Avtar Singh Sandhu, known as Pash, was a Punjabi poet whose writing challenged oppression, complacency and the narrowing of political imagination. His work is often discussed for its insistence that resistance must remain connected to human freedom rather than become another rigid orthodoxy. Poetry against complacency A poem of resistance asks readers to notice what has become normal through repe…
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was a nineteenth-century poet and teacher in Calcutta and an important early figure in Indian English literature. His writing emerged at a time when English education, colonial power and new intellectual movements were reshaping public debate. His legacy invites readers to consider how poetry can question inherited assumptions and make room for independent thought. Writ…
Part 35 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian and South Asian poetry. Kazi Nazrul Islam’s celebrated poem “Bidrohi,” often translated as “The Rebel,” builds a speaker whose voice refuses to remain within one identity or one emotional register. The poem’s energy comes from accumulation: a sequence of bold images makes the speaker seem at once destructive, creative, wounded and free…
Part 23 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s wider literary inheritance. Kazi Nazrul Islam, born in Bengal in 1899, became known as the “Rebel Poet” for writing with extraordinary energy against oppression, communal hatred and social injustice. He is now especially celebrated as the national poet of Bangladesh, while his Bengali works remain important to the shared literary hist…
Introduction: Why 2 October Is Remembered Across India 2 October is observed across India as Gandhi Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi or Bapu. Born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, Gandhi went on to become one of the most influential figures of India's freedom movement and one of the most widely recognised advocates of non-viol…
