The India Series #6 - Dilip Chitre

Dilip Purushottam Chitre (1938 – 2009) was one of the foremost Indian writers, poets, critics, painters and filmmakers to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a very important bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a painter and filmmaker.

Chitre published his first collection of poems in 1960. He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "Little Magazine Movement" of the sixties in Marathi. He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in the United States. He has worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation in Bhopal and Chitre also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal.

In 1969 Chitre held his first one-man-show of oil paintings in Bombay.

His professional film career started in 1969 and Chitre has since made one feature film, about a dozen documentaries, several short films and about twenty video documentary features. He wrote the scripts of most of his films as well as directed or co-directed them. He also scored the music for some of them.

Chitre passed away at his Pune residence in the wee hours on Thursday 10 December, 2009.