Ranjit Hoskote

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Ranjit Hoskote (born 29 March 1969) is a contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Bibliography 3 Exhibitions curated 4 External links 5 References 6 See also

[edit] Biography

Ranjit Hoskote was born in Mumbai and educated at the Bombay Scottish School, Elphinstone College, where he read for a BA in Politics, and the University of Bombay, where he took an MA in English Literature and Aesthetics.^[1] Hoskote belongs to the younger generation of Indian poets who began to publish their work during the early 1990s.^{[2] [3]} His work has been published in numerous Indian and international journals, including Poetry Review London, Wasafiri, Poetry Wales, Nthposition, The Iowa Review, Green Integer Review, Fulcrum (annual), Rattapallax, Lyric Poetry Review, West Coast Line, Kavya Bharati and Indian Literature. His poems have also appeared in German translation in Die Zeit, Akzente, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Wespennest and Art & Thought/ Fikrun-wa-Fann. He is the author of four collections of poetry, has translated the Marathi poet Vasant Abaji Dahake, co-translated the German novelist and essayist Ilija Trojanow, and edited an anthology of contemporary Indian verse.^{[4] [5]}

The critic Bruce King writes of Hoskote's early work in his influential Modern Indian Poetry in English (revised edition: Oxford, 2001): "Hoskote has an historical sense, is influenced by the surreal, experiments with metrics and has a complex sense of the political... An art critic, he makes much use of landscapes, the sky and allusions to paintings. His main theme... is life as intricate, complicated, revolutionary movements in time... We live in a world of flux which requires violence for liberation, but history shows that violence itself turns into oppression and death." Reviewing Hoskote's first book of poems, Zones of Assault, in 1991 for India Today, the poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote: "Hoskote wants to discover language, as one would a new chemical in a laboratory experiment. This sense of linguistic play, usually missing from subcontinental poetry in English, is abundant in Hoskote’s work." A decade later, reviewing Hoskote's third volume, The Sleepwalker's Archive, for The Hindu in 2001, the poet and critic Keki Daruwalla wrote: "It is the way he hangs on to a metaphor, and the subtlety with which he does it, that draws my admiration (not to mention envy)... Hoskote’s poems bear the 'watermark of fable': behind each cluster of images, a story; behind each story, a parable. I haven’t read a better poetry volume in years."^[6]

Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on Poetry International Web, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote’s metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaceted experience." ^{[7] [8]} Although he was closely associated with the modernist poet Nissim Ezekiel, who was his mentor, Hoskote does not share Ezekiel's poetics. Instead, his aesthetic choices align him more closely with Dom Moraes and Adil Jussawalla.

In 2004, the year in which Indian poetry in English lost three of its most important figures – Ezekiel, Moraes, and Arun Kolatkar – Hoskote wrote moving obituaries for these ‘masters of the guild’, essays in which he wove personal reminiscence with the editor’s historic mandate of context-making.^{[9] [10] [11] [12]} Hoskote has also written, often, about the place of poetry in contemporary culture, the dynamics of the encounter between reader and poetic text, and the role that reading circles and literary platforms can play in the process of literary socialisation.^{[13] [14]}

In 2006, the prestigious literary imprint, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, launched its new poetry series, Edition Lyrik Kabinett, with a German translation of Hoskote's poems, Die Ankunft der Vögel, rendered by the poet Jürgen Brocan. The other two volumes in the series, which was launched at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, were by the renowned American poet Charles Simic and the noted German poet Christoph Meckel.

As a literary organiser, Hoskote has been associated with the PEN All-India Centre, the Indian branch of International PEN, since 1986, and is currently its General Secretary, as well as Editor of its journal, Penumbra. He has also been associated with the Poetry Circle Bombay since 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997.

