Ranjit Hoskote
Encyclopedia
Ranjit Hoskote is a contemporary India
n poet
, art critic
, cultural theorist and independent curator
.
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.
Hoskote belongs to the younger generation of Indian poets who began to publish their work during the early 1990s. 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. His poems have appeared in many major anthologies, including Language for a New Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008)
Hoskote has also translated the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic-poet Lal Ded, variously known as Lalleshwari
, Lalla and Lal Arifa, for the Penguin Classics imprint, under the title I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded. This publication marks the conclusion of a 20-year-long project of research and translation for the author. .
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."
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." 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. 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.
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.
As Cultural Theorist
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). 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 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
, Bharti Kher
and Iranna GR. He has 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
. Hoskote has also written a monographic essay on the Berlin-based artists Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan.
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', 'intercultural communication' and 'transformative listening'. He has also returned often to the theme of the 'nomad position' and to the polarity between 'crisis and critique'. 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, and in what he has called the nascent 'third field' of artistic production by subaltern producers in contemporary India, which is "neither metropolitan nor rural, neither (post)modernist nor traditional, neither derived from academic training nor inherited without change from tribal custom" and assimilates into itself resources from the global archive of cultural manifestations.
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. 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."
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" 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. 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.
More recently, Hoskote, especially in collaboration with Nancy Adajania
, has focused on transcultural artistic practice, its institutional conditions, systems of production and creative outcomes, and the radical transformations that it brings about in the relationship between regional art histories and a fast-paced global art situation that is produced within the international system of biennials, collaborative projects, residencies and symposia.
As Curator
Hoskote curated his first exhibition, 'Hinged by Light', at the age of 25. In his role as an independent curator, Hoskote has conceived and organised twenty exhibitions of contemporary Indian as well as international art since 1994. These include 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 was co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale
(2008) in South Korea
, collaborating on this project with Okwui Enwezor
and Hyunjin Kim.
In 2011, Hoskote was invited to act as curator of the first-ever professionally curated national pavilion of India at the Venice Biennale
, organised by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Art. Hoskote titled the pavilion 'Everyone Agrees: It's About To Explode', and selected works by the artists Zarina Hashmi, Gigi Scaria, Praneet Soi and the Desire Machine Collective for it. The pavilion was installed in the central Artiglierie section of the Arsenale. Hoskote wrote that his pavilion was "intended to serve as a laboratory in which we will test out certain key propositions concerning the contemporary Indian art scene. Through it, we could view India as a conceptual entity that is not only territorially based, but is also extensive in a global space of the imagination." In making his selection of artists, the curator aimed to "represent a set of conceptually rigorous and aesthetically rich artistic practices that are staged in parallel to the art market. Furthermore, these have not already been valorized by the gallery system and the auction-house circuit.... The Indian manifestation will also focus on artistic positions that emphasize the cross-cultural nature of contemporary artistic production: some of the most significant art that is being created today draws on a diversity of locations, and different economies of image-making and varied cultural histories."
As Cultural Activist
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.
Awards, Grants and Residencies
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 has also held a writing residency as part of the Goethe-Institut/ Polnisches Institut project, 'The Promised City: Warsaw/ Berlin/ Mumbai' (2010). 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.
Hoskote has held 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.
Hoskote currently lives and works in Mumbai.
Essays
Articles
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
, cultural theorist and independent curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
.
Early life and education
Ranjit Hoskote was born in MumbaiMumbai
Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
and educated at the Bombay Scottish School
Bombay Scottish School
Bombay Scottish School popularly known as Scottish is a private, co-educational day school located at Mahim in Mumbai, India. The institution was established in 1847 by Scottish Christian missionaries under the name Scottish Female Orphanage....
, Elphinstone College
Elphinstone College
Elphinstone College is an institution of higher education affiliated to the University of Mumbai. Established in 1856, it is one of the oldest colleges of the University of Mumbai. It was exalted as a prestigious seat of learning during the British Raj and is generally observed for its vibrant alumni...
, where he read for a BA in Politics, and the University of Bombay, where he took an MA in English Literature and Aesthetics.
Career
As PoetHoskote belongs to the younger generation of Indian poets who began to publish their work during the early 1990s. His work has been published in numerous Indian and international journals, including Poetry Review London, Wasafiri, Poetry Wales, Nthposition, The Iowa Review
The Iowa Review
The Iowa Review is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews.Founded in 1970, this magazine is issued three times a year, during the months of April, August, and December. Originally, it was released on a quarterly basis. This frequency of publication lasted...
