Little magazine movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Little Magazine Movement is literary movement which originated in the fifties and the sixties in many Indian languages like Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati. Little Magazines is also called ` laghu aniyat kaleek' or small non-periodical magazine in MarathiThe defining feature of this movement is its emphasis on non-conformist and anti-establishment literary values. This movement provided a platform for development of the individualistic modernist literary movement in its early phase as well as more socially and politically committed avant-garde literature in its later phase. In Marathi, for example, the movement gained momentum with periodicals like Shabda published in a cyclostyled form by reputed writers like Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, and Ramesh Samarth in the early fifties in Mumbai. Later on in the sixties, well known writers like Bhalachandra Nemade brought out little magazines like Vacha. The movements like nativism and Dalit used this little magazine movement as a platform for coming into their own. This movement in Marathi brought forth acclaimed writers like Namdeo Dhasal, Vasant Abaji Dahake, Vasant Dattadray Gurjar, Vilas Sarang, Manohar Oak, Tulsi Parab and so on apart from Chitre, Kolatkar and Nemade. The little magazine movement as well socially radical movements lost momentum in the late seventees and the eighties. In Marathi, in the nineties there was a resurgence of the little magazines like Abhidhanantar, Sausthav, and Shabdavedh. The focus of these magazines is their insistence on locating contemporary Marathi poetry in the context of the tremendous social changes that have taken place due to globalization and the policies of Indian Government like liberalization and privatization. These recent little magazines have provided a platform for young Marathi poets like Manya Joshi, Hemant Divate, Sachin Ketkar Nitin Kulkarni, Mahendra Bhavre, Mangesh Kale among many others to come into their own in the nineties.

In Gujarati, the radical literary anti establishment movement was represented by the writers of a group called Ray Math. Suresh Joshi, a renowned Gujarati poet, critic and short story writer brought out little magazines like Vrishchik and Setu in collaboration with the well known poet-painters like Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakkar. Such little Magazines provided a space for modernism to evolve in Gujarati and brought major poets like Shitanshu Mehta, Ravji Patel, Manilal Desai along with Sheikh and Joshi. This movement lost its momentum too very early in the eighties but the magazines like `Gadya Parva' and `Vahi' represent this movement today.

EXTERNAL LINKS

I) A Brief Introduction to the contemporary Marathi poetry

II) Globalization and New Marathi Poetry

--Sachin 16:46, 23 November 2006 (UTC)