Hakara

Overview

Hakara is a bilingual online journal of arts and literature published from Pune, Maharashtra. It appears in Marathi and English together, and its name is the Marathi word for a call: a summons, a cry, an invitation to respond. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and criticism alongside visual art, photographic projects and video, in themed issues that appear three times a year. It is, unusually, both a literary magazine and an arts journal, and it treats the two as one conversation.

The journal, styled in Marathi script as Hakara with a final danda, occupies a distinctive position among Indian online journals. It is rooted in Marathi language and culture, yet deliberately international in outlook. It is peer reviewed and multidisciplinary, yet open to work in progress and experimental forms. And it is published not by a university or a commercial house, but independently by its two editors, as a collaborative practice.

The editors and the founding idea

Hakara was launched by playwright Ashutosh Potdar and art critic and researcher Noopur Desai, who remain its editors. Potdar is a playwright, poet, writer and translator whose Marathi plays, including F-1/105 and Anand Bhog Mall, have been published, and who teaches literature, cultural studies and drama at FLAME University in Pune. Desai, who took her master's degree in art history from MS University of Baroda and has pursued doctoral research at TISS, works as an art writer and researcher.

That pairing explains the journal's shape. A theatre-maker and literary scholar working in Marathi and English, joined with an art historian, were never going to produce a conventional single-language literary magazine. In interviews, the editors describe wanting an open space in which artists and writers could express their concerns: not only political and social concerns, but concerns about art itself, about medium and material. Desai has said that in any art form it is difficult to have a tangible outcome, and that it is therefore important to create dialogue; Hakara exists to be that dialogue.

A bilingual journal: Marathi and English together

Language is Hakara's central editorial decision. Each issue publishes work in both Marathi and English, not as a main text with translations appended, but as two living languages sharing one journal. The editors have described their aim as a dynamic environment in which no conversation is unilingual, where what is gained and lost in translation becomes part of the creative exchange rather than a problem to be solved.

This matters in the Indian context. Marathi has a rich, argumentative literary and theatre culture of its own, centred on Pune and Mumbai, while English is the language through which Indian writing reaches national and international readers. Most journals choose one world or the other. Hakara insists that a Marathi poem, an English essay, a play and a photographic project can answer the same theme in the same issue, and that readers are enriched by moving between them.

Themed issues, three times a year

Hakara is organised around a single theme for each issue, and publishes three issues a year. The theme gives very different contributors a common point of departure: fiction, poetry and criticism in both languages, along with visual art and video pieces, all respond to one chosen idea, so that an issue reads as a many-voiced exploration rather than a miscellany.

The approach can be seen in its pandemic-era issues. The introduction to its issue on the theme of Home, the second issue published during the COVID-19 pandemic, invoked both Satyajit Ray and Vaclav Havel, and insisted that home implies not just a place, but also a sound one creates, a language one speaks, and a move one makes. That sentence captures the journal's method: a familiar word, unfolded by writers and artists until it reveals language, memory and movement inside it.

What Hakara publishes

The journal publishes unpublished plays, short stories, poetry, essays and criticism, together with art and photographic projects and video work. The emphasis on unpublished plays is notable: drama is central to Marathi culture, yet plays are among the hardest literary forms to publish, and a journal willing to carry full dramatic writing, edited by a practising playwright, gives Marathi and English theatre a rare printed home.

Alongside creative work, the journal carries criticism and reflection that sit, in the words of one interviewer, between existing academic and non-academic discourses. It is interested in work that responds to current debates while remaining attentive to how form, content and context shape expression. Exhibition reviews and writing on visual artists appear alongside literature, so that a reader may move from a poem to a review of a Mumbai gallery exhibition within the same issue.

Peer review and editorial practice

Hakara describes itself as a peer-reviewed journal, a discipline not universal among literary magazines. Peer review, combined with the editors' own academic positions, gives its criticism and essays a scholarly weight, while its openness to creative and unfinished work keeps it from becoming a purely academic publication. The editors have spoken of valuing works in progress, and of publishing as a collaborative practice, in which editing is a conversation with contributors rather than a gate kept against them.

That collaboration extends to the journal's bilingual labour. Editing across Marathi and English, across literature and visual art, is slow, skilled work done by a very small team. The journal's survival and regularity, three themed issues a year produced by two editors with full professional lives, is itself evidence of the commitment the project commands.

Place in Marathi and Indian literary culture

Within Marathi culture, Hakara contributes something Pune is well placed to give: a serious, contemporary journal that honours the Marathi literary and theatrical tradition while refusing to seal it off from the world. Within Indian literary culture more broadly, it demonstrates that the most interesting experiments in Indian publishing may be bilingual and regional at once, rather than English-only and metropolitan.

International attention has followed. Words Without Borders, the leading journal of literature in translation, interviewed the editors at length about the past and present of Marathi literature and art, about publishing Hakara as a collaborative practice, and about what a bilingual journal can do that a unilingual one cannot. FLAME University, Potdar's institution, has likewise profiled the journal as the kind of open space the art world needed. For a small independent online journal, that recognition confirms that its experiment is being watched well beyond Pune.

Digital form and how to read it

Hakara is an online journal, published at hakara.in, where its themed issues can be read freely. The digital form is integral to its identity: only online publication makes a bilingual, image-carrying, video-including journal economically possible for an independent team, and only online publication lets a Marathi-English journal be read as easily abroad as in Maharashtra.

Issues are presented with their visual material intact, artworks reproduced with artists' courtesy lines and gallery credits, and contributions tagged by form and subject so that readers can follow a theme, a language or a kind of work through the journal. Readers who wish to contribute watch the journal's calls around its announced themes; readers who simply wish to read gain, three times a year, a free, carefully edited encounter with contemporary Marathi and English writing and art.

Why Hakara matters

Hakara matters because it answers, in practice, a question Indian culture keeps asking: how can a strong regional language tradition and a global English readership enrich, rather than dilute, one another? Its answer is to refuse the choice. One journal, two languages, one theme, many art forms, edited by a playwright and an art historian in Pune, peer reviewed yet open to experiment, local in its roots and international in its conversation.

Its name remains its best description. A hakara is a call, and a call expects an answer. Every themed issue is the editors calling writers, poets, playwrights, critics, photographers and artists to respond to one idea in two languages, and every reader who moves between Marathi and English, between a story and a photograph, is answering. In a crowded field of Indian online journals, that is a genuinely original position, and it is why this small Pune journal has earned attention far beyond its size.