Introduction: The worlds of Bombay poetry

In a moving new poem about literary labor and literary survival from the latest edition of his Collected Poems, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2016) reflects on “his” generation of poets which came about in “sixties Bombay” and which is emblematically represented by the publishing cooperative Clearing House¹ set up in 1976 by four poets and close friends: Arun Kolatkar, “the one who died”, and the three “who survive”, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Mehrotra himself:

Our Generation

As others go their ways

we came ours

in sixties Bombay

and stuck together

through thick and thin.

The times evened out.

The one who died

was the reviving sort

and soon revived.

Would the same fate

await us three –

Adil, and Gieve, and me –

the ones who survive. (165)

If Arun Kolatkar “was the reviving sort”, and has now become almost canonical after a life of and in marginality, the work of many other “Bombay poets” (and artists, playwrights and musicians) still waits for its readers and audiences. This double special issue reads the city of Bombay through the poetry of the place, and the poetry of Bombay through the urban space – and its different linguistic and creative contexts – that made the writing and the publishing of this poetry possible. The hope is to excavate the many worlds of this generation of writers, and to document, reveal and revive the richness of the creative work of the poets, of their collaborators and interlocutors, and of the communities and networks they created. We have kept the name “Bombay” instead of Mumbai as the city was officially renamed in 1995, because the story we map here coincides with a city that was still called and known as Bombay. Many of the writers,² artists and poets to whom this issue gives voice, intentionally, and sometimes emphatically, retain the older name – identifying with the cosmopolitanism that has come to be associated with “Bombay” – rather than “Mumbai” that was instituted by the Shiv Sena.³

There is of course a whole mythology surrounding the city of Bombay, which is aptly conveyed by many of Salman Rushdie’s novels, or by a character in David Davidar’s (2007) The Solitude of Emperors when he talks about Bombay as

[a] city of poets and cafés, and all-night sessions of drinking and versifying, a place to rival Joyce’s Dublin or Cavafy’s Alexandria or Pessoa’s Lisbon: Dom hammering away with one finger at his typewriter in Sargent House, spectacles slipping down his nose, as the poems ran wild in his head, Adil holding court in his eyrie on Cuffe Parade, Nissim spinning his demotic verse in coffee houses and poets’ gathering, Kolatkar with his strange fierce epic about Gods of stone. (82)

The historian Gyan Prakash (2010) acknowledges that, as early as the 1930s, “Bombay was the place to be if you were a writer, an artist or a radical political activist” (119). The bilingual writer Vilas Sarang (1994) remembers the 1960s in the city as “one of the best and liveliest periods in Marathi literary history” (310), and the poet Adil Jussawalla (1972) recalls the “feeling of tremendous artistic potential gathering together in one place and the pleasurable feeling that Bombay was the place where it would find release” (6). Although we have aimed to take into account as many diverse and sometimes conflicting voices as possible, and do not want to chart a utopian time and space, Vilas Sarang’s and Adil Jussawalla’s memories frame our questions in the following pages: how and why did Bombay become such a breeding ground for a particular kind of modernism and modern poetry after independence, roughly between the 1950s and the 1980s, when the city saw the flowering of poetry collectives and poetic geniuses in English and Marathi, such as Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar or Namdeo Dhasal? Since Bombay poets did not write in a vacuum but congregated in fraternities, worked collaboratively, navigated between different creative, cultural and linguistic worlds and were tuned into the sociopolitical context around them, it is imperative that we study the spaces, the processes and the practices that enabled, energized and structured the poetry of this period.

We chart Bombay as a material location through multitudinous practices of everyday life as well as through the processes of writing, publishing and creating by which the city comes into being, and is continuously being (re)invented. It is a lived city as well as an imagined one, imagined and retold through its various lives in different languages, spaces, representations and vocations. The imagination of a commonly shared urban space that was then called Bombay tugs at and extends the boundaries of the mapped city to stretch to larger parts of the region, of the nation and of the world. This dynamic view of Bombay allows for an understanding of both the Marathi novelist Bhalchandra Nemade (who moved into the interior of the state of Maharashtra for a life of non-urbanisms, but whose writing and publishing practices still connected him to Bombay) and the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (who insistently reclaimed Bombay as his own despite having lived in Allahabad for most of his life). As his interview in these pages illustrates, Mehrotra considers himself a “Bombay poet”: “I can’t see myself having any other literary identity.” Our attempt is therefore not to place a wall around Bombay and claim a separate space of writing; rather, it is to mark and analyze a node through which multiple and exciting trajectories of art, writing and culture traverse to other places and back.

