I am pluri-lingual like many other South Asian writers I know. Kolatkar, Nagarkar, Vilas Sarang and Damodar Prabhu are what I would call my contemporary Anglo-Marathi writers. There are Anglo-Bangla, Anglo-Malayalam and Anglo-Oriya poets, among my contemporaries. Our individual histories as bilingual writers are very different though, if that matters.

As for me, I was born in a family of native Marathi speakers in Baroda, or Vadodara, in Gujarat and spent the first 12 years of my life there speaking four languages fluently: Marathi, Gujarati, Hindustani and English. My first three years of schooling were in an English medium school run by Jesuits and I picked up English from an Irish 'brother' among other teachers. I switched schools often. My second was a Marathi medium school where Gujarati was also a subject. Hindustani (the pre-partition lingua franca of Western, Northern, Central, and Eastern India) was another addition to my linguistic repertoire. I studied Bangla and Urdu out of curiosity.

From 13 to 22, I lived in Bombay/Mumbai. I finished high school, went to college, graduated with honours in English literature, worked as a college tutor and as a journalist, all before I was 22. I then married, published my first book of poems in Marathi, and went to Ethiopia to teach English in government high schools on a three-year contract. While there, I picked up the national language, Amharic, but have lost it since due to lack of practice. From 25 until the age of 37, I was again in Mumbai. In this period, I worked with corporates as well as NGOs, from a multinational pharmaceutical company to a cultural organization dedicated to civil rights, and from an advertising agency to freelancing as a translator, journalist and film scriptwriter.

This phase ended with my being named Creative Executive at the Indian Express Group of Newspapers. During the National Emergency of 1975-77, I kept my job with The Indian Express to take leave and join the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa in the US as an invited Fellow. I stayed on in the US till the end of 1977 even after my Fellowship tenure ended. For the next two years, I conducted creative writing workshops for schoolchildren in the public school system of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Language is the medium of all personal and professional relationships. Creative writing is an intimate dialogue between writer and reader, both of whom are imaginary to each other. The only real thing for each of them is the language that connects them. But language also connects one with one's inner self. It is our means of self-recognition through transient and tentative self-images. It is the core of both our spiritual and secular (or this-worldly) experience.

Marathi is my given mother tongue. English is my favourite other tongue. They don't divide me. I will not cohere without either of them. For that matter, Gujarati, Hindustani, Urdu, and all the other languages through which I am connected with the outer world as well as my own inner self matter equally to me. I have been writing poetry seriously since the age of about 16, when I took the momentous decision to live as a poet and an artist. I had a vague premonition it was not going to be an easy life. It did prove very difficult indeed, at times. However, my curiosity and the realm of human experience made my life an exciting adventure and I was rewarded, from time to time, by revelations that constitute the core of my work, the insights that made it worthwhile to be a poet and an artist.

Image: A painting by Dilip Chitre.

Also see: The man who guarded India's titans

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