ABOUT
Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre is a bilingual poet, translator, and independent scholar working between Marathi and English. His work is rooted in the landscapes of what has now become the city of Navi Mumbai and engages with Bhakti traditions, caste, and the intertwined questions of language, memory, and social history.
Trained in English literature, he has taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with a focus on Dalit literature, Bhakti poetry, literary theory, and translation. His scholarly work has been closely engaged with Marathi Bhakti poetry, particularly in its linguistic, historical, and philosophical dimensions.
As a translator (भाषांतरकार), he has brought several key Bhakti texts into English, including One Hundred Poems of Tukaram (2015), One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela (2015), and The Autobiography of Sant Bahinabai (2023). His translation of Chokha Mela has been prescribed as a core text in MA (Honours) English programmes at the University of Mumbai since June 2022. More recently, his work on a cluster of fourteenth-century Marathi Dalit saint-poets received the PEN Presents × SALT award (2025).
His ongoing translation projects include Maharshi Vitthal Ramji Shinde’s The Problem of Untouchability in India, currently shortlisted for the New India Foundation Translation Fellowship
and a forthcoming set of translations of anti-caste writings by Mahatma Jotiba Phule. Alongside these, he is translating W. B. Yeats’s The Tower into Marathi as part of a larger effort to bring major works of world poetry into the language.
His creative work includes the bilingual poetry manuscript The City of Graves, which examines the erasure of agrarian and ecological worlds during the making of Navi Mumbai. Drawing on memory, oral histories, and lived landscapes, the project reflects his broader engagement with questions of land, displacement, and continuity.
He is the founder-president of the Sitaram Mhatre Foundation, where he leads initiatives in digital humanities and oral history. The Foundation has developed a comprehensive Unicode corpus of Marathi Bhakti literature and is currently undertaking computational work on the Dnyaneshwari. Its oral history initiative documents the experiences of project-affected communities in Navi Mumbai and Sangli.
He serves as Editor-at-Large at Asymptote Journal, with a focus on bringing Marathi literature—especially Bhakti traditions—into a wider international conversation.
He holds an MA, BEd, and MPhil in English, a Postgraduate Diploma in Translation, and has qualified the UGC-NET and SET examinations.