could afford to do so. It was not unknown for the family of a Bengali Hindu, who himself had come from East Bengal in 1947, to share its basha with a Bengali Muslim family. The Bengali Muslim knew that he would return home if Bangladesh won the war. His Hindu host kept dreaming of a bari relegated forever to the nostalgic lay of a lost land. 

My family was more lucky. Our first trip to Bangladesh was to Lutfar Chacha‘s home in Khulna across the land crossing in Benapole. Of course, I enjoyed the royal spreads at breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. But what filled my eyes was the sight of Ornob, Tulu and their little sister (by then), strutting about their home as if it was theirs. It was theirs. Bangladesh restored in me my extended sense of myself, my identity as a resident of Epaar Bangla who sought completion in the autonomy of Opaar Bangla. Soon after, I visited Baker in Bogra. At one dinner, his mother sat down just the two of us together. Naturally, I got the larger piece of fish in a bowl. I cooked up an excuse for Baker to go and look for something. I exchanged the bowls. He returned to eat. When we began with the vegetables, he exchanged the bowls. That insouciant smile again. I hate him. He has outwitted me always inspite of being a year younger.     

The refugee is the first citizen of imagined Bengal. She will also be the last. That is, without Bangladesh and West Bengal being the ultimate refuge of the transitional Bengali self, there will be no Bengal.  

There will be no me.

Birth matters. No one can be born in two places.

In his essay, “Englands of the Mind”, Seamus Heaney[10] registers the birthing role of place in the “interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythical life”; what a land does is to afford a man “nurture that he receives by living among his own”. Bengal forms a similar geography of the mind. It received me among my own. Life was material, which is to say that it veered from the banal to the brutal, but it was redeemed by the furtive companionship of the imagination.  The trellising which Heaney notes does not have to be idyllic. It rarely is. Australian writer Dorothea Mackellar’s[11] poem, “My Country“, written while she was homesick in Britain, captures the native lore of a land that her ancestors supposedly discovered for her. She writes: “I love a sunburnt country,/ A land of sweeping plains,/ Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of drought and flooding rains.” Australia is nothing without its enervating drought and its equally uncaring rain. Mackellar dismisses the pastoral epiphanies of a promised expatriate land, particularly “When sick at heart, around us/ We see the cattle die”. Natural disasters provoke her to reclaim art from nature. She redeems a wayward landscape by offering it refuge in her lines.

I am no Heaney or Mackellar. Bengal has no need to find refuge in my words. May these English words of mine find refuge in the lap of Bengal from which I sprung into life.  

[1] Epaar Bangla: This side of Bengal (West Bengal)

[2] Opaar Bangla: That side of Bengal (East Bengal or Bangladesh)

[3] Father’s younger brother is chacha and ji is an honorific in chachaji

[4] Father’s younger brother’s wife

[5] Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish man of letters and aesthetician (1892-1940)

[6] Achintya Kumar Sengupta (1903-1976), writer and editor in Bengali language

[7] Refugee in Bengali

[8] Kazi Sabyasachi (died 1979), a Bengali Elocutionist, Nazrul’s son

[9] Dispossessed in Bengali

[10] Seamus Heany, 1939-2013, Irish writer

[11]  Dorothea Mackellar, 1885-1962

 Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1

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Essay

Rabindranath and the Etchings of His Mind

Anasuya Bhar explores the various lives given to a publication through the different edited versions, translations and films, using Tagore as a case study and the work done to provide these online .

Rabindranath’s first efforts at writing poetry, what he refers to as padya or rhymes, were made when he was merely a boy of seven or eight years. This is what he has to say about his maiden experience, the magic and the awe with which it surprised him –

“I had, until then, only witnessed rhymes in printed books. Without any scratches, mistakes, nor any signs of thought even – there seemed to be no sign of any of the earthy weaknesses either. I dared not imagine that these rhymes could be produced by one’s own efforts. … But when the skilful mixing of a few words gave rise to the rhythm of the ‘payar’, the magic of making rhymes remained no longer an illusion. “(My translation from Jibansmriti ‘The Poetry Beginnings’, VB, 27)

The above excerpt from Jibansmriti is significant in many ways. The memoir was written when Rabindranath was in his fiftieth year, in 1911. A careful study reveals that there are three manuscript versions to the text of Jibansmriti and the one available on print (and published by Visva Bharati), is the third and the latest version. Jibansmriti (My Reminiscences) is a piece of Rabindranath’s own life writing, along with two other pieces in book form: Chelebela (My Boyhood Days, 1940) and Atmaparichay (The Self Revealed, 1943).  

Rabindranath was a reluctant biographer of himself. Perhaps his first conscious efforts at autobiography is to be found in an essay called Atmaparichay that was first published in 1904, wherein he had consistently defended his wishes to not fuss over his life. In fact, he had wanted to keep separate his jiban and brittanto, that is the biological nitty-gritty of his life and the descriptive and analytical of his creative life. He believed that a poet’s life inheres in his poetry; that there is no need to separately concern oneself about his life details. This was re-iterated in more than one places. Nevertheless, although Rabindranath was reluctant of a conscious autobiography, he has revealed much of himself in his letters, and other non-fiction and travel essays. He was a self-conscious writer with a great emphasis put towards self-expression as well as expression of the self.  To know about him one needs to scour through these writings.