The issue is titled “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry” and we intentionally juxtapose the idea of the world with the space of the local in postcolonial and post-independence Bombay. We also deliberately pluralize the notion of the “world”. Most approaches to “world literature” and world-system theories, from Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti to Pascale Casanova, postulate a single world system. Casanova (2007) posits a highly competitive and hierarchical world literary space with “literary capital” accumulated in the “center” that western metropolises like Paris represent. Writers of the so-called “peripheries” are said to be struggling to attain literary legitimacy and “consecration” bestowed in these literary capitals. Much has been said on the latent Eurocentricism of these approaches, and we agree with Francesca Orsini’s (2015) deep questioning of the geographical categories at work in current debates on “world literature” that make the local space and writing disappear. With this special issue we aim at forwarding another view of the literary world which takes the local as standpoint but the local as always worldly, open to a constellation of other locals, and engaged in mutually constitutive connections and affiliations with other worlds (be they geographic, linguistic, imaginative or creative). Beyond the center/periphery binary paradigm, we want to shift the focus onto multiplicity and interconnectedness, and onto the boldness and cosmopolitanism of a generation of “Bombay poets” and artists who, in the words of Gulammohammed Sheikh in his interview in this issue, inhabited and embraced “more than one world”.

The “worlds of Bombay poetry” collide and coexist in these pages to show the complex interchanges that took place across spheres that are often considered disconnected from each other on the ground, and not read as part of the same narrative: the Marathi and English literary and publishing worlds for one; but also Dalit writing and Indian literature in English; advertising and poetry; visual arts and literary publishing. They also show the transactions that took place across and between geographical spaces, since Bombay expands to places in Maharashtra, to Pune where many Bombay poets, publishers and artists worked and lived, and where Marathi little magazines were published or to Aurangabad with the writer Bhalchandra Nemade; to Gujarat and to Baroda with the visual artist Gulammohammed Sheikh; to the USA and Germany with the novelist Kiran Nagarkar; to Delhi with the scholar and translator Vinay Dharwadker; to Calcutta and the Bengali writing world with the publisher Ashok Shahane and with Amit Chaudhuri; to Allahabad and the USA with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; to the UK with the poets Adil Jussawalla, Dom Moraes or Nissim Ezekiel, among others. Bombay thus becomes the heart of a literary and artistic efflorescence with arterial extensions into disparate spaces and communities.

There has been a wealth of books, anthologies and journal issues on Bombay/Mumbai, and the stream of publications about the city seems inexhaustible. We are only acknowledging here some of the most noteworthy publications that have either focused on the literature, and especially the poetry, of Bombay, or that have mapped the creative contexts in which this poetry emerged. In English, the idea of a “Bombay circle” and poetry became ensconced in scholarly discussion first with Bruce King’s ([1987] 2001) foundational book, Modern Indian Poetry in English, where he documented the social, commercial and literary contexts of the Indian poets in English in general, many of whom came from Bombay. Another important book that also establishes the notion of the city through the words of its poets is the book of interviews Talking Poems, by the poet Eunice de Souza (1999), herself from Bombay and with extraordinary access to the cohort of Bombay poets of her time, including Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Melanie Silgardo.

