About Us

Our founder has been dead for more than a hundred years. He remains, somehow, remarkably good at running the place. Born 1887. Gone in 1923, at thirty-five. Sukumar Ray left behind poems, stories, illustrations, and an extraordinary ability to make complete nonsense feel perfectly reasonable.

Bombagarh is for people who take nonsense seriously. Very seriously. Almost suspiciously seriously.

We print the wonderfully unruly world of Sukumar Ray onto things people actually use.

Why not leave them in the book?

Because books live on shelves. Great characters, however, occasionally deserve to walk around.

So, we let them.

At Bombagarh, we bring Ray’s characters into the present day without giving them a fashionable haircut, a modern makeover, or any other unnecessary improvement. Because, the originals were doing perfectly well without us.

When one of his drawings finds its way onto something of ours, our job is deliberately modest. We prepare the original for printing — the detail, the hatching, the line exactly as he drew it — and then we get out of the way.

No reinterpretation. No “inspired by” version. No artist secretly hiding behind the moustache.

Just Sukumar Ray.

He also knew considerably more about printing than we do. He studied print technology in England, improved the way half-tone blocks were made, and published papers about it in English journals.

So, when we say we are careful with his artwork — understand that we are being supervised.

A note on what we print on

White. All of it. The drawings are black ink on paper and we saw no reason to argue with them.

T-shirts come in three cloths at three prices, described honestly on every product page — choose whichever one you wish to. 

Everything is printed only after you order it. Nothing is stocked, warehoused, or sold off cheaply in January.

And the library

We are putting the whole of Sukumar Ray on this website, free to read, with his own drawings. Poems, stories, plays — one work at a time, until it is all there.

We know you have read him. Almost every Bengali has. But we assume it was a long time ago, and that what survived is a fragment — a name, a rhythm, two lines quoted by someone who cannot remember the third.

So the library stays open, and it costs nothing. No order to follow, nothing to finish. The fragment you remember is in there — and so is the line you have been misquoting for thirty years that is  funnier than you remembered.

It seemed wrong to sell you two lines of a poem you could not then go and read.

Bombagarh is a brand of UPLIFE, registered in Kolkata. Write to support@bombagarh.com. One person reads every message — not the founder, sadly, who would almost certainly have replied in verse.