Hoskote was principal art critic for The Times of India, Bombay, from 1988 to 1999. Between 1993 and 1999, he was also a leader writer for The Times and wrote a weekly column of lively cultural commentary, 'Ripple Effects', for it. In his role as religion and philosophy editor for The Times, he began a popular column on spirituality, sociology of religion, and philosophical commentary, 'The Speaking Tree' (he named the column, which was launched in May 1996, after the benchmark 1971 study of Indian society and culture, The Speaking Tree, written by his friend, the scholar and artist Richard Lannoy) ^[15]. Hoskote was an art critic and cultural commentator, as well as a senior editor, with The Hindu, from 2000 to 2007, contributing to its periodical of thought and culture, Folio ^[16] as well as to its editorial and op-ed pages, and its prestigious Sunday Magazine.

In his role as an art critic, Hoskote has authored a critical biography as well as a major retrospective study of the painter Jehangir Sabavala, and also monographs on the artists Tyeb Mehta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Baiju Parthan and Iranna GR. He has also written major essays on other leading Indian artists, including, among others, Gieve Patel, Bhupen Khakhar, Akbar Padamsee, Mehlli Gobhai, Vivan Sundaram, Laxman Shreshtha, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, Jitish Kallat, the Raqs Media Collective, Shilpa Gupta and Sudarshan Shetty.

As a cultural theorist, Hoskote has addressed the cultural and political dynamics of postcolonial societies that are going through a process of globalisation, emphasising the possibilities of a 'non-western contemporaneity'^[17] and 'intercultural communication'^[18]. He has also returned often to the theme of the 'nomad position'^{[19] [20]} and to the polarity between 'crisis and critique'.^[21] In many of his writings and lectures, Hoskote examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the political, describing this as a tension between the politics of the expressive and the expressivity of the political. He has explored, in particular, the connections between popular visual art, mass mobilisations and the emergence of fluid and fluctuating identities within the evolving metropolitan cultures of the postcolonial world.^{[22] [23]} Hoskote has also speculated, in various essays, on the nature of a 'futurative art' possessed of an intermedia orientation, and which combines critical resistance with expressive pleasure.^[24] At the same time, Hoskote has reflected on the place of beauty and the sublime in contemporary cultural practice, often speaking of "experiences parallel to beauty". In a major essay on the subject, he writes that "the modern art-work is often elegiac in nature: it mourns the loss of beauty through scission and absence; it carries within its very structure a lament for the loss of beauty."^{[25] [26]}

In a series of essays, papers and articles published from the late 1990s onward, Hoskote has reflected on the theme of the asymmetry between a 'West' that enjoys economic, military and epistemological supremacy and an 'East' that is the subject of sanction, invasion and misrepresentation. In some of these writings, he dwells on the historic fate of the 'House of Islam' as viewed from the West and from India, in an epoch "dominated by the NATO cosmology"^[27] while in others, he retrieves historic occasions of successful cultural confluence, when disparate belief systems and ethnicities have come together into a fruitful and sophisticated hybridity.^[28] Hoskote has also attended to the phenomena of politicised religiosity and reinvented belief in the epoch of globalisation, as idioms of retrieval or revival, as expressions of alternative modernities or even counter-modernities.^{[29] [30] [31]}

Hoskote is also a vocal and articulate defender of cultural freedoms against the monopolistic claims of the State, religious pressure groups and censors, whether official or self-appointed. He has been actively involved in organizing protest campaigns in defence of victims of cultural intolerance.^{[32] [33] [34]}

Hoskote has been a Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa (1995) and was writer-in-residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He was awarded the Sanskriti Award for Literature, 1996, and won First Prize in the British Council/Poetry Society All-India Poetry Competition, 1997. India's National Academy of Letters honoured him with the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. The S. H. Raza Foundation conferred its 2006 Raza Award for Literature on Hoskote.

In his role as an independent curator, Hoskote has conceived and organised thirteen exhibitions of contemporary Indian and Asian art since 1994, including a mid-career retrospective of the artist Atul Dodiya for the Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2001) and a lifetime retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala for India's National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and New Delhi (2005). Hoskote's exhibitions cover a range of curatorial interests, including sculptural departures from the abstract (as in the 1994 show, 'Hinged by Light'), site-specific public-art installations (as in the 2000 show, 'Making an Entrance'), phantasmagoria (as in the 2006 show, 'Strangeness'), and the curve of a distinctive Indo-Iberian regionality (as in the 2007 survey exhibition, 'Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa').

