Aajchi Kadambari: Nondi Ani Nirikshane

This book should, in fact, have been published much earlier. I—and I alone—am responsible for the delay. Much of the writing in this book was done during a period when I was not writing a novel. I wrote a considerable portion of it while I was in a deeply distressed state of mind on a personal level. However, that distress will not be reflected in these pages. While fighting desperately to keep myself from being overwhelmed by despondency, this writing gave me renewed strength. It became a refuge, a safe corner, and a protective shield that helped me stand firm.

I had always intended to undertake this work at some point, and that period of my life created the opportunity. It was a time when I was unable to write a novel. A novel on which I had written approximately a hundred pages came to a standstill during that period, and it remains unfinished even today. Whether I will ever be able to continue it is impossible to say. After the novel came to a halt, I wrote much of the material included in this book. Together with the earlier pieces, this work has grown into a substantial body of writing, or so I believe.

Every act of writing has its own significance. The kind of inner compulsion that an author must experience to write a novel is not present in the same way in this kind of writing. Nevertheless, it is different and important in its own right, with an objective that is relatively clear on the surface.

My purpose behind this work is fairly simple. I wanted to examine and understand the distinctive face of the Marathi novel of my time. I often felt that contemporary Marathi novels were not receiving adequate critical attention. I observed that critics trained in literary theory were not engaging with them sufficiently. This feeling was the strongest motivation behind my decision to undertake this work.

For this purpose, I selected works by novelists who began writing before my time and those who have continued writing up to the present day—writers whose work I consider important or, at the very least, noteworthy. I decided that to understand the character of the contemporary novel, one must look back a little, but not too far into the past.