প্রবাস The magazine
প্রবাস
Probash
The word means living away from home. Bengali has carried it for centuries as something closer to a condition than a location: the state of being elsewhere while the festival happens without you. This magazine is what the condition produces.
Writing, poetry, photographs, illustration, recipes, arguments, and the sort of half-remembered childhood detail that only surfaces in October. In Bengali, in English, in both at once.
পুজো মানে ঘর, ঘরের আরেক রূপ। অচেনা মুখগুলোর মধ্যেও নিজের মানুষকে খুঁজে নেওয়া।
পড়ুন Read it
The back issues, open on the table
আগের সংখ্যা
Both previous issues, page by page, turning the way paper turns. Nothing to install and nothing to sign into.
The full issue, as it was printed and handed out at the pandal.
Opening Probash 2025
Send us something to publish
লেখা পাঠাও
Prose, poetry, memoir, photo essays, illustration, translation. There is no house style and no word limit worth arguing about. Bengali and English are equally welcome, and so is the mixture most of us actually speak.
- Original work only, and tell us if it has appeared elsewhere
- Bengali submissions in Unicode, not as images, so we can typeset them
- Photographs at the largest size you have
Design the cover
প্রচ্ছদ প্রতিযোগিতা
One cover is chosen for the printed magazine and credited on it. Any medium, painting, digital illustration, photography, collage, alpona, linocut. The only constraint is that it should survive being printed at magazine size.
- Portrait orientation, high resolution
- Your own work, made for this
- The shortlist is shown on Instagram before the final call
কেন Why bother
A Puja magazine is not an afterthought
Bengal invented the Sharadiya number, the fat annual literary issue published for the Puja, and it is where a great deal of the language's best writing first appeared. Serialised novels, debut poems, arguments that ran for years. Probash is a very small member of a very old tradition.
It outlives the five days
The pandal comes down in a week. The magazine sits on a shelf and gets found again in five years.
It is the only part anyone can keep
Bhog is eaten, the idol goes into the water, the lights come down. Print is the exception.
It is how the quiet people take part
Not everyone wants to carry bamboo or hold a microphone. Some people want to write something down.