05. 03. 2023

A Century Shimmers like a Star-studded Sky

[Amitabh: Samastipur aur anya Kavitaen. New Delhi:Nibandh, 2023] Prasanta Chakravarty The tightrope of real intimacy means trying to cultivate our common capabilities—for life is unembellished, plane and full of unexpected miracles; even in...

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25. 07. 2022

The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting Chinnamul

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 the Partition, Chinnamul (The Uprooted,...

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22. 02. 2022

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

Subha Mukherji in Kolkata, October 2021[The author is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge] ‘Bhaager Ma’: Durga Puja, Barisha Club, Kolkata, October 2021. Photo: courtesy of the artist, Rintu...

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20. 01. 2021

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

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 perspective and on modes of enunciation....

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15. 08. 2020

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 poems and...

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26. 07. 2020

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 of an intimacy...

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14. 07. 2020

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...

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01. 04. 2020

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...

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08. 03. 2020

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...

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06. 02. 2020

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...

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18. 12. 2019
Letter to a Student

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...

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01. 09. 2019

The Canon and the Syllabus

  Life is short and there are many books to encounter. How does one underline the ones that are worthwhile? More importantly, how do whole societies and traditions take up certain readings as...

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09. 05. 2019

Jaaware’s Destitute

Prasanta Chakravarty In his book Practicing Caste, on Touching and Not Touching Aniket Jaaware takes caste as an instance in order to transport us elsewhere.We are not yet born, he says. So, he...

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07. 04. 2019

The Aesthetics of the Festival

  We celebrate festivals. Actually we celebrate the experience and mood of a festival. Celebrating itself is an art, a primitive and joyous form. Besides, festivals are where we gather as a community—real...

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