Kavita

The word kavita simply means poem in Marathi — but in the Marathi literary tradition it carries a particular weight. Where the ghazal and nazm came to the subcontinent through Persian and Urdu, the kavita grew from Sanskrit and Prakrit roots, shaped over centuries by the varkari saint-poets — Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, Eknath — who wrote not for courts but for the road, for pilgrimage, for the common person who needed the divine to speak in their own tongue.

Marathi kavita can be devotional or romantic, formal or conversational. It can carry the intricate internal rhymes of the abhang — the saint-poets’ preferred form — or move with the looser rhythms of modern lyric poetry. What stays constant is a directness of feeling. Marathi poetry tends not to hide behind ornament. The emotion is named, the image is specific, and the music comes from the language itself — a language whose sounds are round and full, whose verb endings carry mood and gender and time all at once.

The poems in this section are the ones that have stayed with me — songs that became poems, or poems that became songs, or songs so inseparable from their melody that to read them on the page is to hear them anyway.

Every kavita here has touched me in a way I cannot fully explain. These are not a survey of the tradition — they are the ones I carry. The ones I return to. Each of them reminds me of a person, and I suspect they always will.