Mohan Rakesh was a leading twentieth-century Indian author whose drama, fiction, and criticism played a pivotal role in the Indian modernist movement after independence (1947–), and whose work continues to exert a strong literary-artistic influence through the mediums of print as well as performance. He wrote primarily in Hindi, India’s majority language, but some critical essays were written originally in English, and his work in multiple genres has been translated widely into English as well as other major Indian and European languages since the 1960s. In relation to postcolonial and global modernisms, Rakesh exemplifies the cosmopolitan urban Indian writer whose authorial self-positioning responds carefully to the effects of British colonialism, European modernity, and the complex literary history of a major language such as Hindi.