At the Borders of Words: Form, Violence, and Practice in Modern Indian Poetry

How do poets write when they belong to more than one language, but no single language feels entirely like home? Recent scholarship has shattered the idea that literature belongs neatly to a single nation or tongue. While many view this multilingual reality only as a form of displacement, this talk shifts the focus to poetic practice, exploring how writers actively mold, fragment, and redistribute language as an art form. By looking at recurring poetic strategies from Indian modernist writing, the talk will examine how modern poets use metaphor to critique the limits of speech; write on the volatile borders where different languages meet; expose social and bodily violence through deliberate linguistic choices; and create dense, culturally local archives within single poems.

Anjali Nerlekar teaches South Asian literatures, multilingual modernisms, and translation studies at Rutgers University, and is co-editor of Modernism/modernity, the flagship journal of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (Oxford University Press), a landmark volume on India’s multilingual literary traditions.