Bal Sitaram Mardhekar (1 December 1909 – 20 March 1956) was a Marathi writer who brought about a radical shift of sensibility in Marathi poetry. He was born in a town called Faizpur in the Khandesh region of Maharashtra. Similar to what Baudelaire did in French poetry, Mardhekar brought a decadent urban ethos into Marathi poetry. Marathi bhakti (भक्ति) poetry and the poetry of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden had an influence on him. In 1948, he was charged and tried for obscenity for some of his poems in Kahi Kavita. He was declared innocent of these charges in 1952.