The beginnings of Jamini in 2003 was met with great excitement over the opportunity to acknowledge and name a new creative landscape. Jamini managed to define, in its years of publication, the ground-breaking developments and the progressions of the contemporary Bangladeshi art scene. The journal’s coterie of writers, critics, researchers, and photographers described, demarcated and nourished both the art world and the market in Bangladesh. Jamini was connected with and engaged in the local art scene’s (un)real estate of dreams, and its vivid and varied regime of interrogation. Jamini indulged in the desire to contextualise and understand our arts as a fluid, local phenomena vis-à-vis globalised forces. Rustling through the vintage issues of Jamini still summons up a strange excitement. The journey has not been equal. After 2006, the issues were less regular. A four-year hiatus in 2009 led to the magazine being revamped in 2014.
TEAM
Publisher: Abul Khair
Chair of the editorial board: S. Manzoorul Islam
Editorial board: Fakrul Alam, Kaiser Haq, Zeenat Chowdhury
Editor: Luva Nahid Choudhury
Senior Editorial Assistant: Farina Noireet
Design & Layout: Emon Obaidullah
Syed Iqbal Hossain
Syed Manzoorul Islam
Chair
Dr. Syed Manzoorul Islam is Professor of English and Humanities at ULAB, and a former professor of English in the University of Dhaka. He is an award winning fiction writer and art critic who has curated Bangladesh art exhibitions in UK, India and Iran.
Dr. Islam’s areas of special interest include Shakespeare, Modern Poetry and Fiction, Literary Theory, Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism and Translatology. He is a noted column writer and an occasional political analyst.
Fakrul Alam
Member
Dr. Fakrul Alam is a professor of English at the University of Dhaka. A renowned academician, researcher and translator, his works on postcolonial literature and Rabindranath Tagore have established him as one of the foremost intellectuals of Bangladesh. Dr. Fakrul Alam is currently serving as the first Director of the ‘Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Research Institute for Peace and Liberty’. One of his most important works is the translation of Bangabandhu’s ‘The Unfinished Memories’ (Oshomapto Attojiboni) into English. He is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) and SAARC Literary Award.
Kaiser Haq
Member
A renowned academician and poet, Kaiser Haq began teaching English Literature at Dhaka University in 1975, and has at various times taught at a number of other universities. Haq was a Commonwealth Scholar at Warwick University, a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Vilas Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1986-87), a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at SOAS, London University (2002-2003). As a poet and translator he has had the pleasure of seeing his work included in the curricula of schools and universities at home and abroad.
Zeenat Chowdhury
Member
After teaching English abroad since 1992, Zeenat Chowdhury moved to Bangladesh and brought her knowledge and love for literature, and education to actively pursue the promotion of Bangladeshi writers opting to write in English as Director of Bengal Foundation’s Publication wing. She has jointly worked with Skira Editore based in Milan, on the Contemporary Masters and Great Masters Series of Bangladeshi artists, as well as other world-class monographs. A culinary aficionado, she owns and runs companies owning several eateries in the capital.