Literature and visual arts,poet and painter, India
Octobre 2016 à Juin 2017
Born in Panjab, India, Teji Grover completed a Master’s in English literature at Panjab University, Chandigarh in 1978. After doing a comparative Study of D.H. Lawrence and Dostoevsky for her M. Phil dissertation, she taught English Literature in a university college at Chandigarh for 20 years. She also worked intensively in formal and elementary child-centered innovative education, writing, and literature in central rural India on a UGC Fellowship 1985-1989. She was the Director\Writer-in-Residence at Premchand Chair in Ujjain under the aegis of the Department of Culture in Madhya Pradesh—a position held concurrently with Senior Fellowship from the Central Ministry of Culture from 1995-97. She is also an active participant as writer and translator in the Indo-Swedish translation project and has published five volumes of (Hindi) poetry, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays and travelogues, a novel, and about fifteen titles into Hindi from literary classics and contemporary writing primarily from Norwegian and Swedish. She has developed a well-researched repertoire of natural, eco-friendly colors while producing her own paintings since 2003. Winner of the S.H. RAZA AWARD and Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Awards for poetry, she is a widely anthologized poet in several Indian and foreign languages. Her novel NEELA has been the subject of doctoral research and another full-length study on contemporary experimental prose by Polish Hindi scholar Kamila Junik.
"On Being a Poet-Painter"
The project consists of two parts: the first comprises of writing concerning the vocation of being a poet-painter - the angst, the joy, the risks, the crises related to the almost equal engagement with the two art forms. The writing also includes essays concerning other poets and poet-painters, both home and abroad, whether celebrated or completely unknown, whose work has a direct bearing on her own predicament of being equally involved with both forms for the last thirteen years. This will be in continuation with what she has already written about. For instance, the celebrated Hindi poet Shamsher who was also a painter, the famous Swedish poet Ann Jaderlund who has a deep engagement with visual art, and Shailendra Dubey, another highly prolific but almost unpublished poet-painter writing in Hindi. Revisiting the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Tomlinson, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Michaux, whose lives as poet-painters are highly instructive for anyone who wishes to understand the relationship between these art forms. She also hopes to write poetry and to continue painting with home-cooked colors from natural substances and to carry on her ongoing documentation of these colors.
GROVER, Teji."Weak Pink Color: Translating Ann Jaderlund on the Ghats of the Narmada." See online journal Pratilipi, http://pratilipi.in/2008/06/weak-pink-color-teji-grover/. It will also be published in the forthcoming issue of Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing, Volume 10, Number 1.
GROVER, Teji.Teji aur Rustam Ki Kavitayen, a two-in-one book of poems with fellow poet Rustam, with an introduction by Ashok Vajpeyi, HarperCollins India, 2009, 215 p.
GROVER, Teji. Neela (a novel), Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, 1999 with Second edition published in 2016, p. 92
GROVER, Teji. Neela Ghar aur Doosri Yatraen, essays and travelogues, Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, 2016, p 204
GROVER, Teji. Lo Kaha Sambari (Collection of poems, second edition), Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, 2016, p.92 (First ed.1994.)