Several early poetry anthologies are particularly significant with reference to Bombay writing. Dilip Chitre’s (1967) An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, which constitutes one of the first anthologies of Marathi poetry translated into English, features prominent modern Marathi poets in translation (such as P.S. Rege, Vinda Karandikar, Manohar Oak, Narayan Surve, Arun Kolatkar or Dilip Chitre himself), whose lives and work have all been closely associated with the city of Bombay. In this issue, we reproduce pages of his long introduction, because it constitutes in many ways a manifesto for modernism, and is still one of the most illuminating critical texts on the period of effervescent creativity delineated in the following pages. It also provides a common framework and context against which we can read and interpret the diverse voices included here. Twenty years later, the special issue of a journal from Hyderabad, The Literary Endeavour, on “Bombay Poetry: Poems on Bombay City” (Rao 1987), offers a dizzying selection of poems by English-language “Bombay Poets”, including those of Adil Jussawalla, Amit Chaudhuri, Arun Kolatkar, Darius Cooper, Dilip Chitre, Dom Moraes, Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel, Hubert Nazareth, Imtiaz Dharker, Keki Daruwalla, Kersy Katrak, Manohar Shetty, Melanie Silgardo, Menka Shivdasani, Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasaraty, Saleem Peeradina and Vilas Sarang. But while this selection, based on the poets’ and the poems’ connection to the city unites the Bombay poets, it does not chart the backdrop against which they wrote.

Apart from anthologies and journals, such as Vilas Sarang’s The Bombay Literary Review (a particularly influential magazine that bridged the gap between Marathi and English through its translational agenda), several essay collections have been extremely important. Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (Patel and Thorner 1995) is a landmark interdisciplinary publication, which includes insightful chapters on the city as cradle of creativity and cultural exchange, on the emergence of new literature in Marathi and Gujarati from the 19th century onwards, and on the architecture, cinema and theater of Bombay, as well as on its art scene.⁴ Because they uncover the spirit of the city’s jazz and rock-and-roll scene that so many admen, writers and artists frequented between the 1940s through to the 1970s, Naresh Fernandes’s and Sidharth Bhatia’s books (Fernandes 2012; Bhatia 2015) reveal the musical world against which Bombay poets must also be situated. In Mumbai Fables, Gyan Prakash (2010) excavates a wealth of backstories behind the city’s known history by exploring a multitude of eclectic sources, including the periodicals, popular music and films of Bombay. And in another noteworthy study, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon, An Oral History, Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon (2004) document the world of the working class that built the economy of Bombay in the 1950s and 1960s by including interviews with Marathi writers such as Narayan Surve along with those of the millworkers.

In Marathi, it is individual essays and journal issues that explore poetry at various social and cultural intersections of Bombay. There are, however, some volumes that do examine the writing of Bombay poets, even if the category used in these volumes is “sathottari” instead of “Bombay.” In Sathottari Marathi Kavita ani Kavi (The Poets and Poetry of the Post-1960 Period), the renowned critic R.G. Jadhav (1997) surveys the sathottari (post-1960) poetry of Bombay, and the Dalit Marathi writer and scholar Sharankumar Limbale (2007) has edited Sathottari Marathi Vangmayatil Pravaha (The Course of Literature in the Post-1960 Period), an anthology of essays on Bombay writing that includes a close view of Dalit writers. There are also extraordinary poetry anthologies like the famed Punha Kavita (Poetry Again) edited by Chandrakant Patil (1965), and Punha Ekada Kavita (Poetry Once Again), edited by Chandrakant Patil and N.D. Mahanor (1982); Swatantryottara Marathi Kavita, 1961–1980 (Post-Independence Marathi Poetry 1961–1980), edited by T.S. Kulkarni (1994); Drushyantar: Swatantryanantarchi Marathi Kavita (A Changed Perspective: Marathi Poetry after Independence; Patil 2007), all of which predominantly feature Bombay poets. An earlier volume of essays, edited by G.M. Pawar and M.D. Hatkanangalekar (1986), Marathi Sahitya: 1950–1975 (Marathi Literature, 1950–1975) includes essays on poetry, theater and major literary forms but again, while inclusive of many Bombay writers’ work, this volume is not focused on the city of Bombay as such. Instead, the little magazines such as Aso, Atta, Rucha, Vidroha, and others do the scholarly and cultural work of piecing together the variegated worlds of Bombay after independence.

