ARUN KOLATKAR’S HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

(1932-2004)

VINAY DHARWADKER

Reading Kolatkar’s English poetry

Arun Kolatkar’s career as a bilingual poet in English and Marathi
began around 1953, when he was twenty-two years old, and drew to a
close with his death in 2004.1 For the greater part of these fifty years,
he worked in five different genres: original poetry in Marathi; Marathi
versions of his English verse; original poetry in English; English
versions of his Marathi poetry; and English translations of the work of
other Marathi poets, past and present. In the first two decades of his
career, he published his poems and translations sporadically and in
small quantities, with the Marathi material appearing in – or
disappearing into – obscure magazines in Maharashtra, and the
English material being featured in a few periodicals and anthologies
with a limited national and international circulation. He published his
poetry in book form for the first time at what proved to be the
midpoint of his career: Jejuri, an extended poetic sequence in English,
appeared in 1976, while Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā, practically a
volume of collected early poems in Marathi, reached print in 1977.2
The growth of Kolatkar’s reputation in the late 1960s and early
1970s as a poet and translator was largely the product of coterie
appreciation, based more on promise, personal admiration, and word
of mouth than on publication and public debate. The first two books
seemed to transform this dynamics of recognition in 1977, as Jejuri
1
Kolatkar’s official year of birth is 1932, but Dilip Chitre has recently corrected it to
1931, in “Remembering Arun Kolatkar”: http://dilipchitre.spaces.live.com (accessed
18 August 2007).
2
Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri, Bombay: Clearing House, 1976, and Aruna kolhatakarachyā
kavitā, Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 1977. Jejuri has so far gone through five editions by
Pras Prakashan, Mumbai, in 1978, 1982, 1991, 2001, and 2004; one edition by
Peppercorn, London, in 1978; and one edition by the New York Review of Books,
New York, in 2005 (with an Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri).
152 Vinay Dharwadker

won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and Aruna

kolhatakarachyā kavitā received the Maharashtra
state government’s annual H.S. Gokhale award for
that year. Despite the broad acclaim, however,
Jejuri retained the aura of a cult classic, and over
the next twenty-five years Kolatkar reverted to the
reticence and miscellaneous publication
characteristic of the first quarter-century of his
career. Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s,
he referred to a large body of recent work in scattered interviews with
poets and journalists, but published only about fifteen new poems in
Marathi and a handful of new English poems, English versions of his
early Marathi poems, and English translations of other Marathi poets.3
Then, in 2003-2004, when death due to a terminal illness seemed
imminent, he suddenly published five collections of verse, repeating
the pattern of 1976-77, but on a much bigger scale. Chirīmirī (2003),
Bhijakī vahī (2003), and Drona (2004) brought together a substantial
amount of previously unpublished poetry in Marathi, while Sarpa
Satra (2004) and Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) did the same in English.4
These books created a fresh configuration of texts, and radically
altered Kolatkar’s profile as a poet. For much of his time in the
limelight, he was considered to be a poet who wrote and published
sparingly: Jejuri, at 58 pages, and Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā, at
131 pages, added up to a mere 189 pages in print until 2003. The
oeuvre that emerged in its final form by mid-2004 practically
quintupled its size overnight, with the writing in Marathi now filling
714 pages, and that in English reaching an aggregate of 304 pages.
Besides the surprise, that Kolatkar’s lifework amounted to 1020 pages
in print – about twice as much as A.K. Ramanujan’s collected poems
in English and Kannada taken together – the burst of publications at
the end also emphasized two other unexpected patterns. His English
output turned out to be comparable in size to the oeuvres of his
Anglophone compatriots, who wrote in just one language (among
them, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, both of whom also died in

3
Eunice de Souza, Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999, 17. Kolatkar’s uncollected poems and translations are in the
boatride and other poems, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
4
All five books were published by Pras Prakashan, Mumbai. For this essay I will be
using the 2004 editions of Sarpa Satra and the Kala Ghoda Poems.
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 153

2004); and the extent of his oeuvre in Marathi proved to be almost

two-and-a-half times that of his output in English.
Kolatkar’s bilingualism, the proportion of his Marathi writing to
his English writing, and the overall magnitude of his lifework
inescapably complicate the process of reading his poetry in English,
underscoring the importance of two complementary critical objectives.
One is to map Kolatkar’s English oeuvre as a whole, paying
proportionate attention to the formal, thematic, and modal
organization of Jejuri, Sarpa Satra, and Kala Ghoda Poems. Scholars
working in English have avoided such a mapping so far, because they
have been preoccupied almost exclusively with the generic and textual
orientations of Jejuri in isolation: as Eunice de Souza noted at the end
of 2007, “Kolatkar’s work tends to be synonymous with Jejuri” even
now.5 The other objective – as distinct from the first – is to resist the
segregation of texts by language that the reductive equation of
“Indian-English” with “Anglophone” demands.6 My goal is to develop
an interpretation of the English poetry that is mediated throughout by
an anterior or parallel reading of the Marathi poetry, especially of the
early poems in Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā and the voluminous
body of late poems in Bhijakī vahī. The thrust of this type of bilingual
reading is to situate Kolatkar’s English oeuvre within the wider
circumference of his lifework, to explore the ambivalence of his
identification as an “Indian-English” poet, and to bring his Marathi
poetry into play as an indispensable means of resolving critical issues
that the English poetry cannot settle on its own.
But Kolatkar was not only a poet: a trained painter and a
commercial artist by profession, he worked as an art director for

5
Eunice de Souza, “Work in Progress”, Mumbai Mirror, 27 December 2007: http://
www.mumbaimirror.com (accessed 9 January 2008).
6
Throughout this essay, I distinguish between three types of Indian-English authors:
Anglophone writers, such as Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, who are monolingual
in English, both as readers and as writers, without literate access to an Indian
language; Anglicized writers, such as R. Parthasarathy, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram
Seth, and Sujata Bhatt, who are bilingual or multilingual as readers (usually with
literate access to at least one Indian language) but who remain monolingual in English
as writers; and cosmopolitan figures, such as Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, A.K. Ramanujan,
Kamala Das, and Mamta Kalia, who are bilingual or multilingual both as readers and
as authors. Identifying Indian poets who write in English as uniformly “Anglophone”
falsifies this linguistic and cultural complexity. With appropriate modifications, such
a typology also applies to literatures in English produced across Asia and Africa as
well as Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the Caribbean.
154 Vinay Dharwadker

several Indian advertising agencies over three decades, and won the
annual award of the Commercial Artists’ Guild on six different
occasions. In addition, he was a musician, trained as a singer and a
percussionist (on the pakhāwaj, a double-conical drum), who had a
performer’s access to varieties of Hindustani classical and folk music,
and an eclectic afficionado’s lifelong passion for Western classical,
Jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and other musical genres. Kolatkar’s background in
music, advertising and marketing, and painting and the visual arts
(which embraced a devotion to photography and film) profoundly
affected his verbal skills and techniques, his rhetoric, and even his
conception of poetry and poetic form. It is therefore essential to focus
on the pivotal features of his visual, musical, and multimedia
imagination, which played a constitutive role in his English poetry.7
In the chronology of publication, Jejuri was Kolatkar’s first book
as well as his first book in English. It appeared initially as a long
poetic sequence in a periodical (Opinion Literary Quarterly, 1974),
and then as a book (Clearing House, Bombay, 1976). It was followed
twenty-eight years later by Sarpa Satra (June 2004), and shortly
afterwards by Kala Ghoda Poems (July 2004), both from Pras
Prakashan, Ashok Shahane’s small press in Mumbai (Bombay). When
we read or re-read the three English books in the chronological order
of their publication, what becomes apparent immediately is their
strong thematic patterning. In the logical order of themes, Sarpa Satra
comes first, transporting us back to an indeterminate date in Indian
antiquity, at an epic moment in the mythical-narrative world of the
Mahābhārata, when the first large-scale deforestation of the land for
urban settlement and the definition of imperial territories presumably
were still fairly recent events. Jejuri then takes us on a very different
type of journey to a medieval temple-town in rural India, suspended
on the cusp between the pre-modern and the modern, spanning the
centuries from about the middle of the last millennium, when the gods
and legends associated with the town were on the ascendant, to the
third quarter of the twentieth century, by which time they had fallen
into a state of decay

