Shirish Pai (

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

: शिरीष पै; 15 November 1929लेखिका आणि सामाजिक कार्यकर्त्या शिरीष पै यांचे निधन
– 2 September 2017Marathi poet, activist Shirish Pai passes away
/ref>) was a social worker and a writer from

Maharashtra Maharashtra (; , abbr. MH or Maha) is a states and union territories of India, state in the western India, western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. Maharashtra is the List of states and union te ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. She had written in

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

and

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, primarily the former.

Early life

Shirish was the elder daughter of

Acharya Atre Prahlad Keshav Atre () (13 August 1898 – 13 June 1969), popularly known as Āchārya Atre, was a prominent Marathi language, Marathi writer, poet, educationist, founder–editor of ''Maratha'' (a Marathi language newspaper), and above all, a n ...

. She had a college degree in Law from Government College of Law, Mumbai.

Career

She joined her father's newspaper, ''Maratha'', as a journalist. She was deeply influenced by the Soviet thinking and way of life, and toured the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

and other Eastern Bloc countries. Alongside her father, Shirish played a role in the

Samyukta Maharashtra Samyukta Maharashtra Movement ( mr, संयुक्त महाराष्ट्र चळवळ), commonly known as the Samiti, was an organisation in India that advocated for a separate Marathi-speaking state in Western India and Cent ...

movement.

Writing

She wrote several books, including collections of her poems. She introduced the

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

form of poetry to

Marathi literature Marathi literature is the body of literature of Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Maharashtra and written in the Devanagari and Modi script. History Ancient Era Maharashtri Prakrit was the southern Prakrit tha ...

in 1975. She has also translated Japanese haiku into Marathi and English. In a newspaper interview in June 2011 she revealed that she had started writing and composing poems from the time she was in secondary school and received great encouragement from her father in this regard.

Family

Shirish was married to lawyer and journalist Vyankatesh Pai. They have two sons, Rajendra Pai and Vikramaditya Pai who are both lawyers. She resided, and died, in Mumbai.

References

External links

The following web page lists Shirish Pai's books: * 1929 births 2017 deaths Marathi-language writers 20th-century Indian women writers Writers from Pune 20th-century Indian poets Indian women poets Poets from Maharashtra Women writers from Maharashtra {{India-writer-stub