Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta is a scholar, critic, poet, short story writer and translator par excellence. She had served as a Professor (Retd.) and Former Head, Department of English, University of Calcutta; Dean, Faculty of Arts (2007-2012), University of Calcutta.

She has received several awards and fellowships, like the Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (October 1998 to June 1999; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA), Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Award (2001-2003), Australia India Council Fellowship (August-October 2005), Fulbright Scholar in Residence, at SUNY, Oswego (August- December 2006), Visiting Fellow, University of British Columbia Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies (March 2007), Visiting Professor, Department of English, State University of New York, Oswego (May-July 2011, 2013), Charles Wallace Translation Fellowship, BCLT University of East Anglia, Norwich (2016), Visting Professor, Jaggelonian University, Krakow, Poland (2018).

She received the IWSFF Women Achievers Award in 2019, the WEI Kamala Das Poetry Award in 2020, the ETHOS Literary Award in 2022, Muktadhara Tagore Samman 2024. She was conferred the Governor’s Scroll of Honour in 2024, and the CLRC National Lifetime Achievement Award 2024.

In October 2024 she delivered two lectures on Tagore’s writings at St. John’s College, University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS), University of Oxford.

Her scholarship is evident from her impressive publications (books and translations).

The Novels of Huxley and Hemingway: A Study in Two Planes of Reality, Responses: Selected Essays (Prestige, 1996), Manimahesh (Sahitya Akademi, 2000), Her Stories 20th Century Bengali Women Writers (Srishti, 2002), The Indian Family in Transition: Reading Literary and Cultural Texts (SAGE, 2007), Media, Gender and Popular Culture in India: Tracking Change and Continuity (SAGE, 2012), SWADES Tagore’s Patriotic Poems (Visva Bharati, 2013), Tagore: At Home in the World (SAGE 2013), Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family and Gender in Tagore’s Fiction and Films (Orient Blackswan 2013), Abuse and Other Short Stories (Dasgupta Book Company, 2013), Towards Tagore: A collection of Essays (Visva Bharati Publications, 2014), Golpo Sankalan: Translated Contemporary Bengali Short Stories (Sahitya Akademi 2016, second edition 2018), Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing (Pan Macmillan, USA, 2017), In Memoriam: English Translations of Tagore’s Poems in Swaran and Palataka (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), SHE: Short Stories by Indian Women Writers (Sahitya Akademi, 2021), In Memoriam: English Translations of Tagore’s Poems in Swaran and Palataka (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), It Begins at Home and Other Short Stories (Virasat, 2022), Indian Folk Narratives (Sahitya Akademi, 2023), Indian Folk Narratives (Sahitya Akademi, 2023), Miscellany: Selected Reviews, Letters, Articles and Interviews 2000-2022 (Authorspress, 2023).
She was the Managing Editor of Families A Journal of Representations (2000-2012)

Her poetry collections are Snapshots (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1997), Dilemma (Anustup, Kolkata, 2002), First Language (Dasgupta and Company Private Limited, Kolkata, 2005), More Light (Dasgupta and Company Private Limited, Kolkata, 2008), Lakshmi Unbound (Chitrangi, Kolkata, 2017), Sita’s Sisters (Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata, 2019), Indomitable Draupadi (Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata, 2022), Unbound New and Selected Poems (Authorspress, 2021), Ekalavya Speaks (Penprints, 2023).

Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta can be reached over [email protected]

Title of the Project:

Banabani: The Forest’s Message

Rabindranath Tagore and the Environment

Project Description

In 2024, I begun work on my translation project titled Banabani: The Forest’s Message Rabindranath Tagore and the Environment. As far as I know Banabani, Tagore’s volume of poems of 180 pages, divided into six parts was first published in 1931 and has not been translated into English, in its entirety, till date. I intend to complete the translation work and add a detailed introduction to the translated version by December 2025.  If all goes according to plan my manuscript will be ready for publication by April 2026.

In course of my reading of Banabani I have come across the poet’s immersive concerns about the environment, expressed in his powerful and artistically crafted poems. The poems carry the message without ambiguity that it is crucial to understand the need to actively protect the natural environment. In the poems Tagore emphasizes that the responsibility of preserving the planet and its rich resources, primarily the forests and the natural phenomena that we have effortlessly inherited, lies with every thinking empathetic human person. I strongly feel that when completed, this translation project along with a critical introduction that will refer to Tagore’s other important writings on the environment, will be a useful addition to both translation studies and Tagore studies.

I am confident that my experience in translating Tagore’s poetry will help me in my proposed project. My earlier translated books of Tagore’s poems are Swades: Tagore’s Patriotic Poems published by Visva Bharati Publications, 2013 and In Memoriam: Rabindranath Tagore’s Smaran and Palataka published by Sahitya Akademi, 2021. Both these books have been well received.