7
Besides Chitre’s, “Remembering Kolatkar”, and de Souza’s, Talking Poems, for a
discussion of these features, see the obituary by Ranjit Hoskote, “Poetry Loses a
Major Presence”, The Hindu, 27 September 2004: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/09
/27/ 2004092702971000.htm (accessed 1 September 2007).
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 155

As the final step in a triadic pattern, Kala Ghoda Poems then

brings us down the paths of colonial history – particularly the byways
of the British nineteenth century – squarely into the urban nightmare
of contemporary Mumbai, connecting post-colonial India through the
space-time contraction of globalization to places as far-flung as
Tokyo, Seoul, Warsaw, Texas, Alaska, and Peru.8 This three-part
structure, which mirrors the ubiquitous textbook division of Indian
and world history into the “ancient”, “medieval”, and “modern”
periods, suggests that Kolatkar explicitly wished to position his
English oeuvre as a concerted work of the historical imagination. This
is a sharp and sudden reversal from the dominant perspective of the
preceding decades, in which the poems of Jejuri long appeared to be
the radical aesthetic experiments of an essentially apolitical and
ahistorical artist. And yet, as recently as 2006, a commentator such as
Amit Chaudhuri tried to postulate an unsustainable opposition
between Salman Rushdie’s “monumental view of Indian history in
literature” and Kolatkar’s “consignment of history to the scrap-yard”
as the defining polarity of Indian-English writing in the last quarter of
the twentieth century.9 The precise scope and thrust of the historical
vision that guides Kolatkar’s writing at large become evident when we
map out the three books in their multiple inter-relations.

The drama of Sarpa Satra (2004)

Sarpa Satra is a single book-length poem of 894 (mostly short) lines
in the dramatic mode, and the setting, characters, context, and action
are all developed from a specific portion of the Mahābhārata (c. 400
BC- AD 400). The title of Kolatkar’s book is a Sanskrit phrase from the
epic, in which sarpa may be translated as either “snake” or “serpent”
(the latter being the English derivative from the same Indo-European
root), whereas satra means “session”, as of a court of law or a formal
assembly (and is not to be confused with satraha, “seventeen”,

8
Kolatkar develops such connections most overtly in the 31-part sequence “Breakfast
Time at Kala Ghoda” (Kala Ghoda Poems, 80-113). His poetics of cosmopolitanism,
internationalism, and globalization resonates strongly with current intellectual
interests worldwide, but for reasons of space I have been unable to pursue it here.
9
Amit Chaudhuri, “Pilgrim’s Progress”, Guardian, 21 October 2006: http://books.
guardian.co.uk (accessed 29 September 2007). I discovered this article after I had
formulated my basic argument for the present essay, for which I also did not have
access to Chaudhuri’s Introduction to the 2005 New York Review of Books edition of
Jejuri, from which the Guardian article is derived. Also see note 27 below.
156 Vinay Dharwadker

common to several Indo-Aryan languages). Kolatkar’s poem is thus

about a “snake session”; or, untangling the allusion, it is about the
sarpa satra or great “snake sacrifice” ordered by King Janamejaya, a
seminal event in the narrative – and also in the history of the narrative
– of the Mahābhārata. The title itself, which is likely to puzzle readers
in English, thus plunges us directly into an epic situation in ancient
India, using the technique of de-familiarization to prepare us
cryptically for a journey into uncharted poetic territory.10
The Mahābhārata tells us reflexively that it was composed by
Krishna Dvaipayana (popularly known as Vyasa, the “redactor”), and
that it was first published or made public when it was recited in its
entirety at Janamejaya’s sarpa satra during his inauguration as the
king of Hastinapura.11 While this elaborate Vedic yajña or sacrifice
was in session, Janamejaya asked to hear the full story of his
ancestors, and Krishna Dvaipayana, who had recorded it in a long
poem and was present, authorized his pupil, Vaishampayana, to recite
it before the king. The text that Vaishampayana recited on that
occasion was the original Mahābhārata; it became the only legitimate
source-text for all subsequent transmissions of the epic; and a part of
its function was, and ever since has been, to explain the significance
of that ritual, and to recount its multifarious antecedents and contexts.

10
De-familiarization is one of Kolatkar’s key poetic strategies, but remains to be
analysed in depth. Commenting on a poem in Jejuri, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has
observed that “It surprises by revealing the familiar, the hidden that is always before
us” (The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1992, 55); and Hoskote has suggested more recently that Kolatkar
had “a magical gift for translating the familiar into the wonderful, by focusing on
details or tweaking our programmed approaches to objects, people and relationships”
(“Poetry Loses a Major Presence” ). But neither commentator was able to identify
these effects as an outcome of systematic de-familiarization, which the Russian
Formalists defined as “the basic function of all [stylistic and compositional] devices”
in the 1920s, and which Bertolt Brecht described as “the alienation effect” in the
context of theatre a little later. See Uri Margolin, “Russian Formalism”, in The Johns
Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005; Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds and
trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press,
1965; and Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987.
11
My discussion of the epic here draws throughout on The Mahābhārata, I: The Book
of the Beginning, ed. and trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1973. My summary of the sarpa satra episode below simplifies the original
narrative, omitting many details not relevant to Kolatkar’s poem.
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 157

The epic narrates the events of the sacrifice particularly in the final
chapters of the Book of Āstīka, its fifth minor book (embedded in its
first major book, the Ādi-parvan), and the main story may be
summarized as follows.
Janamejaya is the great-grandson of Arjuna, the third of the
Pandavas; Janamejaya’s father, Parikshit, was the son of Abhimanyu,
who was Arjuna’s son by Subhadra. Long after the battle of
Kurukshetra, when the Pandavas voluntarily relinquished their
worldly power and set out for heaven, Parikshit – as their sole
surviving direct descendant – inherited their kingdom, with its capital
at Hastinapura. But Parikshit was assassinated while still on the
throne, and when Janamejaya became the next king, he resolved to
perform a special snake sacrifice at the inauguration of his reign to
avenge his father’s murder.
The remote causes of Parikshit’s assassination lie in events in his
grandfather’s life. When Arjuna, still a young prince, completed his
training as a warrior, he received a set of cosmic weapons as a reward
for his accomplishments. His closest friend in his youth was Krishna –
a warrior-god and an avatar of Lord Vishnu, and, in the theology and
cosmology of the Mahābhārata, the supreme deity of the universe;
Krishna possessed cosmic weapons of his own, such as the chakra
(“discus”) called Sudarshana and the gadā (“mace”) called Kaumudi;
and when Arjuna received his “graduation present”, the two young
friends went out together to the Khandava Forest to test their arsenal
of weapons. In the process, they inadvertently set fire to the pristine
forest, burning it down along with every living thing in it. Among the
innocent and accidental victims were the Nagas, the Snake People,
most of whom were unable to escape the conflagration. One of the
few Snake People who survived was Takshaka, who at the time of the
blaze was away in Kurukshetra, but whose wife and son were at home
in the forest. His wife was killed by one of the numerous powerful
arrows that Arjuna unleashed during a wild shooting-spree, and upon
returning to the ruins of his home, Takshaka made a vow to avenge
her murder.
But Takshaka was a coward and a dissimulator, and he was unable
to attack and kill Arjuna, as he wanted to, for the remainder of the
latter’s lifetime. Frustrated by his own weakness and failure, Takshaka
then vowed to seek vengeance upon Arjuna’s descendants – the first
problematic step in a prolonged cycle of revenge and retribution.
158 Vinay Dharwadker

