Issue 2 — November 2023
People, their memories and metaphors, the communities they create, and their survival are at the heart of the second issue of Littera Magazine. The oft-forgotten small towns in India’s Northeast and their vivid marketplace make an appearance in Ayaan Halder’s essay. A son accompanies his father to the meat market—this familiar setting paves the way for an incisive look at the underlying communal tensions which has continued to haunt India and the subcontinent for centuries. The celebrated Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Shonar Tori” has been widely adored since its publication. Aninda Rahman invites us to look at the poem in a different light, emphasizing the political and economic realities of Tagore’s time. Jayanta Sen and S. B. Shams reflects on Bangladesh’s healthcare and education systems respectively. How a developing country with a fragile healthcare system survived the tumultuous days of the pandemic has been narrated with clinical precision and clarity in Sen’s essay. S. B. Shams, after writing about the history of the subcontinent's education system for our inaugural issue, returns with a critical examination of the policies that are behind the frailties of our education infrastructure.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Education Reform in Bangladesh and Disenfranchised Policy Analysis
By S. B. Shams
Bangladesh’s glossy experiment in education reform involves listening to foreign experts with little local experience or importing a global solution and applying it here uncritically. But there is more to it than meets the eye.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Shonar Tori: On Questions—the Agrarian, the Literal, and the Literary
By Aninda Rahman
Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem “Shonar Tori” is typically interpreted as an existential encounter between man and himself. A different reading emerges when the objects in the poem are taken literally at their historic moment.