, Green Integer Review, Fulcrum (annual)
Fulcrum (annual)
Fulcrum, An annual of poetry and aesthetics is a United States literary periodical that has been published since 2002. It is edited by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich...
, Rattapallax, Lyric Poetry Review, West Coast Line, Kavya Bharati and Indian Literature. His poems have also appeared in German translation in Die Zeit
Die Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...
, 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
Vasant Abaji Dahake
Vasant Abaji Dahake is a Marathi poet, playwright, short story writer, artist, and critic from Amaravati district in the Maharashtra state of India. He is awarded Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection ` Chitralipi' for the year 2009....
, co-translated the German novelist and essayist Ilija Trojanow
Ilija Trojanow
thumb|Ilija Trojanow Ilija Trojanow , is a Bulgarian-German writer, translator and publisher.-Life:...
, and edited an anthology of contemporary Indian verse. His poems have appeared in many major anthologies, including Language for a New Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008)
Hoskote has also translated the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic-poet Lal Ded, variously known as Lalleshwari
Lalleshwari
Lalleshwari , also known as Lalla, Lal Ded or "Lal Arifa". She was a mystic of the Kashmiri Shaivite sect, and at the same time, a Sufi saint. She is a creator of the mystic poetry called vatsun or Vakhs, literally 'speech'...
, Lalla and Lal Arifa, for the Penguin Classics imprint, under the title I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded. This publication marks the conclusion of a 20-year-long project of research and translation for the author. .
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
India Today
India Today is an Indian weekly news magazine published by Living Media India Limited, in publication since 1975 based in Mumbai. India Today is also the name of its sister-publication in Hindi...
, the poet Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri American poet...
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
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
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."
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." Although he was closely associated with the modernist poet Nissim Ezekiel
Nissim Ezekiel
' was an Indian Jewish poet, playwright, editor and art-critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India's literary history, specifically for Indian writing in English....
, who was his mentor, Hoskote does not share Ezekiel's poetics. Instead, his aesthetic choices align him more closely with Dom Moraes
Dom Moraes
Dominic Francis Moraes , popularly known as Dom Moraes, was a Goan writer, poet and columnist. He published nearly 30 books.-Early life:...
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
Arun Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar was a poet from Maharashtra, India. Writing in both Marathi and English, his poems found humor in many everyday matters. His poetry had an influence on modern Marathi poets...
– 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. 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.
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
Charles Simic
Dušan "Charles" Simić is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.-Early years:...
and the noted German poet Christoph Meckel
Christoph Meckel
Christoph Meckel is a German author and graphic artist.- Life :Christoph Meckel spent his youth in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he attended Gymnasium. In 1954/55 he studied graphic art at the Academy of Art in Freiburg im Breisgau, and in 1956 at the Academy of Art in München.Since 1956 he has...
.
As a literary organiser, Hoskote has been associated with the PEN All-India Centre, the Indian branch of International PEN
International PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
, 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.
As Cultural Theorist
Hoskote was principal art critic for The Times of India
The Times of India
The Times of India is an Indian English-language daily newspaper. TOI has the largest circulation among all English-language newspaper in the world, across all formats . It is owned and managed by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd...
, 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). 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 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
Jehangir Sabavala
-Early life and education:Jehangir Ardeshir Sabavala was born to an affluent Parsi family in Bombay , India. His mother belonged to the aristocratic Cowasjee Jehangir family. He studied at Cathedral and John Connon School, Elphinstone College, and earned a diploma from Mumbai's Sir J. J. School of...
, and also monographs on the artists Tyeb Mehta
Tyeb Mehta
Tayyabb Mehta was a noted Indian painter. He was part of the noted Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, which included greats like F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and M.F...
, Sudhir Patwardhan, Baiju Parthan
Baiju Parthan
Baiju Parthan, a painter, born in 1956 in Kerala, India is known as a pioneer of intermedia art in India. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of...