This double special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing builds upon earlier work in Marathi and English but also diverges from them in some important aspects. A significant feature of the work here is the in-depth presentation of the writing worlds of Marathi and English, which too often seem divided by impermeable (and sometimes hostile) frontiers. The essays, interviews and visual documents from these two writing cultures (its critics, writers, publishers, publishing ventures, and networks) are rarely discussed in the same volume. The range of diverse views on literature and on poetry that this issue exhibits can give the readers a sense of the arguments, the contradictions and heritages that exist in the category “Bombay poets”, and the wide-ranging collaborations amongst them (such as those between writer Bhalchandra Nemade and publisher Ashok Shahane, or between the artist Gulammohammed Sheikh and the Clearing House poets). These collaborations sometimes happened across linguistic divides, as many bilingual writers, such as Arun Kolatkar, Kiran Nagarkar, Dilip Chitre or Vilas Sarang who wrote both in English and in Marathi, or a poet like Pavankumar Jain (editor of the little magazine, Tornado) who wrote in English and in Gujarati, demonstrate. The dialogue between different linguistic worlds is symptomatic of the way so many of these poets navigated between different artistic genres and media. Gieve Patel, for instance, is simultaneously a poet, a dramatist and a painter. The poet Dilip Chitre also became a visual artist and film-maker, and enough has been said of Arun Kolatkar’s multifaceted creativity. William Mazzarella’s article here charts in Kersey Katrak’s “many faces” – poet, actor, adman, public intellectual and mystic – the multiple worlds of Bombay. Interestingly, the younger generation of Bombay poets has cultivated the same creative multiplicity: in English, Jeet Thayil is also a musician and a novelist; Anand Thakore a Hindustani classical singer; Ranjit Hoskote a celebrated art critic and curator; and in Marathi, Raja Dhale is a renowned Dalit activist, poet, editor of little magazines, and artist; Hemant Divate, a Marathi poet, editor of little magazines, publisher of books in both English and Marathi; and Mangesh Narayan Kale, a poet, publisher and editor of little magazines and an artist.

It seemed imperative for us to represent the different practitioners of these worlds through their own words. Wherever possible, we have solicited new interviews with Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, Eunice de Souza, Kiran Nagarkar, Bhalchandra Nemade, Ashok Shahane and Amit Chaudhuri, while also republishing an important, but not easily available, interview with Raja Dhale.⁵ We have also aimed at creating a dialogue between critical or academic essays per se and personal memoirs, like those of the film-maker and writer Arun Khopkar and the journalist Sidharth Bhatia. What is more, we have tried to bring together essays and documents, including letters, many of which are out of print or still unpublished (some of the letters exchanged by the Clearing House poets, for instance, or a letter from the American editor and Mimeo Revolution co-founder Douglas Blazek addressed to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in 1967). Among the foundational texts on and of the period we republish pages of little magazines in Marathi and in English, and excerpts from two important essays by Ashok Shahane and Bhalchandra Nemade. By relating these various documents to each other in the pages of the same volume, we also show the joint foundation of writing that underlay poetry in Bombay, irrespective of the language in which it was written.

We have generally attempted to depart from a traditional literary perspective of critical essays on one poet or one oeuvre, by encouraging contributions that map the social, cultural, creative and political contours of “Bombay poetry”, while keeping the poets and their writing constantly in view. In the case of Marathi poetry, we do showcase some of the central poets of the time through the translations done by Vinay Dharwadker, because Marathi poetry is not easily accessible in English, and that imbalance needs to be redressed to some extent. Dharwadker’s selection, a mini-anthology of Marathi poetry in itself (with translated poems by B.S. Mardhekar, P.S. Rege, Indira Sant, Vinda Karandikar, Mangesh Padgaonkar and Arun Kolatkar) gives us firm ground to understand the Marathi poetic universe being sketched out in these pages.

