Kaurab is a Bengali language literary magazine representing innovative, alternative, non-mainstream and experimental genres of Indian literature with an emphasis on poetry and poetics. The Kaurab Magazine (Kaurab Patrikaa) has been in print since 1970. In 1982 it won the D. K. Gupta award as the most distinguished Bengali literary magazine. Kaurab's online version, Kaurab Online, is an electronic webzine of poetry and poetics, and houses an international translation and poetry book review archive. The webzine began in 1998.

The print magazine is currently bi-annual while the webzine is tri-annual.

Famed Bengali poet/authors Kamal Chakrabarty and Barin Ghosal were the founding editors of the magazine. Presently a younger second generation team of Bengali poets and writers led by Aryanil Mukherjee edit both the print and the webmag.

CinnamonTeal has provided print services to some books from Kaurab lately. We have also published two books by Aryanil Mukherjee. All of these titles are listed here.

  • Late Night Correspondence

    by Aryanil Mukherjee

    ISBN: 978-81-906900-6-5

    Are translations reserved only for luminaries? white-bearded and august? Think again. late night corespondence, Aryanil Mukherjee’s first book of Bangla-English transcreations, combines cultural borrowing, scientific logic and everyday life to disrupt isolated systems of culture. Mukherjee’s unique practice of Bangla poetry, as well as essay writing and editing, from deep in Midwest, USA, truly mediates the flip sides of the planet for us. His work reminds us that ultimately our scaffoldings grow out of ignorance.

    78p/Paperback/8"x5"

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  • chaturangik/SQUARES

    by Pat Clifford
    and Aryanil Mukherjee

    ISBN: 978-81-907296-6-6

    chaturangik/SQUARES is a book length collaborative poem by Pat Clifford and Aryanil Mukherjee. The book is inspired by Satyajit Ray's seminal film Shatranj Ki Khiladi (The Chess Players). The work deals with the mechanics of chess and politics in both a thematic and formal way. At times the language is opaque and confrontational. In other places there is a resigned melancholy. In the first three sections the text is alternated. In the last section lines are woven together. Often what started as longer poems were chopped or condensed. In the end, each installment was placed into the boxes of a chess grid.

    The poem's use of languages is more complex than it would appear. Translation was part of the collaborative process itself, not something done after the fact. In a typical section, Clifford would start out writing in English to which Mukherjee would respond in Bengali, who would then translate Clifford's English lines into Bengali and his own Bengali into English. Critical focus would be placed immediately on the modifications and then prompt the next section. An agreement was reached that Mukherjee would have final discretion over the Bengali text and Clifford would have the same for the English sections.In the end, a linguistically reflected text was produced— a poem that can be read in multiple ways.

    45p/Paperback/6.25" x 6.25"

  • Sohid Hobar Aager Moumachigulo
    (Bees Before Martyrdom)

    by Sukanta Ghosh

    The usual derelictions of love poetry have always made up its Achilles Heel. The monotony of its singular focus - the lover or the object of love - often makes the poetic language and imagery hinge about it, eventually dimming or destroying the passionate aura by binding it to a single object of desire as weed binds to rock. Young Bengali poet Sukanta Ghosh, an ardent globe-trotter, has been able to overcome this theme-trap in his maiden book of poems - Bees Before Martyrdom. These poems call upon a rather skillful, lyrical erasure technique that hazes the boundaries between love and the lovely, the object and its desire, friendship and liking. The poems in this book are garlanded with sensuous memories of several international women, all made of flesh and blood and a vestige of cultural geography. Bees Before Matyrdom presents us love poems of the new millennium.

    The book is published by Kaurab and printed by CinnamonTeal

    67p/Paperback/8"x5"