Hamid Dalwai’s main interest, and perhaps obsession, was with changing the attitudes of Indian Muslims towards democracy and modernism . . . He wished to erase communal markers and distinctions in public life, in pursuance of a common citizenship for all Indians in a genuinely secular and democratic nation… There was nothing apologetic about Hamid Dalwai, whose modernism was militant and uncompromising. -- Ramachandra Guha, from 'Makers of Modern India'

HAMID DALWAI was a journalist, social reformer and writer. Born into a lower-middle-class family in Maharashtra in 1932, he was a gifted writer, and his novel Indhan is recognized as a significant contribution to Marathi literature. He founded the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal in the 1970s, and in his short life he relentlessly pursued religious and political reforms in the country. He died in 1977, at the age of forty-four.

DILIP PURUSHOTTAM CHITRE (1938–2009) was a bilingual poet and critic writing in Marathi and English, besides being a painter, film-maker and translator. He was the co-founder and editor of Shabda, the influential little magazine dedicated to Marathi poetry. The first volume of his collected Marathi poems, Ekoon Kavita, received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994. The same year, he received a Sahitya Akademi translation prize for his translations of the saint–poet Tukaram’s poems in Says Tuka. He also translated the thirteenth-century mystic poet Shri Jnandev’s Anubhavamrut.