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

Arun Kolatkar and modernism in India I: the ‘Bombay scene’ in the 60s

Made from the photocopy of a photo held by Darshan Chhabda

Abstract

The poet and critic Adil Jussawalla recalls the sensation in the 60s ‘of tremendous artistic potential gathering together in one place and the pleasurable feeling that Bombay was the place where it would find release’. It is the artistic ferment of post-independence Bombay which Dilip Chitre also associates with a ‘fantastic conglomeration of clashing realities’ that will be the subject of this presentation. Modernism was fashioned by the collective group practice of an anti-establishment minority of writers and visual artists who responded to the spirit of the times and forged ‘communities of the medium’ by founding little magazines and small presses. They also opened up new directions from a distinctly oppositional perspective. The special alchemy of bohemianism and cosmopolitanism seems characteristic of the period and of Kolatkar, signaling both a spirit of dissent or marginality and the feeling of belonging to a specific 'conspirational' artistic subculture. The talk will also broach on memories of Ginsberg in Bombay, on the Artists’ Aid Fund Center, the galeries and cafés of Kala Ghoda, on the ‘paperback revolution’ without which many poets acknowledge they would not be writers today, on the American 'lineage' for many modern poets including Kolatkar, on the transnational affiliations which the little magazines were staging at the time, etc

Speaker Biography

Laetitia Zecchini is a Research Fellow at the CNRS in Paris. Her research interests and publications focus on contemporary Indian poetry, on postcolonial theory and on the politics of poetics. She recently co-edited La modernité littéraire indienne: Perspectives postcoloniales (2009) and co-translated the Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh into French (Dans un pays tout plein d'histoires, 2007). She co-organizes the 'Postcolonial literatures and theories' research seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS Ulm) in Paris and is currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (accepted by Continuum). Her translation of Kala Ghoda Poems (Arun Kolatkar) into French is forthcoming by Gallimard (bilingual edition, May 2013).