About

Anjali Nerlekar is a faculty member specializing in multilingual Indian modernisms, Marathi literature, Indo-Caribbean literature, poetry studies, translation studies, Caribbean and postcolonial studies, and Indian book history. She holds degrees including B.A., M.A., M.Phil. from the University of Pune and a Ph.D. from Kansas. Her academic focus encompasses a diverse range of literary and cultural studies, emphasizing the intersections of language, postcolonialism, and regional literatures.

Research topics

• History
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• Gender studies
• Art
• Literature
• Art history
• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Modernism at the Conjunctures: Marathi Multilingualisms in the 1979 Special Issue of Rucā

  Modernism/modernity · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  abstract: Despite the vaunted multiplicity of languages, cultures and backgrounds in Indian writing, there has been a persistent tendency to write unitary literary histories of these diverse works. The mapped boundaries of the linguistic states as well as monocultural notions of linguistic histories means that literary histories in turn end up invisibilizing the deep connections that crisscross the drawn lines of state and language. Taking a sample case from Marathi and Urdu literature to demonstrate the porosity of such linguistic, cultural, and geographic demarcations, this article presents a conjunctural modernism that is also an instance of "weak modernism." It shows that it is impossible to write a history of Marathi literature without accounting for its exchanges, hospitalities, and conversations with other literary and cultural worlds at the borders of the state-mandated linguistic region. In the process, it dismantles conventional notions of the parochial, the regional, and the cosmopolitan.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ground Beneath One's Feet and the Span of the Postcolonial

  2024-08-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter questions the efficacy of terms like the “postcolonial” to cover the complex negotiations that take place in the here and now of reading a literary text. Taking representative readings of poems from the post-1990s navadottari Marathi poets from Bombay, the chapter asks for a bracketing of the concerns of the postcolonial and instead to heed the local conversations that make up the immediate foundation of the literary work. Instead of tethering the writing to a conceptual idea of the negative that such a term implies, the chapter argues for a literary reading that starts with the conviction of abundance (as Anjali Arondekar suggests) or the eventfulness of the present in the text, as Lauren Berlant proposes.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-12-18

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The task of compiling chapters for a book as vast in topic as a Handbook of modern Indian literatures is a challenging one. The Introduction takes a self-reflexive look at the project, highlighting the rationale behind the editorial decisions. Noting the paradigm of monolingualism under which much of literary scholarship on Indian literature suffers, the Handbook offers a multilingual and comparative approach to modern Indian literatures. Highlighting the melding of the trajectories of region, language, and borders, along with a close reading of texts and literary archives, the Introduction provides a fuller picture of the energetic space of scholarship on Indian literature even while interrogating and crossing the borders of the nation as narrowly understood. The Handbook will show the deep connections and collaborations across the limits of genre, language, nation, and region, producing a literature of diverse contact zones that generates newer questions of form, location, technique, culture, and society.

  PublisherDOI

• Textual solidities and solidarities

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bombay/Mumbai and its Multilingual Literary Pathways to the World

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Mumbai has always been in and of the world. There has never been a time in the history of the city when it hasnotbeen cosmopolitan whatever level of urban analytics one applies to it. While the city of Mumbai has name recognition in discussions of world literature through a handful of recognized writers and mainly through prose (Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta, Vikram Chandra), their presence sometimes constitutes the brightly-lit space beyond which lies further unexplored territory of loss and living, a different "duniya" that is unseen in the world. This essay looks at alternative constructions of multiple, contradictory and diverse worlds in multiple genres, but mainly in the multilingual poetry of Bombay writers, especially in the hidden locations of embattled lives that emerge in the poetry of the Dalit poets of Mumbai.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ecology of the Archive in Adil Jussawalla's ‘Date Book’ for a Missing Novel

  South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • History

  The Cornell Bombay Poets’ Archive was initially started with Adil Jussawalla’s donation of his massive archive to the Special Collections at Cornell University. Jussawalla has been collecting and documenting the state of Indian letters, more precisely the state of Indian poetry, for over fifty years. This essay takes a representative archival document from this collection to show the abiding engagements of the poet with the world in which he lived. This text is a planner/diary (a ‘date book’), which contains a set of notes for an unwritten novel from the 1970s, when Adil Jussawalla’s career as poet and writer was in its early stages. The planner/diary shows us the multiple trajectories of the conflicted space of the English writer in post-Independence India that we must heed when studying Indian modernisms: the peculiar combinations of pasts and presents to create an Indian modern; the combination of the trans-regional with the translocal with the deeply personal; and the refusal to sentimentalise anything.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Postcolonial Archives

  South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) of Language: The Materialist Poetry of Arun Kolatkar and R.K. Joshi

  2021-10-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Further thoughts on Asian Studies “inside-out”

  International Journal of Asian Studies · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Geography

  Abstract In response to Sato and Sonoda's “Asian Studies ‘inside out’: research agenda for the development of Global Asian Studies,” members of the Global Asias Collaborative at Rutgers University – comprised of a diverse group of scholars of Asia and the Asian diaspora located in history, literature, art history, geography, among other disciplines – offer responses to this generative prompt to remap the place and field of “Asia” in its heterogeneous and interwoven temporalities and topologies.

  PublisherDOI

• The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) of Language: The Materialist Poetry of Arun Kolatkar and R.K. Joshi

  South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · 2020-09-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The tumultuous politics of the post-Independence period in Bombay/Mumbai, and the creation of the linguistic states, released multiple and contradictory energies towards a re-examination of the Marathi language and its valence in linguistic, literary, social and cultural contexts. This essay employs the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar and the Marathi-language poetry of R.K. Joshi to show the ways in which the sathottari poetry of Bombay engages with these socio-political questions of language and region by channelling the principles of concrete poetry and making the visual presence of the language (in its script, its lines, its presence on the page) a part of its meaning-making process.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laetitia Zecchini

  6 shared

• Francesca Orsini

  University of London

  2 shared

• Jahan Ramazani

  2 shared

• Emalani Case

  Duke University

  1 shared

• Maile Edgments Charteris

  Duke University

  1 shared

• Stephen Burt

  Royal Meteorological Society

  1 shared

• Brandy Sherrard-Johnson

  Duke University

  1 shared

• Gemma Robinson

  Cardiff Metropolitan University

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Pune

• M.A.

  University of Pune

• Other

  University of Pune

• Ph.D.

  Kansas