Harjot Banga (he/him/his) is a poet, writer, and PhD candidate in Anglophone Postcolonial Literature, currently based between Punjab, London, and Turin. His work explores memory, displacement, marginalisation, caste, gender, and the sensual body across languages and cultures. His poetry has appeared in Cronica Regia, Scrittori sotto i riflettori, The Red River Book of Poets of Dissent, The Hooghly Review Poetry Special, Majlis Mag, and Usawa Literary Review. He is the author of the Punjabi collection Gaman of Kishti (2019) and the self-published Melodia di un’interiorità infranta (2017), which won the “Ossi di Seppia” award for best foreign author (2018). His monograph on Anita Desai, Anita Desai’s India: The Religious Plague, Holocaust, Decadence and Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag / Columbia University Press), was published in June 2024. His academic articles have appeared in both national and international journals. You can find him on Instagram: @harjy.banga.
Short story by Harjot Banga: ‘How dirty were the hands that designed those temples? Hands that counted the opium profits in the warehouses of Calcutta, honeyed and lethal with dust? Hands that fixed the cables that drained Burmese rice while the Hooghly teemed with corpses.’