From its origins in the 1882 novel Anandmath, the attention of European Orientalists, and the impact on early Hindu nationalist movements, Abhimanyu Kumar traces the complicated legacy of India’s national song.

Ronald Ross was once immortalized in Amitav Ghosh’s historical novel. Nivedita Dey rediscovers a memorial dedicated to Kolkata’s forgotten, Nobel laureate physician.

Creative Nonfiction by Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario: ‘And then, sometimes—only sometimes—we pull out a stack of old, old handwritten letters with multiple creases, letters exchanged in the past. We touch and re-touch the fragility of being, feeling, and loving too much, all that we once assumed that time couldn’t repair.’

Reading Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree in the Lade Braes, Scotland. ‘The poetry of trees is, after all, about agency—the act of breaking, rending, repairing, citing through metaphor. But what agency do trees hold?’