The issue enables a new understanding of the poets’ work through the study of the different cultural and artistic worlds that have nurtured their poetry: advertising, for instance, which became a “host culture” for many Bombay writers and gave them the opportunity to conjoin visual and textual imagination, while raising questions on the fraught connections between art and “the market”. In his interview, Kiran Nagarkar discusses his stint alongside Arun Kolatkar at the advertising firm MCM (Mass Communication & Marketing), and William Mazzarella’s article on the poetry of Kersy Katrak also explores the complex entanglements and tensions between advertisement and poetry. Theater was an exceptionally vibrant form of expression in Bombay during this period and Shanta Gokhale’s essay documents the ways in which theater in four languages (Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English) also intersected with the worlds of writers. Pop and rock music’s advent on the scene is discussed in Sidharth Bhatia’s article, “Rock around the clock in 1970s Bombay”, where he touches upon the interesting convergence of poetry and music in the network of the poet Nissim Ezekiel, the singer Nandu Bhende, and the poet’s nephew and singer Nissim Ezekiel Jr. The visual arts, and their creative transactions with poetry, represent another important aspect of Bombay’s cultural scene – one which is at the heart of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s and Gieve Patel’s interviews, and is illustrated by a few pages of the special Vrishchik issue on bhakti reproduced here, by pages from several little magazines in English and Marathi (such as Aso, Vacha, and damn you), as well as by various covers of the Clearing House and Pras Prakashan books, especially the striking cover of the third printing of Kolatkar’s Bhijaki Vahi (with the image from the Vietnam war on the book’s spine). The multilingual publishing scene and its innovative publishing ventures, with the emergence of small presses, journals and collectives to counter the lack of traditional publishing spaces, can be seen in a selection of Clearing House letters introduced by the writer Jerry Pinto, and is also chronicled by Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Bhalchandra Nemade and Ashok Shahane in their respective interviews. The traffic between languages, as evident in the bilingual, multilingual or translating practice of so many poets, is underlined by Vinay Dharwadker’s introduction to his anthology of Marathi poetry, and by Arun Kolatkar’s and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s “recastings” of the medieval devotional bhakti poets (Muktabai, Namdeo, Kabir and Vasto) in Vrishchik. Finally, Graziano Krätli’s article maps the Indian and international sociocultural networks which form the backdrop for reading Dom Moraes’ and Nissim Ezekiel’s poetry, and which are also charted by Emma Bird in the context of the PEN All-India center group of writers. Both articles indicate the less-visible transnational exchanges that were taking place in Bombay at the time.

The writers and practitioners of the city’s many creative worlds also depict the actual spaces where these exchanges took place: specific places like the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, for instance, where many artists had their studios at the time and where the influential theater director Ebrahim Alkazi (who is remembered by Gulammohammed Sheikh and Gieve Patel in their respective interviews) also had his office, or the Jehangir Art Gallery where both Sheikh and Patel held their first solo exhibition; St Xavier’s College where many Bombay poets (such as Adil Jussawalla, Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel and Melanie Silgardo) taught or studied; the Rahsyaranjan magazine office near Churchgate where many of the rebellious future Marathi poets, novelists and publishers (Bhalchandra Nemade, Ashok Shahane, Raghu Dandavate, Bhau Padhye and others) met every day and excitedly plotted the downfall of monoliths of the Marathi literary world that had outlived their usefulness; the Asiatic Library where the redoubtable Marathi writer and folklorist Durga Bhagwat met with other writers, in the vicinity of which Bhalchandra Nemade, Bal Thakur and Arun Kolatkar shared cups of chai, exchanged literary ideas and spent hours delving in the library’s bibliographical treasures; the cafés of Rampart Row, where many artists, writers and admen congregated; the hashish dens, speakeasies and Irani restaurants that Arun Khopkar vividly describes as the city’s “nerve centres” in his evocative article which opens this issue; the chawls (tenements) described by Anupama Rao in her article on “Dalit Bombay”, that figure so prominently both in Kiran Nagarkar’s novels and in his interview here; the Chhabildas Hall space, mentioned by Shanta Gokhale, where some of the most significant modern plays in Marathi, Hindi or English were staged in the 1970s; the various sahitya collectives, described by Anupama Rao, where the Dalit writers honed their writerly and activist skills (the Dalit Sahitya Sangh in Worli or the Sidharth Sahitya Sangh near Sidharth College); and the Theosophy Hall building in Marine Lines, home to the PEN All-India Centre and to Nissim Ezekiel’s office, described in Emma Bird’s article.

