SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India

This presentation is born out of a book I am currently completing on Literary modernism in India focusing on the work of the bilingual (English-Marathi) writer Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004). The assumption of the book is that modernity and modernism are shifting notions that transcend space and time boundaries, that modernism is still a relevant paradigm for non-western literatures, that productive traffics exist between a modernist aesthetics and a postcolonial framework, and that it may be the experience of marginality or ‘outsidedness’ which provides a common ground for both. If the story of modernism is the story of migrations and translations, it was also crucially shaped by the metropolis. This book concentrates on the ebullient post-independence Bombay ‘scene’, Bombay 'bohemia' to which Kolatkar belonged. Just like rock and roll which 'crossed all frontiers' in Rushdie’s Ground Beneath her Feet or jazz which in the words of Naresh Fernandes, Indians can claim as much as Paris or New York, many Bombay artists and poets felt modernism was as much 'theirs' as, say, the Americans or the French. They engaged with a modernism - as paradigm for dissent, emancipation and reinvention - that was both irreducibly local and interconnected to everything else that was happening in the world. In the course of this presentation, I will outline the general aims of this book, the theoretical and practical challenges encountered, the reasons why the history of literary modernism is yet to be written in India. Drawing on unpublished material, this research would have been unthinkable without the generosity of those who knew and loved Kolatkar, and who were often part of the ‘little magazine’ fraternity of artists which is also the subject of this book.

Dr. Laetitia Zecchini is a Research Fellow at the CNRS in Paris. Her research interests and publications focus on contemporary Indian poetry, on the politics of poetics and on postcolonial theory. She recently co-edited La modernité littéraire indienne: perspectives postcoloniales (2009), co-translated the Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh into French and co-organizes the 'Postcolonial literatures and theories' seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She is currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (forthcoming Continuum). Her translation of Kala Ghoda Poems (Arun Kolatkar) into French is forthcoming by Poésie/Gallimard (bilingual edition, May 2013).