, Bharti Kher
Bharti Kher
Bharti Kher is one of India’s best-known contemporary artists. Her work encompasses painting, sculpture and installation, often incorporating bindis — the popular forehead decoration worn by women in India — which in Kher’s hands become an epidermal filter, transforming objects and dissolving the...
and Iranna GR. He has written major essays on other leading Indian artists, including, among others, Gieve Patel, Bhupen Khakhar
Bhupen Khakhar
Bhupen Khakhar Bhupen Khakhar was a leading artist in Indian contemporary art. He worked in Baroda, and gained international recognition for his work.-Works:...
, Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee is a contemporary Indian artist.He received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1951...
, Mehlli Gobhai, Vivan Sundaram
Vivan Sundaram
Vivan Sundaram is an Indian contemporary artist. His wife is eminent art historian and critic Geeta Kapur.-Training:Vivan Sundaram was educated at The Doon School, the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S...
, Laxman Shreshtha, Atul Dodiya
Atul Dodiya
Atul Dodiya is an Indian artist.Atul began exhibiting and selling his work in the early 1980s following his graduation from Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree...
, Surendran Nair
Surendran Nair
Surendran Nair is considered one of India's preeminent artists. He is known for a unique style of oil painting that is sometimes referred to as surrealistic in the manner of Rene Magritte, but in fact relies more heavily on symbolism. Nair investigates the realms of myth in a modern day context...
, Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat is an Indian artist who works in varied media. He was born in 1974 in Mumbai . He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai in 1996....
, the Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective is a group of three media practitioners - Jeebesh Bagchi , Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta - based in New Delhi...
, Shilpa Gupta and Sudarshan Shetty
Sudarshan Shetty
Sudarshan Shetty is a contemporary Indian artist who has worked in painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. He has exhibited widely in India and more recently he has become increasingly visible on the international stage as an important voice in contemporary art. His work...
. Hoskote has also written a monographic essay on the Berlin-based artists Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan.
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', 'intercultural communication' and 'transformative listening'. He has also returned often to the theme of the 'nomad position' and to the polarity between 'crisis and critique'. 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, and in what he has called the nascent 'third field' of artistic production by subaltern producers in contemporary India, which is "neither metropolitan nor rural, neither (post)modernist nor traditional, neither derived from academic training nor inherited without change from tribal custom" and assimilates into itself resources from the global archive of cultural manifestations.
Hoskote has also speculated, in various essays, on the nature of a 'futurative art' possessed of an intermedia
Intermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
orientation, and which combines critical resistance with expressive pleasure. At the same time, Hoskote has reflected on the place of beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...
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."
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" 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. 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.
More recently, Hoskote, especially in collaboration with Nancy Adajania
Nancy Adajania
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator based in India.- Biography:Nancy Adajania was educated at the Princess Alexandra School, Elphinstone College, where she read Politics for her BA, the Sophia Polytechnic, Bombay, where she took a diploma in Social...
, has focused on transcultural artistic practice, its institutional conditions, systems of production and creative outcomes, and the radical transformations that it brings about in the relationship between regional art histories and a fast-paced global art situation that is produced within the international system of biennials, collaborative projects, residencies and symposia.
As Curator
Hoskote curated his first exhibition, 'Hinged by Light', at the age of 25. In his role as an independent curator, Hoskote has conceived and organised twenty exhibitions of contemporary Indian as well as international art since 1994. These include a mid-career retrospective of the artist Atul Dodiya for the Japan Foundation
Japan Foundation
The was established in 1972 by an Act of the Japanese Diet as a special legal entity to undertake international dissemination of Japanese culture, and became an independent administrative institution under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Ministry of Japan on 1 October 2003 under the "Independent...
, Tokyo (2001) and a lifetime retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala for India's National Gallery of Modern Art
National Gallery of Modern Art
The National Gallery of Modern Art is the leading Indian art gallery. The main museum at New Delhi was established on March 29, 1954 by the Government of India, with subsequent branches at Mumbai and Bangalore...
, 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 was co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale
Gwangju Biennale
The Gwangju Biennale, which started in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, was Asia's first contemporary art biennale. The purpose of Gwangju Biennale is globalization of art and it respect diversity rather than uniformity...
(2008) in South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
, collaborating on this project with Okwui Enwezor
Okwui Enwezor
Okwui Enwezor is an Igbo Nigerian-born American curator, art critic, writer, poet, educator, and specializing in art history. He lives in New York.- Biography :...
and Hyunjin Kim.