Takshaka waited for an apt opportunity, and found it in Parikshit’s

vulnerability to deception. As a Naga, Takshaka possessed the
magical power to transform his bodily manifestation at will, so he
turned himself into a worm inside a fruit that was sent to the royal
palace. When Parikshit bit into the fruit, Takshaka emerged from it,
resumed his true form, and bit the king in turn, who was killed
immediately by the venom in the snakebite.
At his inauguration as the new king of Hastinapura, then,
Janamejaya is incensed by the perfidious form of this revenge –
enacted not on Arjuna, the obvious source of the wrong, but on an
innocent grandson, and with cowardly deception – and he decides to
avenge his father’s murder by exterminating the whole race of Nagas,
thereby bringing the cycle of retribution to a permanent, pre-emptive
end. But Janamejaya’s decision to commit a ritual genocide of the
Snake People is based on the same flawed moral-ethical logic as
Takshaka’s revenge, and becomes the second problematic step in the
cycle. The young ruler’s decision to carry out a pogrom of this sort,
which he has manoeuvred to legitimize as a Vedic sacrifice sanctioned
by gods and priests, is horrific because it promises to perpetrate an
evil capable of compromising the whole cosmo-moral order, and
therefore must be ended immediately.
But who can stop such an event, once its gears have been put into
motion by a ritual of unprecedented power and magnitude? The Snake
People themselves, descendants of the few who survived the original
Khandava Forest massacre and multiplied to keep their race alive,
search frenziedly for a solution to the problem, even as their members
begin to perish in “the shock and awe” of Janamejaya’s sacrificial fire.
The solution is finally devised by an old Snake Woman (a Nagini)
named Jaratkaru, who has a human son named Astika. Because of his
paternity, Astika is a brahmin, and has acquired the rigorous self-
discipline necessary to become a spiritual practitioner of exceptional
purity, charisma, and power. Jaratkaru decides to persuade her son to
use moral suasion with Janamejaya to stop the sacrifice before it
destroys the entire race of Nagas: she summons Astika, explains the
situation to him, and asks him to approach the king – which the
intrepid young man does, ultimately with success. After complex
negotiations with Astika, Janamejaya cancels the snake sacrifice; the
Nagas survive the potential holocaust, celebrate their young saviour’s
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 159

moral power, and, in return for his help, vow never to inflict a snake-
bite on anyone who protects them.
This is the subject-matter that Kolatkar expands selectively and
reworks in Sarpa Satra. His English text, divided into three un-
numbered sections with titles of their own, is a series of monologues,
the first two being in the voices of imagined characters from the
Mahābhārata, and the third in the voice of a detached modern
narrator. The opening section – the shortest at 57 lines – is called
“Janamejaya”, and resembles a soliloquy on stage, in which a
character speaks aloud in solitude, so that the audience can overhear
his or her supposedly innermost thoughts. In this case, the reader
figuratively listens to King Janamejaya who, in a few short passages
resembling movements in music, directly and unambiguously
expresses his determination to avenge his father’s assassination as
well as his justification of such an act. The tone of his soliloquy is set
in its opening lines:

It was a scheming snake, I’m told,

with a grudge against my great-grandfather
that killed my father.

Killed him with venom

that had gained in potency
through years of patient waiting,

that could, with a single drop,

turn a full-grown banyan tree
in a flash into a crackling cloud of ash

suspended for one endless moment

over a fluted pillar of fire
before collapsing into a smoking ruin.
(Sarpa Satra, 19)

The second section, the longest at 765 lines, is titled “Jaratkaru

Speaks to Her Son Aastika”. But where Janamejaya’s preceding
speech appears to be self-reflexive, the Snake Woman’s piece is a
dramatic monologue, addressed throughout to Astika, even though he
never appears in person on the imaginary stage of Kolatkar’s poem,
and remains an implied interlocutor in the wings, as it were. This
extended address is divided into three numbered but untitled
160 Vinay Dharwadker

subsections of 177, 237, and 357 lines, respectively. As part of her

effort to persuade Astika to intervene and stop the ongoing holocaust,
in subsection 1 Jaratkaru mocks and criticizes three separate targets:
Janamejaya, for his vengefulness; the courtiers and priests around
him, for their spineless compliance with his wishes and for concocting
a spurious “Vedic snake sacrifice” to meet his demands; and Krishna
Dvaipayana, for his immoral and unethical complicity as the author of
the Mahābhārata, in glossing over the genocide of the Nagas without
demurral. In subsection 2, the old Nagini proceeds to attack two other
sets of characters in the conflict: Takshaka, for his irresponsible
absence during the Khandava Forest conflagration (probably because
of an extra-marital affair in Kurukshetra), his inability to save his
supposedly beloved wife, and his unscrupulous vengeance on
Arjuna’s descendants; and Arjuna and Lord Krishna together, for
playing like excitable boys with their fancy cosmic gadgetry, and
wantonly destroying the numerous species, rich botanical resources,
and delicate ecological balance of the Khandava Forest. In subsection
3, Jaratkaru initially zeroes in on the snake sacrifice itself, as a vicious
genocide that will result in the devastation, not only of the Nagas, but
also of the human race and the planet at large; and then goes on to
exhort Astika to end it, by reminding him, among other things, that the
yajña is merely a human ploy, that revenge is madness, that he is
young and clear-sighted and hence may be effective in negotiating
with Janamejaya, and that his near and dear ones have already begun
dying swiftly, one by one. Jaratkaru’s anger and bitterness reach a
crescendo as her monologue approaches its end:

This snake sacrifice,

this mockery, this grotesque parody
of the institution of yajnya

has got to stop ...

The very people

who one would’ve thought

had enough sense of decency

to hang their heads in shame
at what’s going on

turn out to be
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 161

the chief actors in this theatre

of the macabre ...

mumbling mantras or whatever,

and looking oh so dapper in black
– black dhotis, black shawls

and black pigskin slippers to match,

in which their vedic
costume designers have dressed them

with such uncanny appropriateness –

as rivers of snakefat
sputter, sizzle and flow ceaselessly

and the sickening smell of burning snakeflesh

– strong enough to make you gag –
continues to spread throughout the land.
(Sarpa Satra, 60-61)

