Sabyasachi Sanyal
A note on Tadogen Girte and his poetry:
Tadogen Girte, the fictional persona, was created in an attempt to break free from the traditional norms of Bengali literature, which typically endorses a highly selective, gentrified language and sense of sensibility—excluding the vast majority of dialects, geographies, histories, socio-political, religious, caste, and class realities of Bengal that differ every 50 miles from the cultural colonizer that is Kolkata. It was also an attempt to rupture my rather elitist, esoteric counter-culture stance, which at one point began to shackle my writing. Gramscia was a land synthesized in memory of Antonio Gramsci and his theory of cultural hegemony and its silent oppression.
Tadogen Girte, as a nomadic character, was primarily based in a Mongolian locale (both rural and urban) due to its unfamiliarity to the larger Bengali-speaking audience, but the poems themselves were largely inspired by the stark, minimalistic, taboo-less, yet philosophical Inuit poetry. The process involved writing in Bengali, followed by translation into broken English, and delayed retranslation (often by months) back into Bengali. The work started in 2015 and was published in book form by Behula Bangla (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2017) and Sristisukh (Kolkata, India, 2018), with the true identity of Tadogen Girte revealed in a postface.
31
From any page, an introduction can arise—
Here, a letter strikes another letter,
And with a spark, the letters bleed letters.
I see you are making a mistake,
Trying to avoid me,
You are avoiding doubt.
But I am pliable today—
Haven’t touched the glass of liquor yet—
All day long, on the news channel,
I have witnessed my own rebirth.
and yawned.
On the way home,
Grass grows from the cracks on the pavement—
I can hear its sound approaching—
And I need make no effort, except doubt it all.
23
She is my guide—
She shows me through thorny bushes,
a path cuts deep into the sand.
Her intent, I cannot understand.
Though I hand her a thousand Tugrik,
still, I cannot understand, this new pain
swelling from old scars—
She is my guide.
Unmoved by my plight,
from the Altai mountains,
She showed me a chasm—
A chasm that does not care
whether I leap into it or not.
Her intent, I cannot understand.
Though I hand her a thousand Tugrik,
still, I cannot understand—
how the old pain stirs in new scars.
Note: Tugrik: Mongolian currency. Altai refers to a vast mountain range in present day Mongolia,
Russia, China and Kazakhstan. The Altai Mountains have immense spiritual significance in Central Asian
Shamanism as well as Buddhism.
33
The pimp from the red-light zone asks me,
“What’s your opinion about it being 7:19?”
But I know opinion is a lie,
At best, at 7:19, I can share my feelings.
When it’s 7:19, autumn attacks
my coat and shoes.
A small playground which resembles my entire life
clutches at me–thorns and all.
And I lose all my headaches over truth and lies.
Between a dead man’s eyes and the ceiling,
I wander endlessly, living on,
Yet I cannot explain, O Tathagata,
what exactly pierces my skin—
At best, I can tell its meaning.
Note: Tathagata is an honorific for Gautama Buddha. The word can be deconstructed to Tatha-Gata (one
who thus have gone) or Tatha-Agata (one who thus have come). I like to interpret the word as one who
comes with knowledge and goes beyond, or one who frequents between our understanding of the world
and the lack of it.
Sabyasachi Sanyal is a molecular biologist based in Lucknow, India, who writes primarily in
Bengali. He has lived in various parts of India, South Korea, and Sweden, experiences that
inform the diasporic and translingual dimensions of his work. His work has appeared extensively
in Kaurab ( https://kaurab.com ), an international poetry journal where he also served as an
associate editor for nearly two decades. He was a key figure in developing circumcontentive
poetry, a formally innovative movement that emerged from Kaurab and was featured in Jacket2.
His poetry has also been published in Aufgabe and Action, Spectacle. Sanyal’s writing explores
philosophical, mythic, and diasporic themes through experimental and multilingual forms, often
engaging with displacement, gender, and the politics of language.
The Locus 
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