Hoskote is co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) in South Korea, collaborating on this project with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim.^[35]

Hoskote holds an Associate Fellowship with Sarai CSDS, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and is in the process of developing, jointly with Nancy Adajania, a new journal of critical inquiry in the visual arts.^[36]

Hoskote currently lives and works in Mumbai.

[edit] Bibliography

Poetry

• Zones of Assault. (Rupa & Co., New Delhi 1991) ISBN 81-7167-063-6
• The Cartographer’s Apprentice. (Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai 2000)
• The Sleepwalker’s Archive. (Single File, Mumbai 2001) REVIEW
• Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985-2005. (Penguin Books India, New Delhi 2006) ISBN 0-14-306185-2 REVIEW

REVIEW

• Die Ankunft der Vögel, German translation by Jürgen Brocan. (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2006) ISBN 978-3-446-20771-4 REVIEW (German)

Art Criticism

• Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala. (Eminence Designs, Mumbai 1998) ISBN 81-900602-2-8
• Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer. (Eminence Designs/ Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai 2004) ISBN 81-902170-0-3 REVIEW
• The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala. (Eminence Designs/ National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai 2005) ISBN 81-902170-9-7
• Baiju Parthan: A User's Manual. (Afterimage, Mumbai 2006) ISBN 81-903765-0-0 REVIEW
• The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR. (Lund Humphries/ Ashgate Publishing, London 2007) ISBN 978-0-85331-965-8 EXTRACTS
• The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings. (The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai 2008) ISBN 978-81-903283-8-8 REVIEW

Cultural History

• Kampfabsage. (co-authored with Ilija Trojanow; Random House/ Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2007) ISBN 978-3896673633 (German)

As Editor

• Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets. (Viking, New Delhi 2002) ISBN 0-67-089094-4 REVIEW

As Translator

• Vasant Abaji Dahake, A Terrorist of the Spirit. (Harper Collins Indus, New Delhi 1992) ISBN 81-7223-061-3
• Ilija Trojanow, Along the Ganga: To the Inner Shores of India. (Penguin Books India, New Delhi 2005) ISBN 0-1430-3165-1
• Ilija Trojanow, Along the Ganges. (British edition: Haus Publishing, London 2005) ISBN 1-904950-36-1

[edit] Exhibitions curated

• ‘Hinged by Light’ (paintings and sculptural departures by three major Indian abstractionists: Mehlli Gobhai, Prabhakar Kolte, Yogesh Rawal; Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay, January 1994).

• ‘Private Languages’ (paintings, sculptures and assemblages by three emerging Indian artists: Anandajit Ray, Ravinder Reddy, Sudarshan Shetty; Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay, January 1997).

• ‘Making An Entrance’ (site-specific public-art installations by the artists Jehangir Jani, Bharati Kapadia, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Baiju Parthan and Sudarshan Shetty, set up in the Kala Ghoda precinct, Bombay’s old colonial quarter, during the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2000; Bombay, February 2000).

• ‘Intersections: Seven Artistic Dialogues between Abstraction and Figuration’ (paintings and mixed-media works by Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Mehlli Gobhai, Bharati Kapadia, Yogesh Rawal, Baiju Parthan, C. Douglas and Jitish Kallat; The Guild Art Gallery, Bombay, February 2000).

• ‘Family Resemblances: Nine Approaches to a Mutable Self’ (paintings by Laxman Shreshtha, Sachin Karne, Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Baiju Parthan, Amitava Das, Surendran Nair, Anju Dodiya and Gargi Raina; The Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Bombay, March 2000).

• ‘The Bodied Self’ (paintings by Anju Dodiya, Jehangir Jani and Theodore Mesquita; Gallery Sans Tache, Bombay, April 2001).

