Marathi Kadambari

Patil, Y. Y. (April 2015). Edited a book "SHABDAGANDH", Collection of Poetry, written by her Father Shri. Raghunath Narayan Raut / Raghu Varorkar; Pasaaydaan Foundation, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 78p.; ISBN: 978-93-521253-1-9. It is available free for reading HERE.

The translator Dr. Yojana Patil owe to Florece Scovell Shinn who wrote “The Game
of Life & How to Play It” original book in English, as
well as ‘Ishaamaa’ Kundanika Kapadia for bringing it
to India in a condensed Gujarati Translation “ીવન
એક ખેલ”, which she translated in Marathi here.

Review of new Marathi novel Satpatil Kulvruttant ( सातपाटील कुलवृत्तान्त ) written by Rangnath Pathare. The anylisis reveals new politically motivated trends and populist methods used in literary culture to promote Caste biased and racial discrimination based hegemonic agenda.

The earliest Marathi commentary on the Bhagwad Gita  known as the Dnyaneshwari, the Dnyanadevi or the Bhavarth Deepika (A.D. 1290) by Dnyaneshwar or Dnyanadev  (1275-  1293 AD ) is one of  the essential religious and spiritual texts in Maharashtra whose influence on the later development of Marathi literature and culture is enormous.  In a striking metaphor towards the end of his book, Dnyaneshwar tells his guru Nivruttinath, “O my Master, you have made me create this second universe in the form of this work, and that makes me mock at sage Vishwamitra, who created a transient world for Trishanku, simply to demean god Brahma. But this literary creation of mine will live forever.” (18.1886-87).  His act is like that of creating ‘duji shrusti’ an alternative universe like Vishwamitra creating an alternative world for Trishanku.  However, he Vishwamitra’s world was flawed so he mocks at it, while his own creation is not. This is possible because of the Guru’s grace and the grace of saints who he addresses in the’ dharma kirtan’. The current essay explores the implications of reading this act of creating ‘duji shrushti’ as an act of translation from the point of view of contemporary translation studies. The expanded notion of translation used  in order to approach pre-colonial texts like the Dnyaneshwari reveals a rich body of metaphors like that of Trishanku’s‘duji shrushti’ which can be seen as models cross-linguistic and cross cultural communication in pre-colonial multilingual society. An attempt then is made to historically situate these notions in their social and cultural contexts.

The period in which it was composed is significant for South Asia as well as Europe as these places witnessed, in Sheldon Pollock’s words, “transformation in cultural practice, social-identity formation, and political order with far-reaching and enduring consequences.”  He understands the creation of such a text as part of the process of ‘vernacularization’, or “the historical process of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture (1998:21-26). However, I seek to demonstrate in my reading of the Dnyaneshwari using theoretical advances in translation studies and comparative literary studies, what seems to happen in this process is not a simple adoption of cosmopolitan models (teeka/bhashya) in the local languages but creation of new models, genres and literary languages, towards different functional ends, that are neither ‘Sanskrit’ nor ‘Marathi’, but interliterary in the sense of the term used by Durisin (1984) and are created through translation, understood as a process of semiotic transformation.  In social and cultural domain, bhakti literature is neither a single or simple political project of social liberation nor simple continuation of Puranic brahminical hegemony and instead of seeing it simplistically as ‘vernacularization’,  ‘revolution’ or ‘counter-revolution’, the processes of emergence of new literatures have to be understood in context of the complex overlapping and conflictual social and cultural formations of sects, patronage of multiple kinds, innovative intellects and caste-class-gender intersectionalities of literary polysystem of the period.

Keywords: Translation studies, Pre-colonial translation, Dnyaneshwari, Marathi literature, Vernacularization, Interliterary processes, comparative literature

The notions of bhakti and Maharashtra Dharma have remained critical for construction and contestation of modern Marathi identity, and the current write up seeks to provide a brief historical overview of these constructions and modern contestations.

Avant-garde experimental Marathi poetry after the 1990s underwent a spectacular shift of sensibility, linguistic orientation, styles, thematic concerns and techniques. The shift was correlated to the social, economic and cultural processes of globalization and liberalization which were unleashed upon Indian society at that time, and led to this emergent poetry being largely read in the context of globalization and its discontents. This write-up seeks not only to explore the varied stylistic and thematic concerns in Hemant Divate’s poetry but also seeks to situate it in the wider literary, cultural and historical contexts of its production.

The present essay explores his poetics and practice of literary writing and considers Sarang as a true postmodern writer from Lyotardian perspective as he risked marginalization and
neglect by being completely counter-conventional in his poetics, politics and practice in both English and Marathi.

‘Hindu: A Herstory’ appeared in a Special Issue on Bhalchandra Nemade of Yashashri: International Journal of English Language and Literature, ISSN no. 2319-5851, Vol. VII, issue 4, January-March 2015. It argues that the novel Hindu needs to be read as an Indian interpretation of feminism. In spite of it being written by a male novelist, it presents a remarkable range of experiences from the world of Indian women and not just with empathy but with a mature sense of deference for women's intelligence and agency.