Issued as part of UPCC book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-279) and index.

Introduction : archiving the ephemeral -- part one. The context -- Overview : the sathottari period -- 1. Little magazines and the new space for literary writing -- 2. Small presses and stabilizing the "littles" -- 3. Translation and the local nexus of the global in sathottari Indian literature -- part two. The texts -- Overview : Arun Kolatkar's life and work -- 4. The book as a little magazine : the cosmopolitan localism of Bhijaki Vahi -- 5. Material modernisms of small press publishing in Jejuri, Kala Ghoda poems, and Sarpa Satra -- 6. The rough ground of translation in the Marathi and English Jejuri -- Epilogue : no singular truths.

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, materialist reading of Kolatkar's texts uncovers a uniquely resistant sense of the "local" that defies the monolinguistic cultural pressures of the post-1960 years and straddles the boundaries of English and Marathi writing. Bombay Modern uncovers an alternative and provincial modernism through poetry, a genre that is marginal to postcolonial studies, and through bilingual scholarship across English and Marathi texts, a methodology that is currently peripheral at best to both modernist studies and postcolonial literary criticism in India. 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 the specific way in which this poetry redeployed the regional, the national, and the international to create a very tangible yet transient local.

Description based on print version record.