Poets

Vasant Abaji Dahake is a well-known Marathi poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, 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.

His first collection of poems, Yogabhrashta (1972), instantly established him as a successor to the early modernists in Marathi literature such as Mardhekar, P.S. Rege and Vinda Karandikar.

Taut, complex, richly metaphorical, and yet by no means apolitical, Dahake’s work – informed as it is both by decidedly regional and unapologetically international influences – has been marginalised by the more nativist forces of the Marathi literary mainstream.

Writes noted poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote of his work: “Vasant Abaji Dahake’s poems reverberate with the clash of opposites: they speak of the displacement of a solitary consciousness from the countryside to the metropolis, from the expansiveness of landscape to the constrictions of architecture, and the anxieties and the exhilarations that such a traumatic experience can produce.” Hoskote locates Dahake as a poet who entered adulthood in the 1960s – the era of Che Guev..