Keshav Malik was born in 1926 in Maini, Pakistan, to reformed Hindu Arya Samsyist parents. His father was an advocate and mothers a painter, writer and translator. Malik had his school education in Delhi and Calcutta and his college education in Srinagar. He was the first literary editor of Thought and was a democratic socialist who joined M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Movement.
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He travelled widely in Europe and the USA between the years 1950-58. Settling down more or less as a journalist and art critic, Malik, like Nissim Ezekiel, contributed frequently to general and political magazines thereby establishing a relationship between the poets and the editors of such journals. But as Bruce King has pointed out, Indian English poetry as it gained recognition seems to have moved away from political culture towards “other newly emerging modern arts such as painting, drama, film and cultural journalism, which appeal to the educated affluent professional classes of modern urban India”.
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This trend is reflected both in the poetry of those poets and the type of magazines to which they contribute.
Keshav Malik has six volumes of poetry, The Lake Surface and Other Poems (1959), Rippled Shadow (1960), Poems С (1971), Negatives (1982), Shapes in Peeling Plaster (1985) and has also edited a few anthologies like 19 Poets: An Anthology (1981) and Centre and Circumference (1984).
Malik was the editor of Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature for a few years till his retirement in 1984.