Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture

Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern is a close reading of Arun Kolatkar’s canonical poetic works that relocates the genre of poetry to the center of both Indian literary modernist studies and postcolonial Indian studies. Nerlekar shows how a bilingual reading of Kolatkar’s texts uncovers a uniquely resistant sense of the ‘local’ that defies monolinguistic cultural pressures and straddles the boundaries of English and Marathi writing. And as she does this, she uncovers an alternative and provincial modernism through poetry.

Eschewing any attempt to define an overarching or universal modernism, Bombay Modern delimits its sphere of study to ‘Bombay’ and to the ‘post-1960’(the sathottari) period in an attempt to examine at close range how this poetry redeployed the regional, the national and the international to create a very tangible yet transient local.