The Mexican Nobel Laureate poet, Octavio Paz, spent the most bountiful years of his life in India when he lived here in the 1960s as his country’s ambassador. His residence became a meeting point of many young artists who would later become stalwarts of modern Indian culture. Paz became a mentor to them, procured scholarships, organised their exhibitions, financed art journals and even helped them draft art manifestos. While he exposed artists such as Satish Gujral, G M Sheikh, J Swaminathan, M F Husain, Krishen Khanna or Vivan Sundaram to international avant garde art movements, Octavio Paz himself wrote poems inspired by their works. His own understanding of the Western avant garde was often shaped by his immersion in Indian art. This talk grows out of the speaker’s recently-published biography of Octavio Paz: The Tree Within (Penguin, 2025).

Indranil Chakravarty studied filmmaking at EICTV, Havana after graduating from Presidency College, later earning PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. He has been a professor of film history and screenwriting at premiere film institutes in India and abroad, with several publications in English and Spanish.