The third (concluding) section of Kolatkar’s poem is relatively

short again at 72 lines, and is titled “The Ritual Bath”. Since it is
spoken by an unidentified narrator, and is directed explicitly at the
quasi-theatrical audience (the reader of the book), it is neither a
soliloquy nor a dramatic monologue but a rhetorical address with a
didactic intent. The commentator appears to straddle the time of the
epic action (in the remote, mediated past) as well as the time of the
poem’s reception or reading (in the immediate present), and hence is
our own contemporary: he emphasizes the cynicism and personal
greed underlying the sacrificial ritual, and ends with an invective
against the nexus of retribution and killing that cannot be broken
except by an act of voluntary goodwill.
Besides modally transforming the convoluted dialogic narrative of
the Mahābhārata into a brisk and lucid modern play for voices,
Kolatkar creates a multilayered English text that resonates at three
distinct levels. On the most general plane, Sarpa Satra is a poetic
critique of all war and violence, and of one of their most common
causes – the poisonous combination of hatred and revenge that
reproduces itself potentially without end. At a more specific level, the
poem is an explicit defence of the peace movement and the
environmentalist movement that emerged as global phenomena in the
162 Vinay Dharwadker

second half of the twentieth century, particularly in response to

nuclear proliferation, the Cold War and the Vietnam War, the
resurgence of multinational capital, and the unchecked destruction of
natural habitats by corporations and cartels.12 At a yet more specific
level, the poem’s phrasing uses the power of suggestion – as in the
classical Indian mode of dhvanī – to construct a broad parallel
between the characters and events represented in the Mahābhārata
and the historical figures and events in the American invasion of Iraq
in 2003. Kolatkar’s parallel is unmistakable and tinged
characteristically with black humour: the Nagas remind us of the Iraqi
people; Takshaka reminds us of Saddam Hussein; Parikshit is
reminiscent of George Bush (the father); and Janamejaya has a
striking resemblance to George W. Bush (the son), who alleged
publicly in 2002 that Saddam “tried to kill my Dad” and was
determined from the outset to execute the dictator.13
Kolatkar’s most important accomplishment, however, is his
critique of the Mahābhārata itself, specifically in Jaratkaru’s
monologue and in the overall design of Sarpa Satra. For a growing
community of modern readers, the epic’s core problem is its amoral
politics of power, domination, militarism, and force, especially its
multiple justifications of killing and slaughter, which come to a head
in the metaphysical and theological arguments of the Bhagavad-gītā,
embedded inside it. Traditionalist readings – sanctioned by Hindu
revivalism as well as Euro-American Orientalism in the second half of
the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth – have
dominated the international reception of the Gītā in colonial and post-
colonial times, sanitizing its message as a high point of poetic and
philosophical speculation in ancient India.14 In a Modernist reading,

12
This interpretation is broader than Hoskote’s, that “Kolatkar addressed mythic
themes that still resonate in India’s public life – ecological devastation, the military
occupation of far-flung provinces, and the staging of pogroms” (“Poetry Loses a
Major Presence”).
13
The acuteness of the revenge theme, in both the epic and this poem, is indexed by
the fact that Hussein, captured in December 2003, was hanged in December 2006,
well over two years after the publication of Sarpa Satra and after Kolatkar’s death.
14
The traditionalist and Orientalist valorizations converge, for instance, in The Song
of God: Bhagavad-gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood,
with an Introduction by Aldous Huxley, 1944, New York: New American Library,
1972; The Bhagavad Gita: With an Introductory Essay, Sanskrit Text, and English
Translation and Notes, trans. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1948, London: Allen and
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 163

however, Lord Krishna’s comprehensive deconstruction of the karmic

logic of what we now label as “murder” – a move that rhetorically
dismantles the attribution of agency and moral-ethical responsibility to
a subject who takes a life – amounts to a monstrous “aestheticization
of politics” comparable to that which Walter Benjamin, for instance,
imputed to mid-twentieth-century Italian and German Fascism.15 But
rather than assault the Mahābhārata’s metaphysics of violence at its
canonical core in the Gītā, Kolatkar chooses to attack it on the flanks:
he astutely picks a relatively obscure point of vulnerability in the Book
of Āstīka, and leaves us with an uncompromising rejection of the “epic
foundations of Hindu culture”, as constructed by sanctimonious, self-
styled traditionalists.16
The intriguing feature of this typically Modernist rejection of the
past by Kolatkar is that, even though it is articulated in a text written
in English, it is neither an Anglophone nor an Anglicized rejection of
an indigenous tradition on the grounds of its indigeneity. Sarpa Satra,
in fact, is an English version of a poem that was published several
months earlier in Marathi, under the title “Sarpasatra”, as one of the
twenty-five relatively long poems that make up the exceptionally large
book-length sequence called Bhijakī vahī. Given the further fact that
“Sarpasatra” appears to fit organically into the design of the Marathi
volume, it is likely that the poem was first conceived and written in
that language and in that context, and then rendered into English to
stand on its own. The English Sarpa Satra, however, is not merely a
verbal translation of a Marathi original: a comparison of the two texts
reveals that they are parallel poems, based on the same material and a
common poetic paradigm, but articulated along separate lines. Within
this parallelism, the Marathi poem is starker in its effects, and its
rejection of the Mahābhārata’s world view is more incisive,

Unwin, 1989; and The Bhagavad-Gita: With a Commentary Based on the Original
Sources, trans. R.C. Zaehner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
15
See the conclusion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”,
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York:
Harcourt, 1968.
16
Compare Bruce King, “Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar”: http://www.openspaceindia.org
/38Bruce_king01.htm (accessed 18 August 2007). Without the historical perspective
offered here, King prefers the more impressionistic claims that Sanskrit literature “is
allegorized, spiritualized, and treated as moral and historical truths [sic], and used as a
foundation of Hindu nationalism” (8), and that Kolatkar “carried on a running battle
with the ways in which India’s classical Sanskritic culture has been ... used as a basis
for social injustice, Hindu extremism, and ... bad art” (11).
164 Vinay Dharwadker

suggesting that the poet’s anti-traditionalism does not originate in, and
is not limited to, his choice of English as a medium of
communication.17

Jejuri (1976) and the post-colonial flâneur

Sarpa Satra provides the backdrop against which, through contrast as
well as continuity, certain unnoticed and neglected features of Jejuri
become visible. Kolatkar’s first book contains thirty-one relatively
short poems with individual titles, but they are brought together
sufficiently by an episodic narrative structure and a coextensive
thematic frame to seem like a unified lyric sequence. The thematic and
narrative grids are neatly articulated. In the course of a single day, the
anonymous protagonist of the book visits Jejuri, a temple-town in
central Maharashtra, roughly fifty kilometres southeast of Pune, that
has been associated with the popular rural folk-god Khandoba for the
greater part of the past millennium. He walks through the town and its
two temple-complexes (which are located on the nearby hills) over
several hours, closely observing a variety of things around him, and
recording his impressions and responses with precision and in detail.18
On the surface, he seems to be the eye and the consciousness through
which we vicariously experience a day in the life of Jejuri.
Most critics so far have interpreted this sequence in terms of its
discursive organization, stylistic elements, and narrative and thematic
components, attempting to pinpoint its elusive form and genre and the
corresponding poetic argument. As a consequence of their
methodological assumptions, they have tried to project it as a
Modernist quest poem, along the lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land;
as a post-colonial text that typifies an Anglophone or Anglicized
poet’s search for his or her roots in an indigenous culture; or as an
avant-garde experiment in styles of representation, combining
especially the techniques of imagism, surrealism, and concrete

17
This portion of my argument is vital because critics such as Ravindra Kimbahune,
Bhalchandra Nemade, M.K. Naik, and Shubhangi Raykar (all cited in note 21) have
claimed that Kolatkar’s anti-traditionalism is a product merely of Anglicization,
thereby implying contra-factually that there is no room for self-criticism in Indian
“tradition”.
18
Despite its debilitating flaws, Jejuri: A Commentary and Critical Perspectives, ed.
Shubhangi Raykar, Pune: Prachet Publications, 1995, is still useful for basic
information about Jejuri, its temple-complexes, and the worship of Khandoba.
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 165

poetry.19 Some readers, however, have construed the sequence

primarily in terms of its shadowy protagonist’s profile, characterizing
him variously as an alienated, Westernized city-dweller, an urban
tourist in the countryside, a secular Modernist, a sceptical pilgrim, an
agnostic, and even an atheist.20 In such readings, Jejuri becomes the
vehicle of a cultural outsider predisposed by his class, aesthetics, and
ideology to be hostile to a folk-religious tradition of pre-modern and
rural origins surviving under conditions of sustained
impoverishment.21
None of these interpretations, however, has the conceptual clarity,
self-consistency, or grounding in facts necessary to explain what
actually happens in Jejuri. If it were a quest poem, then its
protagonist, at a minimum, would actively seek out an object or
experience at his destination that he does not have or cannot find in
the place from where he starts. But this does not appear to be the case,
because both the journey and the duration in the temple-town are
remarkably open-ended, exploratory, and carefree – and hence,
conversely, also cannot be the indices of a failed quest. Moreover,
Kolatkar’s text cannot belong to the genre of Eliot’s high Modernist
condensed epic. The Waste Land is a response to a cultural crisis in

