Humanities Underground

The Child is Given Over to a Stepmother

Prasanta Chakravarty Unappeasable and plain. That is the reason Simone Weil is able to unburden and pull us deeper into relentless entanglements and by doing so, sets us free. “The woman who wishes...

The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting

Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on...

‘Footfalls echo in the memory’: Displaced Durgas and Migrant Forms

Subha Mukherji in Kolkata, October 2021 Durga Puja is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of India, an annual event most widely and exuberantly celebrated in and around Kolkata. On display at the...

“सच्ची कला चक्कर में डालती है”: An Exchange with Shiv

The poet and the essayist Shiv Prasad Joshi has recently written an essay in Pahal about the wellsprings of writing (http://pahalpatrika.com/frontcover/getrecord/321), on the question of holding a...

The Deceased Deer, Spring Moonlight and Shahaduz Zaman’s Jibanananda

  # 1927: a young Jibanananda Das musters courage to send his first collection of poems—Jhara Palok—by post to Rabindranath Tagore, requesting the great man for his opinion. Tagore reads the...

What Are You Going Through?

Prasanta Chakravarty   “Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for autobiography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses...

The Geometric Elasticity of Force

   Prasanta Chakravarty    An Honest Letter An exceptional testament about the nature of violence in times of civil war appears in the form of a letter: the one sent by Simone Weil to the...

Catastrophe: Corpse of a Tree

Rana Roy   Our world is going through a crisis, caused by power and the will to overpower. Power to overpower nature works in tandem with the wish to overpower humans and creatures alike. People...

Brief History of Spitting: An Indian Account

  Arijeet Mandal             The first reaction after receiving a small cut or bruise in humans is to put it inside the mouth. If the bruise is in some other part of the body that we cannot...

The Accelerated Grimace and the Ground for our Beseeching

It is an unanticipated coincidence that the collected works of Parthapratim Kanjilal, a major poet writing in Bangla for the past half a century, has been published just as George Steiner has breathed...

Letter to a Student

Dear Iqra, I have seen you in classes and in the Arts Faculty corridors. Yesterday I read your helpless and yet immensely brave note after being attacked on the North Campus of Delhi University in...