Bengali literature has had a rich history of prose, beginning more or less in the early 19th century under the colonial Raj. Calcutta's presence as the British Empire's capital in the colony shaped ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. By now, it’s an old joke: Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovers that he has been speaking something called ...

The boatmen put up the sails of seven boats from the mahajan’s godown of garan wood at Shyamganj as soon as the tide ebbed in the river Hooghly. The mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of thirty ...

Durga Puja isn’t just about pandal hopping and feasting in Kolkata — it is also about family time, childhood memories and nostalgia that refuses to die. It is this emotion that many filmmakers have ...

A new Bengali film, Dhaki, explores the fading tradition of live dhak players at Durga Puja. Seventy-year-old Tilak Dhaki faces replacement by recorded music. The film portrays his struggle as a fight ...

If you want to dive deeper into Bengali literature but language is a barrier, there are good translated works that come to the rescue. For instance, The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories, an ...