My intention in this essay, however, lies not in the history of Rabindranath’s life writing. I would, instead, like to dwell on those scratchings, mistakes and etchings of the poet’s mind that made Rabindranath ponder about the final version of any of his manuscripts. He was a relentless revisionist of his own writings. My interest lies in that branch of study, quite recent in academic scholarship, which tries to examine the various changes that each text suffers before being available for the final print. The changes might take place in the manuscript or during the correction of proofs. The successive texts, the manuscripts, the proofs, and finally the printed text all seem to have their own dynamics and seem to possess an autonomy and character of their own. This seems true of all texts of all writers and those of Rabindranath are no exception. Between the ideas and their writing, between the manuscript and the print, between the printed text and its translation into other language(s), a particular text seems to have many distinct lives. Until a short time ago, these fell within the purview of textual criticism and editorial scholarship of a text. Now, they may be considered under the rubric of ‘alternative readings of a single text’. Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), the German Jewish philosopher, talks about the ‘afterlife’ of a text in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ when it is translated, that is to say, a text assumes a different and separate life, with its own dynamics and dimensions when it is translated, from the original. The lives of a text then, multiply when multiple translations take place.

If one studies the three manuscripts of Jibansmriti, one notices three separate beginnings: the first two distinctly pointing to his life proper and his unwillingness to share details of it, while the third and the printed version has a more abstract vision of a painter-like selection of memorable incidents from his life.  The text as it exists in Bangla now, begins in medias res, as it were, with the recollections of his early childhood, as becomes permissibly natural for the memory of a fifty-year-old person. What is interesting are the insights that time and aesthetic distance have provided. Editorial and textual scholarship of Jibansmriti as revealed in Rabindra Rachanabali (Volume 17, Visva Bharati), ‘Grantha parichay’ (introducing the text) cites the minute changes and differences in the three versions of the text. I enclose photographs of all the three versions of the text:

The first manuscript of Jibansmriti. Source: Bichitra

The second manuscript of Jibansmriti. Source: Bichitra

The third and final manuscript of Jibansmriti. Source: Bichitra

The different variations and all the manuscripts of not only ‘Jibansmriti’, but the entire Rabindranath Thakur corpus, including his plays, fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry in English as well as in Bangla, are now available in the Online Tagore Variorum, Bichitra, which was inaugurated by the then President of India, (Late) Shri Pranab Mukhopadhyay, as a part of the Sesquicentenary (150 years) celebrations of Rabindranath Thakur’s birth, in the year 2011. The programme of the digital archives for Rabindranath was co-ordinated by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Professor Emeritus of English, Jadavpur University, and prepared by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. The digital archives bring together all the available versions of all his works and makes provision for their collation, thus allowing the researcher or anyone interested in the world-poet to look through the vast stretch and range of his works. Hence the aptness of its name ‘Bichitra’, meaning ‘various’. It is a unique venture of literary scholarship as well as of software engineering and has been put together by young members all below the age of 35, and academic degree holders mostly from Jadavpur University. It is a rare and pioneering achievement in the field of Digital Humanities in this part of the world.

Any given text may have three or four kinds of an ‘afterlife’. They may be interpretative or of the hermeneutic kind, for instance, those spelt by Rabindranath’s manuscript versions. Another may be achieved through translation, as mentioned earlier. The next may be when a text is being performed. The performance text, the play text, or even the screen play of any text, are effectively different texts in the new scheme of textual afterlives. Each of Rabindranath’s texts then, automatically have different autonomous afterlives as practically all of them have been translated and have several versions as well. Along with these familiar afterlives, the hypertext now, also adds a yet newer dimension. The study of afterlives of a text gains in an all-new dimension when a new text is created based on an older text, by retaining its title or its literary essence. For instance, Aparna Sen’s film Ghare Baire Aaj (2019), is not only an afterlife of Rabindranath’s text of the novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916), but also one on Satyajit Ray’s 1984 film Ghare Baire. The study of the afterlives of a text is a never ending and rich treasure trove and affords endless intellectual curiosity and study. The English Gitanjali (1912), too, is a unique example of a text with many afterlives, even after a hundred years of its literary history. I have written about its complicated trajectory, elsewhere.*  

Sukanta Chaudhuri’s book The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge University Press, 2010) provides significant and perhaps, pioneering insights on this newest aspect of textual scholarship.  Among other aspects of a text, Chaudhuri dedicates one whole chapter on Rabindranath’s ‘katakuti’ (pen scratches and crossings) which invariably were shaped into diagrammatical forms, which Chaudhuri identifies by the name of ‘doodles’. The printed texts do not showcase these pictorial designs or doodles.

A description of Rabindranath’s doodles in one of his manuscripts. Source: Bichitra

The visual aspect of these manuscript pages afford yet another dimension to the working of the poet’s mind while he was working on a poem or a song. They are creative outputs of a different kind, which remain hidden from the printed version of the text, thus disallowing the reader the privilege to dwell with the thoughts of the poet, his seemly and unseemly corrections, as it were. The digital archive Bichitra make all these easily available to us. Understanding, teaching and enjoying Rabindranath’s works become a more gratuitous experience for all of us. If translation is one way of making Rabindranath easily available to most corners of the world, this is yet another move to make his works and all his manuscripts available in every home of all corners of the world. A hundred and sixty years have passed and the magic of Rabindranath or his works remain undiminished and ever contemporary.

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*Bhar, Anasuya. ‘The Many Lives of Gitanjali’ in Evolving Horizons, Volume 5, November 2016, pp. 20-27, ISSN 2319-6521

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Dr. Anasuya Bhar is Associate Professor of English and Dean of Postgraduate Studies, at St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College Kolkata, India. She has many publications, both academic and creative, to her credit.

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