Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin at the crossroads of mankind

In 1943, Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin drew a series of sketches on the man-made famine that had spread throughout Bengal, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Done in Chinese ink and brush on cheap packing paper, the series, famously known as Famine Sketches, were haunting images of cruelty and depravity of the merchants of death, and …

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain — a pioneer of women’s education who strove for a feminist utopia

Where are the men?’ I asked her. ‘In their proper places, where they ought to be… We shut our men indoors.’ Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s seminal science fiction short story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ depicted a feminist utopia, and was one of the first fictional works in India to do so. However, it never really received the fame and recognition that …