Dilip Chitre

Dilip Purushottam Chitre (17 September 1938 – 10 December 2009) was one of the foremost Indian poets and critics to emerge in the post Independence India.

Apart from being a notable bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a teacher, a painter, a filmmaker and a magazine columnist.

Chitre was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938 into a Marathi speaking CKP community.

His father Purushottam Chitre used to publish a periodical named Abhiruchi.

His grandfather, Kashinath Gupte was an expert on Tukaram and this served as Chitre's introduction to the poet.

He also edited An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945–1965).

He was an accomplished translator of prose and poetry.

Chitre's family moved to Mumbai in 1951 and he published his first collection of poems in 1960.

He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "little magazine movement" of the sixties in Marathi.

He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth.

As Is, Where Is selected English poems (1964–2007) and "Shesha" English translation of selected Marathi poems, both published by Poetrywala, were published in 2007.

He started his professional film career in 1969 and made one feature film, about a dozen documentary films, several short films and about 20 video documentary features.

He wrote the scripts of most of his films as well as directed or co-directed them.

He also scored the music for some of them.

In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa in the United States.

He has also worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation.

He also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal.

He was educated both in Baroda and Mumbai.

Travelling in a Cage (1980) was his first and only book of English poems.

Exile, alienation, self-disintegration and death are major themes in Chitre's poetry, which belongs essentially to the Modernist Movement.

It reflects cosmopolitan culture, urban sensibilities, uses oblique expressions and ironic tones.

He was member of a three-writer delegation (along with Nirmal Verma and U. R. Ananthamurthy) to the Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia), Hungary, the Federal Republic of Germany and France in the spring and summer of 1980 and to the Frankfurter Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Germany in 1986.

He was Honorary President of the Sontheimer Cultural Association, of which he was also a Founder-Trustee.

Among Chitre's honours and awards are several Maharashtra State Awards, the Prix Special du Jury for his film Godam at the Festival des Trois Continents in 1984, the Ministry of Human Resource Development's Emeritua Fellowship, the University of Iowa's International Writing Program Fellowship, the Indira Gandhi Fellowship, and the Villa Waldberta Fellowship for residence given by the City of Munich, Bavaria, Germany.

He was a D.A.A.D.

He was Director of Vagarth, Bharat Bhavan Bhopal and convenor-director of the Valmiki World Poetry Festival (New Delhi,1985) and International Symposium of Poets (Bhopal, 1985), a Keynote Speaker at the World Poetry Congress in Maebashi, Japan (1996) and at the Ninth International Conference on Maharashtra at Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA in 2001 and Member of the International Jury at the Literature festival Berlin, 2001.

His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems were published in the 1990s in three volumes.

(German Academic Exchange) Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bamberg in Germany in 1991–92.

After a long bout with cancer, Dilip Chitre died at his residence in Pune on 10 December 2009.

Chitre was a bilingual writer, but wrote mostly in Marathi.

His most famous translation was of the celebrated 17th century Marathi bhakti poet Tukaram (published as Says Tuka).

He translated Anubhavamrut by twelfth century bhakti poet Dnyaneshwar.

He also wrote poetry in English.