• ‘Labyrinth/ Laboratory’ (a mid-career retrospective of Atul Dodiya, including paintings, sculpture-installations and assemblages, at the invitation of the Japan Foundation; Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo, June-July 2001).

• ‘The Active Line’ (drawings by Jehangir Sabavala, Mehlli Gobhai, Laxma Goud, Manjit Bawa and Jogen Chowdhury; The Guild Art Gallery, Bombay, December 2001)

• ‘Clicking into Place’ (a trans-Asian exhibition -- the Indian phase of 'Under Construction', below -- including paintings by Alfredo Esquillo/ Manila, Shibu Natesan/ London, Jitish Kallat/ Bombay, and a digital installation by Baiju Parthan/ Bombay; Sakshi Gallery, Bombay, February 2002).

• ‘Under Construction’ (Hoskote was co-curator for this collaborative curatorial project, initiated by the Japan Foundation Asia Center, which took place at various venues in Asia, culminating in an exhibition at the Japan Foundation Forum and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, in December 2002).

• ‘Visions of Landscape’ (paintings by Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Sudhir Patwardhan, Laxman Shreshtha, Atul Dodiya and Shibu Natesan; The Guild Art Gallery, Bombay, January 2005).

• ‘Jehangir Sabavala: A Retrospective (a prestigious retrospective exhibition of Sabavala’s art, covering the period 1942-2005; The National Gallery of Modern Art: Bombay and New Delhi, November-December 2005).

• ‘Strangeness’ (paintings, drawings, mixed-media works and sculpture-installations by Krishen Khanna, Baiju Parthan, Theodore Mesquita, Viraj Naik, Tina Bopiah, Sunil Gawde, Rajeev Lochan, Riyas Komu, T V Santhosh, Krishnamachari Bose, Krishnaraj Chonat; Anant Art Gallery, Calcutta, January 2006).REPORT

• ‘Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa’ (a survey exhibition gathering together 265 art-works by 22 contemporary artists and 4 historic masters, ranging across oils, watercolours, drawings, graphics, mixed-media works, sculptures and video-installations; artists include F N Souza, V S Gaitonde, Angelo da Fonseca, Laxman Pai; Antonio e Costa, Alex Tavares, Wilson D'Souza, Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal, Hanuman Kambli, Giraldo de Sousa, Vidya Kamat, Viraj Naik, Siddharth Gosavi, Pradeep Naik, Subodh Kerkar, Rajan Fulari, Rajendra Usapkar, Santosh Morajkar, Yolanda de Sousa-Kammermeier, Nirupa Naik, Chaitali Morajkar, Liesl Cotta De Souza, Querozito De Souza, Shilpa Mayenkar, Baiju Parthan, and Dayanita Singh; Old Goa Medical College Building/ Escola Medica e Cirurgica de Goa, for the Goa Tourism Development Corporation, Panjim, April 2007). CURATORIAL ESSAY REVIEW REVIEW

[edit] External links

Poetry

• Poems & interview at Poetry International Web
• 8 poems at Green Integer Review
• 6 poems at Nthposition
• Poem at Rattapallax
• Poem in Poems for Madrid
• 3 poems at Fieralingue
• 6 poems at Talking Poetry
• Ranjit Hoskote Interview mp3 recording

Essays

• Essay by Ranjit Hoskote, 'Looking for Anchorage, and Not in Alaska Alone'
• Critical essay on Documenta 11, at Art & Thought

Articles

• Ambedkar's legacy in The Hindu
• The Mob as Censor at countercurrents.org
• Painting the art world red in Hindustan Times

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Indian English literature
• Indian Writing in English
• Nissim Ezekiel
• Dom Moraes
• International PEN
• Nancy Adajania
• Gwangju Biennale

Persondata
NAME	Hoskote, Ranjit
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Contemporary English language Indian poet, translator and art-critic
DATE OF BIRTH	1969
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bombay, Maharashtra, India
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH