Ranjit Hoskote


Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator. He has been honoured by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, with the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award and the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Translation. In 2022, Hoskote received the 7th JLF-Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry.
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Early life and education

Ranjit Hoskote was born in Mumbai and educated at the Bombay Scottish School, Elphinstone College, where he studied for a BA in Politics, and later at University of Bombay, from where he obtained an MA degree in English Literature and Aesthetics.

Career

As poet

Hoskote began to publish his work during the early 1990s. He is the author of several collections of poetry including Zones of Assault, The Cartographer's Apprentice, Central Time, Jonahwhale, The Sleepwalker's Archive and Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985–2005. 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, 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 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 anthologies including Language for a New Century. and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets.
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.
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... 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."
In 2004, a year in which Indian poetry in English lost three of its most important figures – Ezekiel, Moraes, and Arun Kolatkar – Hoskote wrote obituaries for these "masters of the guild". Hoskote has also written about the place of poetry in contemporary culture.
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.
In 2024, he published "To Break and To Branch: Six Essays on Gieve Patel" and a translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s "The Homeland's an Ocean".

As art critic

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. In his role as religion and philosophy editor for The Times, he began a popular column on spirituality, sociology of religion, and philosophical commentary, "Speaking Tree". Hoskote was an art critic and senior editor with The Hindu, from 2000 to 2007, contributing to its periodical of thought and culture, Folio.
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 Atul Dodiya, 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, 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 cultural theorist

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 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. 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, 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, in collaboration with his wife, 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 was co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, collaborating 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."
Hoskote was a member of the international jury that selected Armenia as recipient of the Golden Lion for best national participation at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
In 2023, Hoskote was part of the six-person search committee for the artistic director of Documenta’s 2027 edition. On 14 November, he resigned from his position at Documenta after the exhibition publicly criticized him for signing a BDS India letter in 2019, calling it "explicitly anti-Semitic". The letter in question had denounced a "Zionism and Hindutva" event hosted by the and co-organized by the Indo-Israel Friendship Association; the letter also called Israel an "apartheid state" engaging in "settler colonialism". Over the following two days, the entire committee resigned, citing the social climate created by the Gaza war in an open letter, and Documenta's "unchallenged media and public discrediting" of Hoskote in particular.

As cultural activist

Hoskote is a defender of cultural freedoms against the monopolistic claims of the State, religious pressure groups and censors, whether official or self-appointed. He has been involved in organising 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 and was writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Bavaria. He has also held a writing residency as part of the Goethe-Institut/Polnisches Institut project, "The Promised City: Warsaw/Berlin/Mumbai". He was awarded the Sanskriti Award for Literature, 1996, and won All India Poetry Prize at 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, New Delhi, and is in the process of developing, jointly with Nancy Adajania, a new journal of critical inquiry in the visual arts.
Hoskote has been researcher-in-residence at BAK/basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, and is a contributor to BAK's long-term Former West platform. Hoskote currently lives and works in Mumbai.

Poetry

Zones of Assault, Rupa Publishers, New Delhi The Cartographer’s Apprentice. The Sleepwalker’s Archive. Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985–2005. Die Ankunft der Vögel, German translation by Jürgen Brocan. Pale Ancestors. I, Lalla - The Poems of Lal Ded, Penguin Classics Central Time. Jonahwhale, Penguin Random House India The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, Arc Publications Hunchprose, Penguin Hamish Hamilton Icelight, Wesleyan University Press

Non fiction

Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer : The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer. The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala. Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows. Baiju Parthan: A User's Manual. The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR. Bharti Kher. The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings. Zinny & Maidagan: Das Abteil/ Compartment. The Dialogues Series. :Anju Dodiya. Atul Dodiya. Veer Munshi. Manu Parekh. Baiju Parthan. Praneet Soi. Atul Dodiya. Kampfabsage. Despair and Modernity: Reflections from Modern Indian Painting.
  • ''Confluences: Forgotten Histories From East And West''

As editor

Dom Moraes: Selected Poems.

As translator

  • Ilija Trojanow, Along the Ganga: To the Inner Shores of India.
  • Ilija Trojanow, Along the Ganges. I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded.

Poetry Anthologies

Language for a New Century ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Published by W. W. Norton & Company.The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets ed. Jeet Thayil. Published by Bloodaxe Books.Staying Human: New Poems for Staying Alive ed. Neil Astley. Published by Bloodaxe Books.Singing in the Dark ed. K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla. Published by Penguin Vintage.
  • Ten Poems about Swimming ed. Samantha Wynne-Rydderch. Published by Candlestick Press.

Exhibitions curated

  • 'Hinged by Light'.
  • 'Private Languages'.
  • 'Making An Entrance'.
  • 'Intersections: Seven Artistic Dialogues between Abstraction and Figuration'.
  • 'Family Resemblances: Nine Approaches to a Mutable Self'.
  • 'The Bodied Self'.
  • 'Labyrinth/ Laboratory'.
  • 'The Active Line'
  • 'Clicking into Place'.
  • 'Under Construction'.
  • 'Visions of Landscape'.
  • 'Jehangir Sabavala: A Retrospective'.
  • 'Strangeness'.
  • 'Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa'.
  • The 7th Gwangju Biennale.
  • 'To See is To Change: A Parallax View of 40 Years of German Video Art'.
  • 'ZIP Files'.
  • 'Shrapnel'.
  • 'The Pursuit of Intensity: Manu Parekh, Selected Works 2004–2009'.
  • 'Retrieval Systems'.
  • 'Detour: Five Position Papers on the Republic'.
  • Everyone Agrees: It's About To Explode.
  • 'The Needle on the Gauge: The Testimonial Image in the Work of Seven Indian Artists'.
  • 'Nothing is Absolute: A Journey through Abstraction', co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote & Mehlli Gobhai.
  • 'The 4th Former West Congress: Documents, Constellations, Prospects', co-convened by Boris Buden, Boris Groys, Kathrin Klingan, Maria Hlavajova, Ranjit Hoskote, Kathrin Rhomberg and Irit Rogoff.
  • 'Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya, Works 1981–2013'.
  • 'No Parsi is an Island', co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote & Nancy Adajania.
  • 'Zameen'.
  • 'The Shadow Trapper's Almanac: Tanmoy Samanta, Recent Works'.
  • ‘Abby Weed Grey and Indian Modernism’, curated by Susan Hapgood and Ranjit Hoskote.
  • ‘Unpacking the Studio: Celebrating the Jehangir Sabavala Bequest’.
  • ‘The State of Architecture: Practices & Processes in India’, co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote & Kaiwan Mehta.
  • ‘And the last shall be the first: G R Iranna, Works 1995-2015’.
  • ‘No Parsi is an Island’, co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote & Nancy Adajania.
  • ‘The Quest for Cruzo: A Homage to the Art of Antonio Piedade da Cruz’.
  • ‘Laxman Shreshtha: The Infinite Project’.
  • ‘DWELLING’.
  • ‘Terra Cognita? Three Moments in the History of the Graphic Image in India, 1556-2016’.
  • ‘DWELLING’.
  • ‘In the Presence of Another Sky: Sakti Burman, A Retrospective’.
  • ‘Anti-Memoirs: Locus, Language, Landscape’.
  • ‘State of Housing: Aspirations, Imaginaries, Realities’, co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote & Kaiwan Mehta.
  • ‘The Sacred Everyday: Embracing the Risk of Difference’.
  • ‘No Place like the Present’.
  • 'The 20th'.
  • ‘M F Husain: Horses of the Sun’.
  • ‘Reverie and Reality: Jogen Chowdhury’.
  • ‘Opening Lines: Ebrahim Alkazi, Works 1948-1971’.
  • ‘Transients’, a solo exhibition of photographs by Sheetal Mallar.
  • ‘Don’t Ask Me About Colour: Mehlli Gobhai, A Retrospective’, co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote & Nancy Adajania.
  • ‘Patterns of Intensity’ .
  • ‘Mehlli Gobhai: Epiphanies’, co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote & Nancy Adajania.
  • ‘The Cymroza Chronicles’ | Cymroza at 50.
  • ‘Mapping the Lost Spectrum’ | Cymroza at 50.
  • ‘F N Souza: The Power and the Glory’.