19
On the quest theme, see M.R. Satyanarayana, “Jejuri: Arun Kolatkar’s Waste
Land”, in Indian Poetry in English: A Critical Assessment, eds Vasant A. Shahane
and M. Sivaramakrishna, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1981, 72-83; and
Sudesh Mishra, “Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: Quest as Stasis”, Commonwealth Review,
II/1-2 (1990-91), 236-61. On Kolatkar’s experimentalism as linked to Euro-American
avant-gardes, see An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, 1945-1965, ed. and trans. Dilip
Chitre, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967; The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve
Modern Indian Poets, Mehrotra, “Introduction” and 52-55, and King, “Ezekiel,
Moraes, Kolatkar” (as well as King, “Two Bilingual Experimentalists”, cited in note
32). Of these, Mehrotra is the most insistent on confining Kolatkar to early-twentieth-
century Anglo-American models, a position I criticize later in this section.
20
See V.R. Kanadey, “Arun Kolatkar’s Poetry: An Exile’s Pilgrimage”, in Modern
Studies and Other Essays in Honour of Dr R.K. Sinha, eds R.C. Prasad and A.K.
Sharma, New Delhi: Vikas, 1987, 141-46; and Prashant K. Sinha and Shirish V.
Chindhade, “Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: An Atheist’s Pilgrimage”, New Quest, LXXIX
(Jan.-Feb. 1990), 45-49.
21
See especially Ravindra Kimbahune, “From Jejuri to Arun Kolatkar”, and
Bhalchandra Nemade, “Excerpts from ‘Against Writing in English: An Indian Point
of View’”, both execrably written and included in Raykar, Jejuri: A Commentary and
Critical Perspectives, 74-83 and 94-99. In this collection, M.K. Naik, “Jejuri: A
Thematic Study” (84-93), and Shubhangi Raykar, “Jejuri: Cross Cultural
Dimensions” (105-26), are also unfavourable to Kolatkar in parts.
166 Vinay Dharwadker

the Euro-American metropolis triggered by rapid and comprehensive

modernization at the turn of the twentieth century. Among other
precursors, it models its search for order, stability, meaning, and
coherence on the quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian romance, in a
pre-Reformation Christian world. It finds urban subjects and life-ways
disintegrating under the pressures of what Charles Baudelaire had
called “bourgeois modernity”, and rejects contemporary metropolitan
civilization even as its own quest peters out in incoherent
fragmentation.22 And it thereby engenders a further quest that Eliot
completes successfully only much later in his career, in places such as
the country house at Little Gidding (where mystical experience is still
possible), and at the village and chapel of East Coker (“where prayer
has been valid”).23
In contrast, Jejuri is a response to a crisis on a different scale in a
post-colony, resulting from the cumulative draining effects of
colonization and the incompleteness of modernization (or, what
Jurgen Habermas’ calls the unfinished project of modernity) over a
period of two or three centuries, and coming to a head in the latter half
of the twentieth century. It does not seek to recuperate an ideal order
in a pastoral past, or to valorize the presence of the past in rustic
harmony, and certainly does not pursue a Holy Grail, for which there
is no substantive equivalent in the Hindu, bhakti, or medieval Indian
world. It criticizes the slavishness, hypocrisy, cynicism, and petty
greed ensconced in the commerce of Indian religion and ritual and the
economy of a dilapidated countryside, but it does not outrightly reject
either urban modernity and contemporaneity or rural-folk tradition.
And it negotiates a set of tensions between country and city, past and
present, and dogmatic faith and secular reason that are at great
variance from the polarities mobilizing Eliot’s quest – a difference
that is perceptible, for instance, when Kolatkar takes up the theme of
water and aridity that also appears in The Waste Land:

a conduit pipe
runs with the plinth
turns a corner of the house

22
On Baudelaire, see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1987, especially Chapter 1.
23
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets, in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems,
1909-1962, London: Faber and Faber, 1963, 215; and also see:
https://www2.bc.edu/john-boylan/files/fourquartets.pdf (accessed 24 April 2013).
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 167

stops dead in its tracks

shoots straight up
keeps close to the wall
doubles back
twists around
and comes to an abrupt halt
a brass mouse with a broken neck

without ever learning

what chain of circumstances
can bring an able bodied millstone
to spend the rest of his life
under a dry water tap24

Moreover, Jejuri cannot be an expression of cultural alienation:

Kolatkar is equally at home in two languages and their cultures, and
even though he appears to be Westernized and urban, he is neither an
Anglophone nor an Anglicized poet, and hence does not need to set
out on a search for lost cultural roots. He is also not an atheist: a
significant amount of his poetry in Marathi and most of his
translations of other poets’ work from Marathi into English engage
explicitly with religious themes, spiritual concerns, and questions of
faith in the past as well as the present (Chirīmirī and Bhijakī vahī, in
fact, contain poems addressed directly to “the gods”). The attempts to
characterize him as an avant-garde poet are equally unproductive: they
force him into artistic moulds (such as imagism, surrealism, and
Dadaism) that are three-quarters-of-a-century old, that cannot
conceivably be regarded as experimental now, and that end up
projecting him as an imitative or derivative Modernist who does not
really possess the agency and autonomy to create something new or
original. By broader implication, such interpretations cast all post-
colonial writing as an exercise in belatedness and cultural dependency
with respect to an always-already advanced West – without even
acknowledging the existence of the kind of bilingual
cosmopolitanism, for instance, that Kolatkar represents, and that
subverts all such classifications. At the same time, this poet (like his
protagonist) is a secular Modernist as well as something of an urban
tourist in the countryside, but the innovative configurations of his

24
Arun Kolatkar, “Water Supply”, in Jejuri, Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 2001, 14.
168 Vinay Dharwadker

versions of secularism, Modernism, and urbanism ought to be charted

closely before they can be judged for what they are.
The straightforward point in this critical context is that Jejuri
displays an exceptionally lively visual quality that keeps its images,
vignettes, narrative elements, and multiple themes constantly in
motion.25 It mixes openness to experience with exploration and
discovery, playfulness and inventiveness with flamboyance, and wit
and humour with sharp-edged satire. It is also a poem of extraordinary
impersonality, in which the protagonist remains on the edge of the
reader’s consciousness, giving away nothing of the poet’s personal
feelings and convictions. It does not flinch while exposing the
deceptions, moral flaws, and internal contradictions of the objects of
its scrutiny; and it does not hesitate to sympathize with the wretched
and the innocent, to memorialize the beauty of the transient, the
fugitive, and the accidental, or to dance with nature’s vitality in the
middle of an exhausted human world. In order to understand this
unusual array of qualities, we need to rethink what the poem’s mode
of representation is, and what the characteristics of its elusive
protagonist are.
Technically, Jejuri is an ekphrastic poetic sequence, both in the
narrower sense of a verbal structure that imitates a work of plastic or
visual art, and in the wider sense of a text that borrows (and adapts)
the techniques of visual representation for specific literary effects. It
goes beyond the “classical ekphrasis” of W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of
Achilles” (which mimetically recreates the shield-maker Hephaestos’
handiwork), the surrealist ekphrasis of the painterly poems of, say,
David Gascoyne, Sir Ronald Penrose, and John Ashbery, and even the
collage of Eliot’s poem: it uses nothing but words to create a virtual
cinematic montage. Kolatkar’s sequence resembles, not so much a
succession of snapshots or still photographs, as a series of short and
medium-length scenes shot on location with a hand-held movie
camera – more than a decade before portable video-recording
technology became commonplace. The text of the poem we read is a
25
Mehrotra suggests that “The presiding deity of Jejuri is not Khandoba, but the
human eye” (The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, 54). For
Hoskote, Kolatkar “often viewed experience as if through a camera, rendering what
he saw and felt as a sequence of stills or as deftly edited footage” (“Poetry Loses a
Major Presence”). But both these insights – which ought to have been starting-points
for analysis rather than conclusions – need to be unpacked theoretically, as later in
this section.
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 169

