An Indian Collection in Ithaca: Anglophone Modernism and the Margins of the Bombay Poets Archive

• Ben Fried

The Bombay Poets Archive occupies a space that is both privileged and peripheral, near to the core of Western academic wealth and far from Indian researchers themselves. Housed at Cornell University Library, this collection brings together the personal papers of several Indian poets who wrote in English, came to prominence in the 1970s, and joined forces to found the highly influential Clearing House co-operative press. An ongoing digitisation project promises to overcome the archive’s dislocation from India, narrowing its focus to Clearing House but making visible and accessible the workings of this creative network. “An Indian Collection in Ithaca” delineates the four types of documents being digitised – letters, drafts, business records, and clippings – demonstrating how they capture the publishing histories of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures (1976) and Distance in Statute Miles (1982) from inspiration to reception. The interconnected papers of the Bombay Poets Archive illuminate the relationships that underpinned a long-marginalised poetic community, revealing the breadth of achievement and the depth of cultural ferment that characterise modernist English-language Indian poetry. I argue that a freely available digital archive will help to foreground these supposedly “marginal” poets within the increasingly polycentric literary landscape of the Global Anglophone.