Between modernity and modernism: Reading affect in Muktibodh’s translated poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT The belief of poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh that poetry can resolve the disjuncture between aesthetic and political realms is significant to interpretations of the literary production of mid-20th-century India. This article examines the use of affects in Muktibodh’s poetry translated into English, that both mark such disjunction and attempt to resolve it. It analyses affects for how they foreground the codependency of modernity and modernism. To this end, the article understands modernity through relative periodization as a phenomenon that continually causes change either through transitions towards capitalism, or alternatively through authoritative, surveillance-based forms of governance. The losses caused by such modernity require rehabilitation, which in Muktibodh’s poetry takes place through a modernist aesthetic. Thus, the article offers a reading that interprets Muktibodh’s modernism as aiming to reconcile his creative-aesthetic freedom with the sociopolitical realities of the losses caused by modernity, and as inspired by the urge to overcome loss.