Pankti Desai

Pankti Desai is an Assistant Professor at the Government Engineering College, Valsad. She did her Masters in English and Comparative Literature from Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, and doctorate from the SNDT University, Mumbai. She is interested in modernist Indian literature, translation studies, comparative literature, literary historiography, and cultural studies and has been documenting and researching on little magazine movements of Gujarat since 2015.

This grant will enable Pankti to critically analyse the role of Gujarati little magazines as a modern phenomenon that emphatically articulated voices of dissent and cultivated alternate discourse of nation and culture. She will examine the factors responsible for the emergence of these little magazines during the 1960s and 1980s and explore the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that led to their marginalisation and effacement later, especially in the context of contemporary Gujarat and India. To do this, she will study the editorials, manifestos, advertisements, literary texts, non-fictional writings, cover pages and illustration of seven Gujarati little magazines. These are: Sangna (1966-1967) Draooon Draooon (1968-1970), Yahom (1968-1970), Sandarbh (1968-1970), Hoo (1971-1974), Akrosh (1978 onwards) and Kalo Suraj (1978 onwards). 

 In their heydays, Gujarati little magazines, even when they had short lifespans, provided space for fresh voices that helped articulate dissent in the cultural sphere of Gujarat. From their cover pages to the content, everything was purposely selected to amplify the immediate sociopolitical and cultural concerns. Standing in contrast to Gandhian idealism, these magazines created environments for new political thoughts. Pankti will analyse these magazines to understand the aesthetic choices of the editors against the complex cultural backdrop of Gujarat after Independence.

Keeping their ephemeral nature and cultural significance in mind, Pankti will document the said magazines and make them available online for public consumption. She will interview poets, writers and artists who were associated with these magazines to understand the varied motivations behind starting little magazines and reasons for their exclusion from the mainstream Gujarati literary history.

The outcome of this project will be a monograph in Gujarati and English. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the monograph and audio visual documentation of magazines and interviews in the field.