Ranjit Hoskote

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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."

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 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 belongs to the younger generation of Indian poets who began to publish their work during the early 1990s. He is the author of five collections of poetry: Zones of Assault, The Cartographer's Apprentice, The Sleepwalker's Archive, Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 and Central Time. Hoskote has been seen as extending the Anglophone Indian poetry tradition established by Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan and others through "major new works of poetry". 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, Prairie Schooner, Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, The Four Quarters Magazine 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).

Recognized as a seminal voice in Indian art criticism from the 1990s onward, Hoskote has been placed by research scholars in a historic lineage of five major art critics active in India over a sixty-year period: "William George Archer, Richard Bartholomew, Jagdish Swaminathan, Geeta Kapur, and Ranjit Hoskote... played an important role in shaping contemporary art discourse in India, and in registering multiple cultural issues, artistic domains, and moments of history." 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 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.

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.

Ranjit Hoskote (born 29 March 1969) is a contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator. He was honoured with Sahitya Akademi Award for life time achievement in 2004.