composite of the discontinuous voice-over of a narrator behind the

camera, passages in the voices of people in front of the lens, and the
poet’s verbal representations of what we would see and experience if
we were actually watching such a film. It is as though Kolatkar had
decided to create a documentary of his visit to Jejuri, letting the roving
impersonal eye of the camera zoom in and pan out at will as he
walked through the town, its temples, and their environs, recording
everything of interest along the way. In this sense, Jejuri is not just a
discursive structure but a quasi-three-dimensional artefact fashioned
by a multimedia imagination – not merely a modern lyric sequence
but a poem composed in a mixed mode, with a sizable number of
lyric, narrative, and dramatic segments spliced into a coherent
ekphrastic montage. The cinematic quality of Kolatkar’s writing
becomes vivid, for example, in the fourth part of the book’s final
poem, “The Railway Station”:

4: the station master

the booking clerk believes in the doctrine

of the next train
when conversation turns to time
he takes his tongue
and hands it to you across the counter
and directs you to a superior
intelligence

the two headed station master

belongs to a sect
that rejects every timetable
not published in the year the track was laid
as apocryphal
but interprets the first timetable
with a freedom that allows him to read
every subsequent timetable between
the lines of its text
he keeps looking anxiously at the setting sun
as if the sunset were a part of a secret ritual
and he didn’t want anything to go wrong with it
at the last minute
finally he nods like a stroke
between a yes and a no
and says
170 Vinay Dharwadker

all timetable ever published

along with all timetables yet to be published
are simultaneously valid
at any given time and on any given track
insofar as all the timetables were inherent
in the one printed
when the track was laid

and goes red

in both his faces
at once
(Jejuri, 55-56)

This scene can be immediately visualized as a vignette in a piece of

surreal or magical-realist movie-making, with a series of special
effects optically literalizing the characters and their actions for darkly
comic effects.26
If this is what the poem resembles, then who is its protagonist? He
cannot be only the camera’s gaze, because his voice – which is the
enabling medium for several other voices – is also on the soundtrack
that accompanies the visuals unreeling before our eyes. In this sense,
it is plausible to think of him as an auteur who has crafted an
imaginative – imaginary – documentary film on Jejuri, recording his
perceptions and experiences with great detachment and precision,
almost like a cultural anthropologist in the field. But, at the same time,
he retains the air of a casual tourist from the city on a jaunt in the
countryside, whiling away his time with the curiosities of a
ramshackle town. In this combination of qualities and circumstances,
he most resembles a flâneur in the symbolist and modernist traditions,
but with important differences from the historical paradigm.27
26
Hoskote sums this up succinctly: “Kolatkar treated literature, not as a language art,
but as a plastic art; he sculpted poetry out of language with the chisels of surprise and
epiphany” (“Poetry Loses a Major Presence”).
27
My interest in this paradigm was stimulated by the “Cosmopolitan Cultures:
Language, Literature, and Theory” Interdisciplinary Interest Circle, sponsored by The
Language Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Spring 2005. For illuminating
discussions, my thanks to Lucienne Loh, on flânerie; Aparna Dharwadker and
Rebecca Walkowitz, on cosmo-modernism; and B. Venkat Mani, on
cosmopolitanism. After I had formulated this portion of my argument, I discovered
that Chaudhuri, in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, had suggested that the protagonist of Jejuri
“speaks in the voice of the flâneur”, but had not expanded upon this insight. Also see
note 9 above.
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 171

In the prototype defined by Charles Baudelaire (in Flowers of Evil

and Paris Spleen), the flâneur is “a lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man
about town’” (OED), who also happens to be a poet and a visionary,
and for whom the loitering – the “unhousedness”, in George Steiner’s
translation of Martin Heidegger’s conception of modern human beings
as irreducibly Unheimlich – is a prerequisite for poetry. As Anna
Balakian says of Baudelaire:

He worked out of his fifty-six consecutive apartments located in

diverse sections of Paris: overlooking the Tuileries, giving him vistas
of urban poverty, or insights into various slices of society. Walking
through the neighborhoods of Paris, he observed animals rotting in the
street, the homeless alcoholics, drug users, or assassins loitering in the
gutters. The beggars, the blind, the ragpickers, the skinny old ladies
and the young famished prostitutes, all became mediums through
which he could convey his changing moods. He turned abstractions
like Beauty, Sorrow, Death, the Ideal into existential intimacies.28

In a broader European context, a flâneur is a man of the city and a

man of leisure (even though he may not be wealthy), whose main
occupation is to walk the streets, looking at shop windows, watching
people, observing things and events, and gathering information about
the latest objects, fashions, and trends. A connoisseur rather than a
consumer, he is a keen and clever observer who prides himself on his
up-to-date knowledge of the world around him, and whose cleverness
manifests itself in his sharp wit and lacerating judgement. But his
leisure leaves him free to follow his fancy and curiosity, to take the
time to go where the impulse of the moment takes him, and his
activities are therefore aimless and directionless: purposiveness is
alien to flânerie.29 Neither pressed for time nor driven by a purpose,
the European flâneur is often vulnerable to boredom and ennui
(Baudelaire’s favourite complaint); he is easily disaffected by old,
familiar, and outdated things, and is always in search of something
new and exciting, which thoroughly engages him – until it, too,

28
Introduction to The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen: Poems by Charles
Baudelaire, trans. William H. Cosby, Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1991, 3.
29
This is what creates the “leisurely pace” that Mehrotra finds in the “enchanted
circle” of Jejuri (The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, 53);
and, to jump ahead, the completely “relaxed” posture that King praises in Kala Ghoda
Poems (“Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar”).
172 Vinay Dharwadker

becomes old and familiar. He is a variable, composite figure who may

be insolent and provocative, flamboyant yet insouciant, or a poser and
a dandy: his whole dynamic is to bring his sensibility into contact with
his surroundings, to dramatize his personality in the interaction
between his taste and the objects it savours. The turn-of-the-twentieth-
century flâneur is thus a high-precision instrument of modernity,
contemporaneity, and immediacy – his minute and extensive
knowledge of goods, materials, people, ideas, fashions, and trends
here and now enables him to judge things audaciously and instantly, to
tell the worthwhile from the worthless, the genuine from the fake, the
real from the illusory.
Kolatkar’s protagonist in Jejuri has many of these characteristics,
but he also incorporates features that are unique to him. Foremost is
the fact that he embodies, to borrow S.K. Desai’s words, “the unity of
consciousness” necessary for the organization of such a poem,
representing “not a personality but a medium” for which the “primary
concern is the relationship between [itself] ... and its immediate
object”.30 Like Baudelaire, he is metropolitan and au courant, but
more like Arthur Rimbaud (especially in A Season in Hell), he poses
as a sceptic and a nonconformist, a rebel, a vagrant, a social renegade.
More broadly, like the French symbolists, he exercises “the power to
concentrate reality as with a burning-glass, to draw the scattered
impressions of the human mind into a focus”; and, like the later
Anglo-American imagists, he presents “unadorned object[s] without
moralizing or other forms of discourse”.31 His location, however, is
not the Euro-American metro-pole but the post-colonial periphery,
while his sensibility is not that of an Anglophone but of a bilingual
cosmopolitan, one of whose cultural worlds, from a Euro-centric
perspective, is somewhat marginal. Moreover, the objects of his gaze
are not the latest, shiny goods in the city, but their opposites: old and
outworn wares in a small, inconsequential town that is evidently out-
of-date, with no real hope of resuscitating itself. Most of the things he
encounters are broken and useless, and many of the people he meets