In 2011, Hoskote was invited to act as curator of the first-ever professionally curated national pavilion of India at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
, organised by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Art. Hoskote titled the pavilion 'Everyone Agrees: It's About To Explode', and selected works by the artists Zarina Hashmi, Gigi Scaria, Praneet Soi and the Desire Machine Collective for it. The pavilion was installed in the central Artiglierie section of the Arsenale. Hoskote wrote that his pavilion was "intended to serve as a laboratory in which we will test out certain key propositions concerning the contemporary Indian art scene. Through it, we could view India as a conceptual entity that is not only territorially based, but is also extensive in a global space of the imagination." In making his selection of artists, the curator aimed to "represent a set of conceptually rigorous and aesthetically rich artistic practices that are staged in parallel to the art market. Furthermore, these have not already been valorized by the gallery system and the auction-house circuit.... The Indian manifestation will also focus on artistic positions that emphasize the cross-cultural nature of contemporary artistic production: some of the most significant art that is being created today draws on a diversity of locations, and different economies of image-making and varied cultural histories."
As Cultural Activist
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.
Awards, Grants and Residencies
Hoskote has been a Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program
International Writing Program
The International Writing Program is a writing residency for international artists in Iowa City, Iowa. Since its inception in 1967, the IWP has hosted over 1,100 emerging and established poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, and journalists from more than 120 countries...
of the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
(1995) and was writer-in-residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He has also held a writing residency as part of the Goethe-Institut/ Polnisches Institut project, 'The Promised City: Warsaw/ Berlin/ Mumbai' (2010). He was awarded the Sanskriti Award for Literature, 1996, and won First Prize in the British Council
British Council
The British Council is a United Kingdom-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. It is registered as a charity both in England and Wales, and in Scotland...
/Poetry Society All-India Poetry Competition, 1997. India's National Academy of Letters honoured him with the Sahitya Akademi
Sahitya Akademi
The Sahitya Akademi ', India's National Academy of Letters, is an organisation dedicated to the promotion of literature in the languages of India...
Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. The S. H. Raza Foundation conferred its 2006 Raza Award for Literature on Hoskote.
Hoskote has held 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.
Hoskote currently lives and works in Mumbai.
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 ParthanBaiju ParthanBaiju Parthan, a painter, born in 1956 in Kerala, India is known as a pioneer of intermedia art in India. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of...
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 KallatJitish KallatJitish Kallat is an Indian artist who works in varied media. He was born in 1974 in Mumbai . He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai in 1996....
; 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 BawaManjit BawaManjit Bawa , born in Dhuri, Punjab, India, was an Indian painter .-Biography:Manjit bawa born in 1941 dhuri,Punjab.Bawa's older brothers encouraged him to pursue art. He studied fine arts at the College of Art, New Delhi between 1958 and 1963, where his professors included Somnath Hore, Rakesh...
and Jogen ChowdhuryJogen ChowdhuryJogen Chowdhury is an eminent Indian painter and considered an important painter of 21st century India. He lives and works in Santiniketan. He graduated from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata and subsequently at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris in the year 1967. He has...
; 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). REVIEW
- ‘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 monographic 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 SinghDayanita SinghDayanita Singh is an Indian photographer, lives and works in New Delhi and now also is partly based in Goa, who is known for her portraits of India's urban middle and upper class families...
; Old Goa Medical College Building/ Escola Medica e Cirurgica de Goa, for the Goa Tourism Development Corporation, Panjim, April 2007). CURATORIAL ESSAY REVIEW REVIEW
- The 7th Gwangju Biennale (Artistic Director: Okwui Enwezor; Curators: Ranjit Hoskote and Hyunjin Kim; Gwangju, South Korea, 5 September-9 November 2008).
