Basant Rungta is a poet, fiction writer, translator, songwriter, musician and organiser of cultural events in Kolkata. In 2000, together with three friends, he founded the informal group Srijan. This is a word common to many languages in India: it derives from Sanskrit and means both ‘creativity’ and ‘creation’. In the last ten years, he has developed Srijan’s rooftop into a popular venue for cultural events in Kolkata. Meetings are held weekly, with a major event each month, including readings and talks by international writers. Basant Rungta’s eclectic interests include literature, art and music, and together with his multilingual abilities, these have led him to embrace many aspects of cultural life in India and elsewhere. He was born in 1944 in Chaibasa (Bihar, now Jharkhand) into a Marwari family, and was educated at St. Xavier’s School and College, Kolkata. At an early age, he started studying Indian classical music and learned to sing and to play the guitar, the sitar and the bansuri. He has travelled throughout India and in many parts of Europe and the USA, where he has also lived. His poems, stories and interviews with writers have been published in leading Indian newspapers such as The Statesman, The Times of India, and The Telegraph, as well as in many smaller literary magazines. As a poet, he writes in English and Hindi, both of which he speaks fluently. As a translator, he works into and from these languages, as well as from Bengali. His Hindi translations from the Bengali poet Shakti Chattopadhy have been choreographed and widely performed, as has his Hindi translation of the one act play, Madhavi, by the Kannad writer Shivaprakash. His English translations of Tagore’s Raja and its songs have been performed and sung by a Tagore theatre group, and his own songs in Marwari have been sung by the cultural association Bharatiya Samskriti Samsad (a leading association for Indian culture). Basant Rungta has also taught Vedanta. He is currently working on two novels: one in English and the other in Hindi.
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