30
S.K. Desai, “Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: A House of God”, in Raykar, Jejuri: A
Commentary and Critical Perspectives, 61, 62-63. The essay unfortunately is uneven,
but offers the core of a cogent account of Kolatkar’s “impersonality” and its relation
to “consciousness”.
31
Desai attributes both statements to the British poet-critic John Wain, but without
citing his source (“Kolatkar’s Jejuri”, 67).
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 173

are imposters and fakes, whom he does not hesitate to judge as such.
But even in the midst of despair and disrepair, he finds several things
that are animated by an unexpected energy, innocence, and resilience:
an ancient beggar-woman outside a temple, a legend about Ajamil and
the Tigers, a butterfly, a flock of roosters jumping in a field, a
mechanical railway signal with a mind of its own. The beggar, for
instance, turns out to be disarmingly “shatter proof”:

An old woman grabs

hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.

She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.

She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won’t let you go.

You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and face her

with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,

‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.

Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on,

the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.

And the temples crack.
And the sky falls
174 Vinay Dharwadker

with a plateglass clatter

around the shatter proof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced

to so much small change
in her hand.
(“An Old Woman”, in Jejuri, 21-22)

What the poet – like his shadowy double, the protagonist – takes
away from the temple-town includes an unexpected empathy for the
dispossessed (“the wretched of the earth”, in Franz Fanon’s phrase);
an immersion in the self-renewing vitality unflaggingly at work in the
world of animals, plants, humans, and even inanimate things; and an
intense pleasure in the makings and workings of myths, legends, and
stories.32 Each of these positive outcomes of Jejuri became central to
the composition of Kala Ghoda Poems over the next three decades,
and led the poet to an overarching progressive or left-liberal universal
humanism by the end of his career.

Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) and the museum of poverty

Kala Ghoda Poems is Kolatkar’s final book in English and the last
book he published in his lifetime. Its title refers to Kala Ghoda, a
locality in the commercial district of Bombay that is circumscribed by
the University of Bombay, Lion Gate, Shyama Prasad Mukherjeee
Chowk, and the Oval Maidan, in the “Fort” area of the city, not far
from the Gateway of India and the Taj Hotel. Its landmarks include
Elphinstone College, the David Sassoon Library, Esplanade Mansion
(the former Watsons Hotel), the Jehangir Art Gallery, and the Max
Mueller Bhavan, as well as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Sangrahalaya
(formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) and the National Gallery of
Modern Art – together with the triangular traffic island that once
lodged a black equestrian statue from which it draws its name (kālā
32
Naik stresses the second factor, identifying it as “the life-principle” (elan vital) that
predates “both ancient religious tradition” (represented in Jejuri’s temples and
lifeways) and “modern industrial civilization” (symbolized by its railway station), and
that is characterized, in his words, by vigour, energy, joy, gusto, spontaneity, and
freedom (“Jejuri: Thematic Study”, 91). So also, Bruce King, for whom Jejuri
“contrasts deadness of perception with the ability to see the divine in the natural
vitality of life” (“An Excerpt from ‘Two Bilingual Experimentalists’”, in Raykar,
Jejuri: A Commentary and Critical Perspectives, 104).
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 175

ghodā in Marathi and Hindi, as also in other Indian languages,

literally means “black horse”). The original statue was removed from
its colonial location in 1965, and replaced with one of Shivaji; but in
the 1980s the latter was moved to its present location near the
Gateway of India, and in the following decade the empty traffic island
was converted into a parking lot, with kerbstones painted alternately
black and yellow running along its three sides. Among the buildings in
its vicinity is the one that used to house The Wayside Inn, the
restaurant (across the street from the Max Mueller Bhavan) where, for
some four decades, Kolatkar met friends regularly once or twice a
week for a post-colonial salon.
Kala Ghoda Poems is an agglomeration of 137 mostly short pieces
presented as individual poems, sequences, and sequences-within-
sequences, making up a total of twenty-eight poems with titles. The
poems vary by mode of representation, voice and tone, verse-form,
syntactic structure, and verbal texture. Some, for instance, are interior
monologues assigned to characters who are imagined or fabulated to
different degrees (a pariah or “pi-dog”, a drug dealer, a personification
of the New Year), whereas some are ekphrastic in technique, narrative
in structure, but dramatic in effect, such as “The Ogress”, who:

has always been a kind

of an auxiliary mother,
semi-official nanny

and baby-bather-in-chief
to a whole chain of children
born to this street ...

and whom we watch as she sits on the edge of a sidewalk and bathes a
street-child “cradled lengthwise / and face down / on her spindly
legs”:

As grown-up fingers soap him,

grab ass,
scrub and knead his flesh,

the headlong boy,

end-stopped by the woman’s feet
pointing skyward,
176 Vinay Dharwadker

nose down between her ankles,

and restricted
by her no-win shins,

is overrun by swirling
galaxies of backsliding foam
that collide,

form and re-form,

slither up and down
and wrap around

the curved space

of his slippery body,
black as wet slate.
(Kala Ghoda Poems, 39-42)

In contrast, some of the poems are multilayered narrative

sequences in a fluid, conversational style, and still others are
contemplations in the voice of a persona resembling the poet, or
descriptive lyrics in the voice of a disembodied, omniscient observer.
All the poems are in rhythmical free verse, most being based on the
colloquial phrase (the speaking voice) rather than the musical phrase
(the singing voice); many of them are arranged in tercets using a short
line, a predominantly prose syntax, and a continuous discursive
argument; but some use verse-paragraphs modelled on the couplet, the
quatrain, or longer stanza forms; whereas others prefer a fragmentary
syntax, with discontinuous phrases of different lengths pasted into a
surrealistic montage. Among the most memorable pieces in the
collection is “The Boomtown Lepers’ Band”:

Trrrap a boom chaka

shh chaka boom tap

Ladies and gentlemen (crash),

here comes (bang), here comes (boom)
here comes the Boomtown Lepers’ Band,
drumsticks and maracas tied to their hands
bandaged in silk and the finest gauze,
and clutching tambourines in scaly paws.
Trrrap a boom chaka
shh chaka boom trap
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 177

Whack.
Let the city see its lion face
in the flaky mirror of our flesh.
Slap a tambourine (thwack),
let cymbals clash.
Come on, let the coins shake and rattle and roll
in our battered aluminium bowl –
as our noseless singer
lets out a half-hearted howl
to belt out a tuneless song
for a city without soul.

Here we come (bang)

and there we go (boom)
pushing the singer in a wheelbarrow.

