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This essay explores two different ways by which ideas and “problems” of the “world,” “India,” “Indian literature,” and “world literature” were experienced, discussed, translated, imagined and remade in specific spaces like Bombay or journals such as The Indian PEN. I focus on one relatively formalized organization, the PEN All-India Centre, which was founded in Bombay in 1933 as the Indian branch of International PEN, and on a contemporary poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and the informal network of writers and artists close to him. Through the widely different agendas, practices, concerns, contexts and forms of writer collectivization which I outline in this essay, the PEN All-India Centre in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Bombay poets of the 1960s did try to eat the corners of the world and of world literature away. They aimed to break on the world stage, reclaimed an “India” that included what was non-Indian, and put forward, through translation and a cut-and-paste “collation” of the world and world literature, an idea of internationalism and interconnectedness where provincialism was the enemy. By discussing the situated, critical, and imaginative processes of reworlding that were at stake, and the struggles they gave rise to in the case of the PEN All-India Centre, I explore how these writers also put forward defiant practices of cosmopolitanism that reallocated the Eastern and the Western, the peripheral and the significant.

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is one of the most distinguished "Bombay poets", whose career spans six decades, from his first work Bharatmata: A Prayer (1966) brought out by the Ezra-Fakir Press he founded to his recently published Collected Poems 1969-2014. His contribution to the Indian English language tradition has been far-reaching, not only through his poetry itself, but through his role as translator, anthologist, editor and critic. In this interview, conducted on April 20-21, 2016, Mehrotra ranges over his extensive career, reflecting on the transnational web of genealogies, associations and translations that lie behind an "Indian poem", on his friendship and artistic collaborations with Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and A.K. Ramanujan, on the break that Indian writers and artists of his generation were trying to make, and on the way his own poetry was inspired by the American Beats. He also discusses his role in the little magazine/small press movement of the 1960s and 1970s when he edited ezra and damn you: a magazine of the arts, and co-founded the Clearing House collective. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was described by his close friend and fellow poet Adil Jussawalla as the "firebrand" of the poetry scene in the 1960s and 1970s (Kohli 1991, 139). A key figure of the little magazine/small press movement, whose poems first appeared in Indian and American little magazines, he published four collections of poetry and recently brought out his Collected Poems 1969-2014 (Mehrotra 2014). He is also an incisive critical voice, whose editions, anthologies and essays, such as The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Poets (Mehrotra 1992), The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Mehrotra 2003) or Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Mehrotra 2012), have been instrumental in shaping the field of Indian poetry in English and forcing us to revise the obvious cartographies and linear genealogies of what is commonly known as "Indian literature". The Absent Traveller, his translations of Prakrit love poetry from the 2nd century AD (Mehrotra 1991) and Songs of Kabir, his "recastings" of Kabir (Mehrotra 2011), are recognized as classics.