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In the course of the past three or four decades, the world of Marathi poetry has been fragmented by the emergence of several new groups of writers, schools of writing, and literary and social movements. Each of these groups, schools, or movements represents an unprecedented combination of interests, based on the writers' esthetics in theory and practice, their social backgrounds (whether class, region, or caste), and their cultural politics, among other factors. The poets included here belong to three distinct literary generations and can be situated in four or five different groups and movements.
P. S. Rege, the oldest of these poets, was a member of the generation of "modernists" who appeared in Marathi in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in Ratnagiri District, in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, in 1910. He studied economics in Bombay and London in the 1930s, taught economics at various colleges in Maharashtra and Goa, and retired in the 1970s as the principal of Elphinstone College, Bombay. He began writing in the 1930s and continued until his death in 1978. Rege's work in Marathi includes eight books of poems, two collections of short fiction, three novels, several plays, and two volumes of essays and criticism. Among his later collections of poetry are Dusara pakshi (The Other Bird; 1966), Priyala (Love and Desire; 1972), and Suhrdgatha (The Good-Hearted Story; 1975), the last a volume of selected poems.
In the years immediately following Indian Independence (1947), several highly accomplished younger poets joined the nava kavya (new poetry) movement inaugurated by B. S. Mardhekar and P. S. Rege. Among the younger poets were Indira Sant, Vinda Karandikar, and Mangesh Padgaonkar, all of whom began publishing their mature work in the 1950s. Padgaonkar, represented here by a late satiric poem, was born in Vengurla, Ratnagiri District, Maharashtra, in 1929, and was educated in Bombay. He received his Bachelor's degree, a teacher's diploma, and a Master's degree in Marathi and Sanskrit from Kirti College, Bombay. Between 1958 and 1960 he worked as an assistant producer at All-India Radio, Bombay. For the next five years he was a professor of Marathi, first at Somaiya College and then at Mithibai College. In 1965-70 he returned to All-India Radio as a producer, and in 1970 he...