Confessions of a Marathi Writer

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 146.201.208.22 on Sun, 04 Oct 2015 16:30:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsConfessions of a Marathi Writer By VILAS SARANG I have been asked to write about myself as a Marathi writer. That's the slot for me, apparently. However, I happen to be a questionable sort of Marathi writer. I wrote my first mature story, "Flies," in the summer (Indian) of 1963, between the two years of the M.A. in English literature I was then reading for. As it happens, I wrote this story in English. Dilip Chitre was editing a special issue of a renowned Marathi magazine, Abhiruchi, run by his father, and I made a hasty crib, to my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the original, for the issue. The Marathi "Flies" appeared in Abhiruchi in 1965; the original English text appeared in The London Magazine in 1981. (I felt flattered that Alan Ross in 1981 thought of a story written in 1963 as new and significant. ) As by then my other, later stories written in Marathi had appeared in English as translations, I allowed this story to appear in LM as "Translated from the Marathi," and that is how it stands in my 1990 collection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well, there's a "Marathi" writer for you!1Even the stories et cetera first written in Marathi by me are often covertly English. I remember composing the long final sentence of "The Terrorist" (which I wrote first, and then worked toward it from the beginning) in Marathi, mentally translating, laboriously over an entire day in my tiny apartment in the benighted city of Basra, a complex English syntax into my native tongue: still, the long, rolling rhythms of that final sentence in the English version are but a shadow in the "original" Marathi. The allusions to Kafka and Eliot in "Testimony of an Indian Vulture" sit uneasily in the Marathi text but come into their own in the English. Numerous examples of this sort could be given. The rhythms in my head are the rhythms of English, and they come into their own only when I do the "original"

Introduction: The worlds of Bombay poetry

“…(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?…”