- 'To See is To Change: A Parallax View of 40 Years of German Video Art' (a re-curation of the globally circulating Goethe-Institut collection, '40 Years of German Video Art', as a 2-day annotated screening cycle and symposium by a group of theorists, artists and enthusiasts: Nancy Adajania, Shaina Anand, Ranjit Hoskote, Ashok Sukumaran, Kabir Mohanty, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Kaushik Bhaumik, Devdutt Trivedi and Rana Dasgupta; Jnanapravaha & Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay, 14–15 November 2008). CONCEPT, DESCRIPTION & SCHEDULE ARCHIVAL VIDEO
- 'ZIP Files' (an editorial selection from the Foundation B&G collection, including paintings, photographic works and sculptures by 24 contemporary artists, including Rameshwar Broota, Surendran Nair, Riyas Komu, Ram Rahman, N. S. Harsha, Nataraj Sharma, Valsan Koorma Kolleri, Jogen Chowdhury, Manu Parekh, Madhvi Parekh, Gargi Raina, Ajay Desai, Krishnamachari Bose, Sumedh Rajendran, Veer Munshi, Pooja Iranna, Baiju Parthan, Rekha Rodwittiya, G. R. Irannna, Ravi Kumar Kashi, H. G. Arunkumar, Subhash AwchatSubhash AwchatSubhash Awchat is an Indian artist and author based in Mumbai.-Literary career:Awchat wrote the novel Madam in memory of Smita Patil, a collection of short stories, and a book of essays....
, K. S. Radhakrishnan, and Farhad Hussain; Foundation B&G & Tao Art Gallery, Bombay, February 2009 and Foundation B&G & Religare Arts Initiative, New Delhi, April 2009). REVIEW REVIEW
- 'Shrapnel' (an exhibition of recent works by Veer Munshi, developed through an ongoing dialogue between Munshi and Hoskote; the exhibition included extracts from the artist's ongoing photographic archive, 'Pandit Houses', and his painting-based installation, 'The Chamber'; Foundation B&G and Tao Art Gallery, Bombay, March 2009). CURATORIAL ESSAY
- 'The Pursuit of Intensity: Manu Parekh, Selected Works 2004-2009' (Foundation B&G and Tao Art Gallery, October 2009). CURATORIAL ESSAY
- 'Retrieval Systems' (an exhibition exploring the use of memory as resource in the work of Alex Fernandes, B. Manjunath Kamath, Baiju Parthan, G. R. Iranna, and Tina Bopiah; Art Alive, New Delhi, November 2009).
- 'Detour: Five Position Papers on the Republic' (an exhibition conceived as a 'critical homage' on the centennial of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, 1909, with works by Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman, Ravi AgarwalRavi AgarwalRavi Agarwal, a Communications Engineer and a land artist, is also founding Director of Toxics Link, an environmental non-profit organisation working in New Delhi, India. It focuses on issues of waste, waste trade, and toxics, and has been active for over a decade.-External links:*...
, Samar Jodha, and Sonia Jabbar; Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay, December 2009-January 2010). CURATORIAL ESSAY, WORKS & INSTALLATION VIEWS
- Everyone Agrees: It's About To Explode (the India pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, la Biennale di Venezia, with works by Zarina Hashmi, Gigi Scaria, Praneet Soi, and the Desire Machine Collective/ Sonal Jain & Mriganka Madhukaillya; Arsenale, Venice, June-November 2011).
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
- Essay by Ranjit Hoskote, 'Winter Thoughts about Spring: Looking Forward to a Renewal of the Arts in Kashmir'
Articles
- Ambedkar's legacy in The HinduThe HinduThe Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
- The Mob as Censor at countercurrents.org
- Painting the art world red in Hindustan TimesHindustan TimesHindustan Times is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded in 1924 with roots in the Indian independence movement of the period ....
See also
- Indian English literatureIndian English literatureIndian English literature refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, such as V.S...
- Indian Writing in English
- Nissim EzekielNissim Ezekiel' was an Indian Jewish poet, playwright, editor and art-critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India's literary history, specifically for Indian writing in English....
- Dom MoraesDom MoraesDominic Francis Moraes , popularly known as Dom Moraes, was a Goan writer, poet and columnist. He published nearly 30 books.-Early life:...
- International PENInternational PENPEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
- Nancy AdajaniaNancy AdajaniaNancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator based in India.- Biography:Nancy Adajania was educated at the Princess Alexandra School, Elphinstone College, where she read Politics for her BA, the Sophia Polytechnic, Bombay, where she took a diploma in Social...
- Gwangju BiennaleGwangju BiennaleThe Gwangju Biennale, which started in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, was Asia's first contemporary art biennale. The purpose of Gwangju Biennale is globalization of art and it respect diversity rather than uniformity...
- International Writing ProgramInternational Writing ProgramThe International Writing Program is a writing residency for international artists in Iowa City, Iowa. Since its inception in 1967, the IWP has hosted over 1,100 emerging and established poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, and journalists from more than 120 countries...