BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Imagining Africa in Bengali fiction and verse
Mowtushi Mahruba’s Africa in the Bengali Imagination: from Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-73 is a distinctive and pioneering work on the way the continent led to creative writing in English as well as Bengali over the decades
9 July 2025, 18:00 PM
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A priceless fictional heirloom
There are any number of ways one can approach Rahat Ara Begum’s collection of short stories, 'Lost Tales from a Bygone Era: An Anthology of Translation of Urdu Stories', assembled, contextualised, and published in this book by her loving grandchildren and their siblings
23 April 2025, 18:00 PM
Remembering Prof Kazi Shahidullah
Friendship with Shahid bloomed over shared interests, studies, & sports at Dhaka University.
27 March 2025, 07:00 AM
BOOK REVIEW: POETRY AND NONFICTION / Poetry for our times and a poet’s new frontier
Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures.
15 May 2024, 18:00 PM
POETRY / Shedin dujone dulachinu bone
You know how that day the wind brought out/ The crazy thoughts I had in me all the while.
10 May 2024, 18:00 PM
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / A peripatetic poet’s pleasing musings
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
3 April 2024, 18:00 PM
POETRY / Be a tree
Be a tree
Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover.
From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
15 March 2024, 18:00 PM
Bangabandhu, the 1947 Partition and Healing its Wounds
In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.
13 March 2020, 18:00 PM
SMI—a Tribute!
To think of Syed Manzoorul Islam—Manzoor bhai to me (but let me call him SMI in the rest of this piece!) —is to think of someone always in motion, whether in the everyday world we inhabit, or the life of the mind that he lives so intensely.
17 January 2020, 18:00 PM
From Liberation War Hero to Prison and After: A Sobering Tale
Two narratives counterpoint each other in Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury’s Chariot of Life: Liberation War, Politics and Sojourn in Jail. The first is the absorbing story of major events in the author’s life till the closing years of the first decade of this century. The second is
13 September 2019, 18:00 PM
Bangabandhu in prison: Transcending stone walls and iron bars
Bangabandhu spent almost one-fourth of his nearly 55 years of life in prison. The first time he went to jail was when as a schoolboy, in his hometown of Tungipara, he and some of his friends got into a fight with Hindu leaders who had beaten up a Muslim one.
14 August 2019, 18:00 PM
Rabindranath’s Monsoonal Music
A rough count of the songs collected in Gitabitan in the section titled “Prakriti” or “Nature” reveals that Rabindranath Tagore composed about 16 songs of summer, over 100 monsoonal ones, 33 songs of Sharat or early autumn, 5 of Hemanta or late autumn, and a dozen
21 June 2019, 18:00 PM
From Jibananda Das’ Ruposhi Bangla
Having lived in the world’s pathways for a long, long time
7 June 2019, 18:00 PM
Truth Stranger than Fiction!
Imagine a Japanese man in Dhaka in the first decade of the twentieth century bent on being employed in the town and ending up marrying a Bengali Brahmo woman, the daughter of a soap factory owner, who has offered him a job. Think of the woman later going to a village near Nagoya with her husband
31 May 2019, 18:00 PM
Human, All too Human!
For anyone harboring misgivings about Rabindranath Tagore but doing so with an open mind, as well as anyone who treasures his works but is realistic enough to know that though superhuman in some ways, he was human—all too human!—this is a must read book. Certainly, I found it unputdownable.
10 May 2019, 18:00 PM
Pohela Baishakh My Bengali New Year Musings
Pohela Baishakh, in other words, got momentum as a kind of counter-discourse -- a vibrant collective and spontaneous response to the damming of the Bengali nationalist consciousness by successive Pakistani military governments working in cahoots with Muslim League politicians.
12 April 2019, 18:00 PM
MORNING WALKS
Morning walks, or rather ambles, tip-toeing towards the rest of the day. One's day gathers pace seemingly hour by hour after one
8 March 2019, 18:00 PM
Patna Blues: Travails of a Minority Community
An enjoyable read, Abdullah Khan's debut novel, Patna Blues is a thought-provoking and moving work as well. It is a book mostly
1 March 2019, 18:00 PM
Karl Marx on India: An Assessment (Part II)
Marx correlates the decrease of Indian textile exports with the monopoly exerted by British muslins to India and the decimation of the population of Dhaka. To quote what he says about the impact of colonization on our city and the outcome of the fatal embrace of British colonial policy in our part of India:
4 January 2019, 18:00 PM
Karl Marx on India: An Assessment (Part I)
In a Delhi bookshop this October, I came across Karl Marx on India. Edited by Iqbal Husain, former Professor of History at Aligarh
28 December 2018, 18:00 PM
The Literary Club of 18th-Century London
We Bengalis think that no one can match us for our addas. If you were growing up in Dhaka in the 1950s or the 1960s and happened
19 August 2018, 18:00 PM
Learning from Bangabandhu's Writings
Translating Bangabandhu's unpublished works has allowed me to see how and why Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a boy from a small, and in those days relatively remote rural community of East Bengal, became the father of our nation.
14 August 2018, 18:00 PM
Poetry
There is sorrow—death too—separation's pangs scald as well—
10 August 2018, 18:00 PM
A Short, Winding and Legendary Dhaka Road
Fuller Road, the short and winding road in the middle of the University of Dhaka campus, is quite legendary, not only as far as the
6 July 2018, 18:00 PM
Folk Hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
The process through which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975) became a folk hero in Bangladesh, that is to say, the way in which his
16 March 2018, 18:00 PM
From Ekushey to International Mother Language Day and Beyond
Like every landmark day of every other country, Bangladesh's Ekushey February, or the 21st of February, 1952, has its roots decades
23 February 2018, 18:20 PM
Rabindranath Tagore's Spring Songs
Since whether you keep me in mind or not isn't in my mind at all,
9 February 2018, 18:00 PM