The poetry of this period was also rooted, albeit sometimes obliquely, in the sociopolitical climate of the time, and must be read against defining political events and circumstances such as the Emergency (1975–77) and the context of the cultural Cold War which are acknowledged both in Graziano Krätli’s article and in Adil Jussawalla interview; but also the Dalit movement, whose literature sparked the renewal of Marathi language and literary culture. In her article, Anupama Rao provides a prehistory of a recognizable Dalit poetics that relates writing with urbanity, “and Dalit Bombay with Bombay Modern”. She traces the social and political roots of this radical spirit in the practice and the writings of Jotirao Phule, R.B. Moré and in various activist collectives. Similarly, in Anagha Bhat-Behere’s translation of Raja Dhale’s interview, it is the intellectual genealogy of the Dalit Panthers, formed in 1972 in Bombay and partly modeled on the Black Panthers, which is traced. The intense intellectual debates that took place in Bombay’s intellectual and artistic circles, and beyond, on issues of nativism, modernism and indigenism (see especially Bhalchandra Nemade’s interview) form the horizon for locating the poetry of this period within the politics of linguistic, regional and national identities. These debates also provide the context for the fraught relationship of “Indian English poetry” or “Indian English literature” to the body of “Indian literature” as a whole, which is discussed by Eunice de Souza, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Adil Jussawalla in their respective interviews.

Since Bombay as a cultural and literary space was never a monolith, the writers themselves represent a wide range of opinion on literary, social and political ideas, and this special issue highlights the debates, generational or ideological differences that energized the writers and readers of the day. The voices of Bhalchandra Nemade, and those of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla and Kiran Nagarkar, appear together in these pages, when they are otherwise seen to be irreconcilable. Nagarkar and Mehrotra, as well as Jussawalla and Chitre, oppose the nativism of Nemade because they see a linguistic diktat in Nemade’s espousal of the role of the vernaculars versus that of English. But Nemade’s interview shows a more nuanced perspective on language and translation than has been seen in most of his previous pronouncements, and it redirects the discussions about language and identity into new areas of inquiry. Although many of these poets were united in the struggle to create a new modern idiom for English poetry in India, there were important differences between them, some of which are revealed in their interviews: for example, Adil Jussawalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra talk about their ambivalent relationship with Nissim Ezekiel. In her article on Dalit Bombay, Anupama Rao documents the internal fissures of the Dalit movement, especially the chasm that existed between the caste vs. class approaches, and the activism of Dalit thinkers and writers to which Raja Dhale also bears witness. Dhale’s political and social engagement counters the practices of other Bombay writers and publishers like Ashok Shahane, for whom the writer’s commitment was only to himself and his own craft (see the excerpted translations of Shahane’s and Nemade’s essays from the 1960s). Finally, Eunice de Souza’s interview raises the question of gender roles in a period of writing where most visible poets were male.

At the end of his interview here, Amit Chaudhuri talks about the metropolis as the “most interesting Indian city” and, in literary terms, the centrality of Bombay continues to be evident today. On many accounts, the city has never ceased to be the foundry of English poetry in India. In his review of Jeet Thayil’s (2008) Penguin anthology of 60 Indian Poets, Jerry Pinto (2008) acknowledges that the anthology celebrates a group of poets formed in the 1980s where the “Bombay Poets” are still irrepressible (they represent more than 26 poets out of the 60 selected). Newspaper articles have continued to celebrate the “Mumbai Muse” (Chitre et al. 2007; Daruwalla 2001), and many observers point to the enduring vitality of the English poetry scene in the city: “In Mumbai, the Poetry Never Ends” (Silgardo 2015). In Marathi, even though the energies of readership and the writers themselves (especially when it comes to contemporary Dalit writing) have spread across the interiors of Maharashtra, publishers like Lokvangaya Griha, Pras Prakashan or Popular Prakashan still operate from Bombay, and the People’s Book House near Flora Fountain in South Bombay, which distributes some of the most important Marathi publications, continues to be a nerve center for Marathi readers.

And yet despite the vitality of the city now and then, the remarkable creative and cosmopolitan effervescence of the time, and the bold experimentalism of this generation, Bombay has always had an almost schizophrenic presence in some of the writing we examine here. It is both the magnetizing urban landscape that enables a vibrant translocal engagement with the life and world of post-independence India and the rest of the world, but it is also a place of intense and unmitigated inequalities that form the central content of much of the poetry and writing of this period. This was the city that is documented in the chawls of Kiran Nagarkar’s novels, the red-light district of Kamathipura in Namdeo Dhasal’s fierce poetry, the working-class neighborhoods of Chinchpokli in Dilip Chitre’s (1980, 55) famous poem “The View from Chinchpokli”, or the hurt that permeates Adil Jussawalla’s Missing Person (1976), and many of his later poems about Bombay, a city he also describes in his interview in this issue as “Babylon falling”. It is a space which is richly documented in Narayan Surve’s poetry, but where the same poet feels that he and the working class are abandoned to the periphery and made invisible in the larger schema of the neocolonial city. Narayan Surve writes of his craft in one of his Marathi ghazals, “Kay Karave?” (What Should One Do?):

If a man should not sing in his lonely nights, then what should he do?

