About Us

Founded in 2022 by translators Suchitra Ramachandran and Priyamvada Ramkumar, Mozhi is an initiative that aims to bring together literatures from various Indian languages and provide a platform for critical discourse. Through a consistent engagement with literary works in the numerous languages of India, Mozhi aspires to cultivate a new generation of readers, writers, critics and translators, and a new way of discussing Indian literature.

Vision

While India has many regional languages, each with a rich literary heritage and significant modern output, we hardly have any media for continuous and engaged conversation between writers, readers and critics operating in different languages. We often don’t know of it when a significant new voice or a new literary movement emerges in an Indian language, simply because such dialogue is minimal.

The only way these conversations can happen is through translations and discourse about the translated works. However, in a literary ecosystem where there is significant opaqueness been the Anglophone world and non-English Indian languages, oftentimes, what is translated and what is not ends up being a political decision. Therefore while some voices are centred, others are left out of the discourse. We hardly talk about what we like and what we don’t like in contemporary Indian writing; what is ‘good’, what appeals to our taste, and what does not. There is an urgent need for discourse about Indian works that is rooted in home-grown aesthetic ideas or traditions. We envision Mozhi as a space where we can provide a platform for such critical discourse. 

Since such conversation can only be enabled through translations, Mozhi is committed to discovering and developing translation talent by sharing resources, recognising great work, and building a community that can support one another. We therefore envision being a loose collective of like-minded people working in and out of different Indian languages, talking about books, writers and ideas. 

We dream of nurturing, over time, a new generation of readers, writers, critics, reviewers and translators who can talk about Indian literature in all its various manifestations.