'This special issue of Cordite Poetry Review has its roots in a project Mridula Nath Chakraborty has been working on for the last three years: Literary Commons: Writing Australia–India in the Asian century with Dalit, Indigenous and Multilingual Tongues. It publishes twenty-five Indigenous Australian and twenty-six Dalit and tribal Indian authors and their poems in the original language and in translation. Each Indigenous Australian poem is translated into an Indian language, offering a glimpse of the twenty-two official languages of India and some not-so-official ones. Each official Indian language is represented in a poem by Dalit and tribal poets. All the poems published here feature across two pages: the translation appears first, followed by the original on a second page. Forty translators were engaged to work on this special issue.' (Introduction)