If he must not periodically seek out and check on his own self,

then what should he do?

[ … ]

The feet traverse the city while leaning on the day’s shoulders

They become weary; if one can’t tell a few stories, then what should one do?

[ … ]

I say, this earth, she merely knows how to give birth to man, nothing more

If one should not keep calling out to oneself, what should one do?

(Surve 2016, 129; original in Marathi)

Surve’s poetic persona lives in a stark world of deprivation where the only instrument of support and survival is his poetic craft. Bombay is the place which gave him the ability to speak and assert the reality of the lives of the multitude, but it is also a space where one is not sure that one is heard, or whether one survives. Like Surve, the poets in Marathi and English have repeatedly cast their voices out into the world as they recreate the relations, the environs, the cultures of Bombay in a particular time-space in the post-independence period: other than write, these poets wonder, “what should one do [to be heard]?”

Through the work of this special issue, and the placing of the poetry in the web of relations between many creative fields, we certainly hope that these voices and their stories will be revived, and read; that such work will be situated both in the worlds of Bombay of which it is part and in the wider world with which it speaks and interacts.

Notes on contributors

Anjali Nerlekar is associate professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, with research interests in global modernisms, Indian print cultures, Marathi literature, Indo-Caribbean literature, spatial and cartographic studies, and translation studies. She has published articles on the poetry of Arun Kolatkar, A.K. Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, and David Dabydeen, and is the author of Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016). In collaboration with Dr Bronwen Bledsoe of Cornell University, she has also created an ongoing collection of documents and manuscripts related to English and Marathi Bombay poetry titled “The Bombay Poets’ Archive.”

Laetitia Zecchini is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. Her research interests include contemporary Indian poetry, the politics of literature, postcolonial criticism, and issues of modernism and cosmopolitanism. She has co-translated Arun Kolatkar and Kedarnath Singh into French, and is the author of Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Moving Lines (2014), which aims at telling a story of modernism in India through a particular poet, Arun Kolatkar, and a particular time and place, the ebullient post-Independence Bombay scene from which his poetry is inseparable. She recently co-edited two special issues (for the Revue de Littérature comparée, 2015 and for Littérature, 2016) on questions of Indian literary history, and is starting a collaborative project on writers’ organisations, free speech and the PEN All-India Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Clearing House poetry publishing collective was one of the most innovative small presses of the time. For a historical overview of the collective and of the “Bombay poets”, see Hasan (2010).

2. Marathi writers have always referred to the city as Mumbai, however, and there isn’t the same ideological stance about the name of the city in Marathi as there is in English. The first line of Arun Kolatkar’s poem in Marathi, for instance, reads “Mumbai ne bhikes lavle” (Kolatkar 1977, 92–96) but translated into English it becomes “Bombay made me a beggar” (Kolatkar 2009, 73–76). Also see Meera Kosambi (1995) who analyses the social perceptions associated with the two different appellations of the city. In this special issue, we sometimes​ use “Bombay/Mumbai” to show these ​conflicted histories and the mixed bilingual space referenced in the name.

3. The Shiv Sena (literally the “Army of Shivaji”) is a far-right Hindu organization in Maharashtra that emerged as a separate entity in 1966 from the joint struggle by the Congress, the communists and others for the Marathi state of Maharashtra. When it was in power in Bombay, the Shiv Sena changed the name of the city to “Mumbai”, from Mumba Devi, a local Hindu deity.

4. The volume includes a chapter called “Poetry and the City” which consists mainly of the poems that were read by Gujarati, Marathi and English Bombay poets (such as Suresh Dalal, Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Narayan Surve and Namdeo Dhasal) who attended the international workshop from which the book originated.

5. The original interview was in Marathi and was conducted by Manohar Jadhav and Mangesh Narayan Kale. For this issue it has been abridged and translated by Anagha Bhat-Behere.