Born and raised in the Atlanta metro area to parents from Karnataka, India, this literary alchemist has spent his adult life as a citizen of the world. He speaks his native tongue English, his mother tongue Kannada, as well as—to varying degrees—Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Russian, and Arabic. He also writes in many of these languages, has visited 154 countries, and lived in 25 cities across the globe. He currently calls Mumbai, India his home where he serves as the co-chair of the Environmental Sustainability Subcommittee of the Global Indian Council, curates artists from other Global South backgrounds to perform their work in India, and inspires other Indians to think globally and imagine a world without borders.
Kiran Bhat; Indian-American polyglot novelist, poet, literary critic/translator, TEDx speaker, and teacher, who has embarked on a journey to transcend cultural and societal borders. “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” a phrase emerging from Sanskrit literature, Maha Upanishad, translates to “the world is one family.” Embracing the ancient scripture that emphasizes a global perspective in all its universal glory, through his writings, Bhat strives to compress our globe into a single narrative fictional space.
Bhat has a broad body of work as the author of the story cycle ‘We of the forsaken world…,’ the world-traveling web serialization Girar (found at www.girar.world), and the multilingual poetry anthology Speaking in Tongues. He has published books in five other languages, and his writing has been published in journals such as The Caravan, Outlook India, Sahitya Akademi, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, 3:AM Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, SOFTBLOW, among others. An excerpt of Girar was nominated recently for the Pushcart Prize.
As a teenager, Kiran confronted challenges as a gay individual, and traveling offered a fresh perspective on viewing the world. It encouraged him to learn and think outside the boundaries we create, to break free, and truly connect with the universe. Bhat embarked on his writing journey at 17 as a bid to deal with some roadblocks in his life due to issues related to his sexuality. Poetry proved to be a sweet escape which also garnered some admiration and encouragement from folks at his high school. A short story writing course at NYU and a workshop with Professor Irini Spanidou, along with personalized attention from big literary journals like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta further nurtured his ambition to write. While they never accepted his work, he received handwritten praise on the back of the rejections, encouraging him to keep submitting and never give up. He obviously never did!
Bhat took a year abroad in Spain from his studies which further challenged his worldview and inspired him to want to spend a life of travel and international living. During this year abroad Bhat travelled all across Europe. A conversation with a tall, brunette woman, on a bus trip between Dubrovnik and Zagreb was Bhat’s inspiration for We of the forsaken world…The woman said that Croatia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Something about that sentence inspired his imagination. In the bus station in Zagreb Bhat sat on one of the metal benches for a few hours and wrote hundreds of pages, which would later form the first draft of his novel.
Evading traditional structures to experiment with multi-genre forms, Bhat’s ‘We of the Forsaken World…’ transports the reader to various parts of the world in various stages of evolution and industrialization. Zooming in and out of these places and his 16 characters who in turn become the protagonist of a different scenario, Bhat weaves a mosaic of meaningful stories that highlight and denounce the beauty and flaws of the world and its inhabitants. Intense and intriguing, the book’s complex setting certainly demands engagement from the reader.
The innovator in Bhat shines bright in his Girar, a one-of-a-kind, subscription-based streaming narrative that happens in 365 places around the planet. A pioneer project with a promise to provide glimpses of parts of the world with archetypal Mother and Father, who live a content and settled life all the while trying to make sense of Son, proudly gay, living far from them in a foreign country. There are 365 installments. Each one reimagines the essence of Mother and Father and Son into a new cultural context and nationality, and each one is stamped with a time and date. Each installment is like a little short story about life in a certain part of planet Earth. Readers are emailed the stories.
The polyglot in him awoke in Speaking in Tongues which features poems written in Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish. Each of the twenty-nine poems represents a year of his then-twenty-nine years of life. Having faced discrimination in Georgia due to his race, religion, and sexuality, Bhat felt the need to write in Spanish not only because he was proficient in it having studied in in high school and lived in Madrid, but knew he would not get carried away by his pain, anxiety, and depression, the way he would if he were to use English. His stay is Shanghai inspired him to answer questions he was constantly asked, and he chose to poetically reply in Chinese. His stay in Istanbul and his reading of the nineteenth-century travelogue, Seyahatname birthed his Turkish poetry, which gives each country he has lived in a voice and poem.
Bhat’s Tirugaata (Ambulation) written in Kannada, summated his travel experiences across 126 countries he has toured. The travelogue details the ways Bhat adapted to foreign nations by learning their language, customs, and practices without any help or prior knowledge about the country. He attempted to inspire Kannada-speaking folks to travel more and consider a more international lifestyle.
Even as technology is seemingly steering the world towards globalization, polarization is on the rise and ubiquitous. Very few among us truly connect truly and profoundly without barriers. Literary luminaries have always played an impactful role in reflecting and eventually shaping the norms of society. Bhat genuinely believes that a global citizen recognizes that nations and countries were created by humans for political are as artificial as any other human construction. A global citizen need not have traveled, but a global citizen is aware that there is a life beyond the fifty-kilometer radius that they were born and brought up in, and that other lives are of equal value to theirs.
It is perhaps through the earnest efforts of writers such as Bhat who architect his identity, thought process, and perception in the direction of a borderless world that each of us might hope to awaken to a world with no dominant culture, no dominant nationality. Be it through the convergence of his webpage, newsletter serialization, and novel, Bhat serves the content for a global audience. It is for us to indulge. Will we? Time will tell!
