Arko Dasgupta – Medium

Arko Dasgupta

Borrowing Vocabularies: Race and Caste

One summer afternoon in the month of April in 1972, Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, and Arun Kamble met in the city of Bombay in the Indian…

9 min readNov 8, 2021

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Borrowing Vocabularies: Race and Caste

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Arko Dasgupta

How do you host an enemy?

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban has prompted many to rationalise the event in terms of clichés: “Afghanistan: the graveyard of empires”…

3 min readAug 19, 2021

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How do you host an enemy?

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Arko Dasgupta

The Punjabi in Kenya: Recalling the life and times of Makhan Singh

The writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once fondly wrote about the commitment of Africans and Indians in joining forces to combat empire and…

6 min readJan 24, 2021

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The Punjabi in Kenya: Recalling the life and times of Makhan Singh

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Arko Dasgupta

What Disturbed Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore measured the soundness of a society by its capacity and propensity to admit contrasting peoples, ideas, and ways of…

5 min readOct 21, 2020

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What Disturbed Tagore

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Arko Dasgupta

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Radical Revolution

In The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Christopher Hill attempts to give us a “worm’s eye view” of…

4 min readFeb 14, 2020

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Radical Revolution

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Arko Dasgupta

The Everydayness of Rural Bengal

Translating fiction is an exercise commonly fraught with unsavoury prospects. Readers who can access a text in the original are disposed…

5 min readJan 16, 2019

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The Everydayness of Rural Bengal

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Arko Dasgupta

Tagore’s Critique of the Modern Condition

In Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama Tasher Desh (translated into English as The Land of Cards), the subjects of the House of Cards follow…

7 min readOct 6, 2018

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Tagore’s Critique of the Modern Condition

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Arko Dasgupta

Without Tagore, Bengali Wouldn’t Be as Alive as It Is Today

In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the intruder in the Kirsanov household, Bazarov, makes it amply clear that he disapproves of…

5 min readAug 28, 2018

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Without Tagore, Bengali Wouldn’t Be as Alive as It Is Today

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Arko Dasgupta

Can We Imagine Something More? Reckoning with Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

In his lecture “The Robbery of the Soil,” Rabindranath Tagore imagines the moon to have been once hospitable to life. This, he tells us…

7 min readAug 28, 2018

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Can We Imagine Something More? Reckoning with Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

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Arko Dasgupta

A bombing love affair between Italians and Bengalis

Most Bengalis are like Benito Mussolini when it comes to their relationship with Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore visited Italy twice, in 1925…

2 min readJan 19, 2018

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A bombing love affair between Italians and Bengalis

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Arko Dasgupta

Arko Dasgupta

PhD candidate in history at Carnegie Mellon University; I study Modern India, the British Empire, the American Civil Rights Movt, intellectual history, and race

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