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Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture looks beyond the apparent enigma of Arun Kolatkar to examine how his English and Marathi poetry took shape—and how it reached readers. In Anu Kumar’s review, the book’s subject is both a poet and the Bombay literary world around him: little magazines, small presses, editorial work, typography, friendships and collaborations.
More than a portrait of one poet
Kolatkar’s literary reputation can make him seem like an isolated, hard-to-categorize figure. Nerlekar’s study offers a different lens: read his work in both languages and alongside the print culture that helped sustain it. The result is not simply a biography or a guide to individual poems, but an account of poetry’s making and circulation.
Northwestern University Press describes the book as a study of Kolatkar’s bilingual writing and the cultural pressures that privilege either English or a single, supposedly authentic, regional language. Its central claim is that attending to both languages changes how the work can be understood. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, editor of Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, calls it “the first to offer a reading of Arun Kolatkar’s work in the two languages he wrote in, English and Marathi.” Northwestern University Press
What “Bombay Modern” means in the book
Kumar places the study in the “sathottari” period, which she dates from 1955 to 1980, when little magazines and small presses flourished. The publisher frames its inquiry more broadly around Bombay after 1960, where regional, national and international currents met. These are related but not identical periodizations: one is the review’s date range for the literary moment; the other is the publisher’s description of the book’s Bombay-centered scope.
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The Oxford academic review characterizes Kolatkar as rooted in Marathi culture while also engaging with global modernisms. Nerlekar’s attention to the local does not make the poetry provincial, nor does its cosmopolitan dimension erase its Marathi context. Instead, Bombay emerges as a place where multiple literary traditions and scales of influence could overlap. Oxford Academic review
How bilingual reading changes the account of Jejuri
Kumar points to Jejuri as a revealing example. The Marathi version appeared posthumously, and the review describes correspondences and differences between the Marathi and English versions, as well as mutual influence. That approach resists a simple story in which one text is merely the source and the other a derivative translation. It treats the versions as part of a more complex bilingual practice.
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This is an interpretation presented through the review and the book’s critical method, not a claim that every reader must regard the two versions as interchangeable. The value of reading them together is that their relationship becomes a question to investigate rather than an assumption to settle in advance.
The infrastructure behind the poems
In Mehrotra’s endorsement, Nerlekar uses privately held archival material to situate Kolatkar among overlapping literary cultures from 1955 to 1980. He singles out “little magazines and small presses, typographies and layouts, literary friendships and collaborations.” The emphasis matters: a poem does not circulate in a vacuum. Editors, publishers, page design and networks of writers help determine what gets printed, how it appears and who encounters it. Northwestern University Press
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Kolatkar’s work in this account extends beyond composing poems. The publisher-hosted endorsement describes him as a poet, publisher and editor. Those roles connect the individual artist to the practical work of building venues for writing. The book’s portrait of Bombay poetry therefore includes the means by which literature was made public, not only the finished poems.
Who may find the book useful
- Readers of Kolatkar: The bilingual focus offers a way to approach his English and Marathi writing as connected parts of a literary practice.
- Readers interested in Indian modernism: The study places local Marathi literary culture in conversation with wider modernist and postcolonial debates.
- Readers curious about literary history: Its attention to small presses, magazines, editorial labor and design shows how a literary scene is built as well as what it produces.
Book details
Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture is by Anjali Nerlekar. Northwestern University Press lists a 320-page book with 22 black-and-white illustrations in paperback, hardcover and ebook formats. The Scroll review also notes an edition from Speaking Tiger. These are bibliographic details, not a statement about current retailer stock or pricing.
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| Northwestern University Press format | ISBN |
|---|---|
| Paperback | 9780810132733 |
| Hardcover | 9780810132740 |
| Ebook | 9780810132757 |
Northwestern University Press book page · Anu Kumar’s Scroll review
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