Life & Background
Kolatkar was born in Kolhapur in 1932 and trained as a painter at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay, working for most of his life as a graphic designer in advertising, where he won awards and made a living that left his poetry free of the market. He wrote in both English and Marathi and treated the two as separate careers, publishing Marathi work with small presses and reading in the bilingual literary circles around Bombay. He avoided literary society, gave few interviews, had no telephone, and held court on Thursdays at the Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda for decades. Much of his work went uncollected for years; Jejuri was out of print for long stretches. Diagnosed with cancer, he allowed two major collections to be published shortly before his death in 2004.
Jejuri
A sequence of thirty-one poems recording a day trip to Jejuri, a temple town in Maharashtra sacred to the god Khandoba. The speaker arrives by bus, is guided round by a priest interested chiefly in payment, and looks at everything with an unbeliever's exact attention: a doorway, a cracked stone, a mongrel bitch, an old woman who wants fifty paise, a butterfly, hens in a shrine. Each poem is a small act of noticing. The famous sequence on the temple rat, the priest's son explaining legends he half-believes, and the closing poem at the railway station, where the speaker watches the indicator and waits for a train, complete a pilgrimage in which nothing is revealed and nothing is dismissed.
The poems refuse both devotion and mockery, which is what makes them difficult to place. Kolatkar's eye is a painter's — flat, precise, uninterested in symbol — and his line is short, plain, and heavily enjambed, so that meaning turns on the break rather than on statement. The question the book asks is what a sceptic actually sees in a sacred place, and its answer is that the sacred and the squalid are the same objects viewed with different expectations. Kala Ghoda Poems, published nearly thirty years later, applies the same method to a Bombay traffic island and its street population, and is now regarded by many critics as the greater achievement.
Why Kolatkar Matters
With Ezekiel, Ramanujan, and Mahapatra, Kolatkar belongs to the generation that made Indian English poetry a serious body of work, and Jejuri is the most examined single Indian English sequence after Ezekiel's Night of the Scorpion. His bilingualism makes him unusual and useful: he is the standard example of a poet who worked at full strength in both an Indian language and English without treating either as a translation of the other. Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra brought a late reassessment of his standing.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Jejuri1976
- Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita (Marathi)1977
- Kala Ghoda Poems2004
- Sarpa Satra2004
- The Boatride and Other Poems2009