Writing in the Mother Tongue: How Diaspora Authors Are Reclaiming Marathi as a Literary Language of Their Own

In a modest apartment in suburban Chicago, Priya Deshpande keeps two notebooks on her writing desk. One is filled with English drafts — scene fragments, character sketches, the kind of exploratory prose that most American MFA programs teach. The other is written entirely in Marathi. It is the second notebook, she says, that feels most like home.

"When I write in English, I am explaining myself," Deshpande, a second-generation Marathi-American author, explains. "When I write in Marathi, I am simply speaking."

Deshpande is among a growing cohort of diaspora writers across the United States who are making a deliberate, often countercultural choice: to publish their creative work in Marathi, even though they were raised in English-dominant households and educated entirely within the American school system. Their decision is not merely sentimental. It is, many of them argue, a profound act of literary and cultural reclamation.

The Inheritance They Almost Lost

For the children of Marathi-speaking immigrants who arrived in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, the language often occupied an ambiguous place in the home. It was the tongue of kitchen conversations, of phone calls to grandparents in Pune or Nashik, of prayers murmured before festivals. But it was rarely the language of books, of school assignments, or of creative ambition.

"My parents spoke Marathi to each other but English to me," recalls Siddharth Kulkarni, a poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area whose debut collection was published last year by a small Maharashtra-based press. "I absorbed the rhythms of the language without fully possessing it. Writing in Marathi as an adult has been like learning to walk in shoes I have always owned but never worn."

This experience — of partial inheritance, of a language half-held — is central to understanding why so many second-generation writers are now turning toward Marathi with such deliberate intensity. The choice to publish in their heritage language is inseparable from a broader reckoning with identity, memory, and the stories that were never told to them directly.

The Challenge of Literary Fluency

Publishing in a heritage language presents challenges that go well beyond nostalgia. Literary Marathi — with its formal registers, its classical poetic traditions, its rich vocabulary drawn from Sanskrit — is a considerably more demanding medium than the conversational Marathi of diaspora households. Many second-generation writers describe a period of intensive self-study: reading classic Marathi authors such as V.S. Khandekar and Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar, working with editors and mentors based in Maharashtra, and immersing themselves in contemporary Marathi literary journals.

"I had to earn the language again," says Ananya Joshi, a short-story writer in New Jersey who spent two years corresponding with a retired Marathi professor in Kolhapur before she felt confident enough to submit her work for publication. "The grammar I could manage. It was the literary sensibility — the way Marathi literature carries its history — that took time to understand."

This investment of effort is itself significant. These writers are not simply translating English-language ideas into Marathi. They are learning to think within a different literary tradition, to approach narrative and verse through the lens of a culture they know intimately but did not always have the language to articulate.

A Literature That Bridges Continents

The decision to publish in Marathi also carries a powerful relational dimension. For readers in Maharashtra, discovering a story written by someone who grew up in New Jersey or Houston creates a particular kind of recognition — a sense that the language has traveled and returned, carrying new perspectives.

For diaspora readers, the effect is equally profound. Parents who had given up hope of sharing their literary heritage with their American-born children are finding that their children have, in some cases, surpassed them in their engagement with Marathi literature. Community libraries in cities such as Edison, New Jersey — home to one of the largest concentrations of Marathi-speaking families outside India — report increased interest in Marathi-language titles, particularly those authored by writers based in the United States.

"When a young woman in Edison reads a story written by someone who went to an American high school, who navigated the same cultural confusion she is navigating, but who chose to write it in Marathi — that is a form of literary solidarity," observes one community organizer who helps coordinate Marathi cultural events in the tristate area.

The Question of Audience

Choosing to write in Marathi inevitably raises questions about readership. English offers a diaspora writer access to the vast American literary marketplace. Marathi, by contrast, reaches an audience that is geographically dispersed and, in the diaspora context, often limited in its reading fluency in the language.

Yet several of the writers interviewed for this article argue that this apparent limitation is, paradoxically, part of the point. By writing in Marathi, they are not seeking the broadest possible audience. They are writing for a specific community — and, in doing so, they are helping to sustain that community's literary life.

"If I write in English, my book might reach more people," Kulkarni acknowledges. "But it will not reach my grandmother in Nagpur in the same way. It will not be read aloud at a Marathi cultural evening in Fremont. There is a particular kind of belonging that only the language itself can create."

Publishers such as Marathi Book Publisher are increasingly attentive to this dynamic, recognizing that diaspora authors writing in Marathi represent not only a new creative voice but a vital bridge between communities separated by thousands of miles.

A New Chapter in Marathi Literary History

What is emerging, slowly and without fanfare, is a genuinely new strand of Marathi literature — one shaped by the experience of living between cultures, of holding two languages simultaneously, of belonging fully to neither country and yet deeply to both. This literature does not merely reflect diaspora experience; it is produced by the very conditions of diaspora life.

For second-generation writers such as Deshpande, Kulkarni, and Joshi, the second notebook — the one written in Marathi — is more than a creative exercise. It is a declaration of continuity, an insistence that the literary inheritance passed down through family and community belongs to them as fully as it belongs to anyone born on Maharashtra's soil.

"I write in Marathi because the language deserves to carry my stories too," Deshpande says simply. "And because I deserve to be part of its history."