Contemporary Bhakti Recastings

Abstract

By exploring how many modern Indian poets (namely, here, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre) have chosen to trace their affiliations and lineage back to the inclusive bhakti devotional tradition, I am exploring the fecund connections between practices of translation and creative writing in contemporary Indian poetry, but also the emergence of a modernity that results from the complex interplay of languages, lineages and hybrid transactions. These transactions between translation and creative writing, between English and other Indian languages, between folk music and poetry, between bhakti and Euro-American modernism, bhakti and the blues or the Beats (since the restaging of these medieval compositions is often made in a kind of jazzy, colloquial American idiom, confusing ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ categories), expose the simultaneous confluence of local and global literatures, the porosity of languages and traditions. Modernism and bhakti become paradigms for renewal and for emancipation. Indian poets also propose a form of belonging as a defiant all-inclusive category, an open-ended process of translation that subverts the quest for origins, transcends the national and celebrates deterritorialization. Translation becomes a form of transgressive practice with powerful dissident political and ‘heretical’ implications in the Indian context.