Trrrap a boom chaka

shh chaka boom tap
Trrrap a boom chaka
shh chaka boom trapp
(Kala Ghoda Poems, 124)

As these examples indicate, Kala Ghoda Poems is a large book

teeming with formal, tonal, and generic energy, and it reproduces this
protean quality at the level of content and structure also. Unlike the
material in Sarpa Satra and Jejuri, the poems in the collection do not
remain inside a neatly-etched narrative circumference or a
circumscribing theme: rather, they move by association and
disjunction from one subject to another, sometimes retaining only
remote connections to place and perspective. All the poems in this
sense are about life in the streets around the Kala Ghoda traffic-island-
turned-parking-lot, which Kolatkar observed closely over fifty years,
starting with his residence and early work as an aspiring artist around
this locality before his first marriage (to Darshan Chhabda).33 The
degree of thematic and topographic interrelation among the individual
poems, sequences, and sub-sequences changes as we proceed through
the book, so that some clusters are tautly interwoven while others are

33
Kolatkar’s first wife, an artist and a writer, is the sister of painter, film-maker, film-
distributor, and art-impressario Bal Chhabda (a founding member, with M.F. Husain
and others, of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Mumbai in the early 1950s). The
marriage lasted from 1953 to 1966. For details, see Chitre, “Remembering Kolatkar”.
178 Vinay Dharwadker

not. This structural flexibility generates a “variable rhythm” in the

reader’s “hospitable imagination” (to use Jorge Luis Borges’ phrase),
underscored by a shifting tempo of images and ideas, repetitions and
variations, pauses and resumptions, digressions and returns. Kala
Ghoda Poems is thus the most musical of Kolatkar’s volumes in
English as well as Marathi, coalescing around a principle of
organization analogous to that of an extended composition in
instrumental Jazz, or of a rāga rendered in full by a vocalist in the
Hindustani classical tradition.34
A number of disparate yet interconnected themes converge upon
this mutating form. The majority of poems and sequences represent
human subjects as individuals and as types, ranging from municipal
sweepers, toilet attendants, food vendors, and delivery men to idlers,
addicts, con-men, drug pushers, beggars, and lepers. Interlaced with
them are poems that touch upon a variety of birds and insects, animals
and pests, plants and trees, flowers and leaves, and fruits and
vegetables, together with an assortment of buildings and institutions,
spaces and surfaces, and exteriors and façades. Woven into these
intersections and interstices is a series of reflections, meditations,
stories, scenes, musings, dramatizations, sermons, diatribes,
catalogues, and evocations that shift continually from poverty and
survival to desire and intoxication, from dispossession and
abandonment to art and trash, from food and music to city and nation,
from politics and globalization to colonialism and history.
The two foremost constellations of themes on this spectrum relate
broadly to garbage and poverty. Garbage or rubbish emerges as a
primary symbol in Kala Ghoda Poems, resonating along with all its
associated terms (none of which are true synonyms) and thereby
becoming the core of a large cluster of concepts that includes trash,
waste, refuse, junk, litter, rubble, dirt, filth, muck, dross, detritus,
scraps, rags, hodgepodge, melange, scum, dregs, rabble, and riffraff.
Over some 162 pages, Kolatkar exploits all these reverberations,
reminding us that each of these words can be applied not only to
inanimate objects and materials, but also to animate as well as dead
things, whether they are forms of human, animal, or vegetable life. In

34
The musical dimension of Kala Ghoda Poems becomes explicit in Gowri
Ramnayaran’s play, Dark Horse (2006), which dramatizes Kolatkar’s life using a
dozen poems from the book, but incorporates Carnatic – rather than Hindustani –
classical music. (As of January 2008, I had not seen a performance of the play.)
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 179

all of these denotations and connotations, “garbage” represents

anything that is rejected, discarded, abandoned, or thrown away
because it is unwanted, useless, worthless, impure, illicit, ugly,
distasteful, unpleasant, decayed, rotten, broken, dilapidated,
desecrated, or used up. The panorama of street life in and around Kala
Ghoda and its triangular parking lot thus unfolds as a cinematic and
verbal drama of discarded human beings – traumatized and worthless
men, sickly women, wasted alcoholics, abandoned drug users,
unwanted children, deranged and dysfunctional adults, sexually
exploited under-age girls, underfed wage-labourers, unemployed
young men, vagrant adolescents, decrepit old men and women,
deformed and diseased couples, criminals and prostitutes, bullies and
drug traffickers – all mixed up with and inseparable from abused,
starved, and abandoned animals, and piles of rotting bio-trash, paper,
plastic, and mechanical junk.
By the end of the book, these polyphonic associations of garbage
add up to three overlapping and overwhelming arguments. First, that
the numerous varieties of trash in Bombay’s public places pervade
every nook and crevice of social, economic, and cultural space so that
art itself, for example, becomes indistinguishable from garbage and
garbage, in turn, becomes indistinguishable from art – transitory,
fugitive, and contingent. Second, that garbage appears continuously in
the streets and then disappears continuously into landfills to create
new land for building, underscoring the historical fact that Bombay
has been built since the eighteenth century on rubbish that was used to
fill the creeks between its seven original islands, so that the edifice of
the great metropolis today stands on a foundation of garbage. And,
finally, that the production and reproduction of garbage, in all its
senses, is an infinite process, so that “the more you clean Bombay, /
the more Bombay there is to clean” (31) – without a conceivable end.
In contrast to Kolatkar’s symbolism of garbage, his treatment of
poverty as a theme is more indirect and discursive than overt and
poetic. One inescapable conclusion of Kala Ghoda Poems is that
poverty in various aspects – which are economic, political, historical,
social, and cultural in their origins as well as manifestations – is the
most fundamental problem confronting modernity and post-
colonialism. Kolatkar’s sardonic references to globalization and the
cosmo-politics of the new millennium, especially in the long thirty-
one-part sequence entitled “Breakfast at Kala Ghoda”, suggest that, in
180 Vinay Dharwadker

his view, the “new world order” that emerged after the fall of the
Berlin Wall has only increased the disparity between the poor and the
wealthy, and multiplied the reach of poverty in urban India. His
portrayal of the discarded, dispossessed, derelict, deranged, and
dysfunctional inhabitants of Kala Ghoda also implies that, in his eyes,
the impoverishment of so many has left a vast, merciless rip across
India’s social fabric: we need to figure out afresh, from the bottom up,
how we are going to deal with the dynamics of abandonment and
rehabilitation, exploitation and restitution, deprivation and restoration,
addiction and detoxification, wilful neglect and conscientious care on
such a massive scale.
An attentive reading of Kala Ghoda Poems has unexpected
cumulative effects. In the miniature allegory of the book’s opening
sequence, the triangular-traffic-island-turned-parking-lot resembles
the dangling triangle of the synthetic peninsula of Bombay in modern
maps; the pi-dog or pariah who ruminates in the first few pages also
embodies the city, so that his dog-consciousness thinking aloud is the
city’s historical consciousness speaking; and, by extension, the city’s
body is a dog’s body, and the life it leads is a stray dog’s life. On a
larger scale, Kolatkar’s construction of parallels (which are not
allegories) implies that the volume’s literal representation of street life
in a particular locality of Bombay is a synecdoche for life in the city
as a whole, for life in every Indian town and city, and for life in post-
colonial India in general. On a more abstract plane, the microcosm of
Kala Ghoda faithfully reproduces the defining characteristics of the
macrocosm of the nation, in which the lives of the homeless and the
dispossessed, individually and on the aggregate, mirror the lives of
those who render them homeless and rob them of a humane existence.
At the same time, in Kolatkar’s view, the fleeting, fugitive lives of the
characters and creatures thrown together by sheer accident on the
city’s inhospitable streets – like the life of the shattered crone in Jejuri
– suggest that something like a “spirit”, whether human or non-human
or trans-human, finds ways to survive (and even thrive) in conditions
of inhuman deprivation.
Placed against the backdrop of his lifework in English and Marathi,
Kala Ghoda Poems reveals an inner logic to its mode and form. The
poet in this book is also a flâneur, but now he appears as a
Baudelairean resident and citizen of the metropolis, which is
transfigured right before his eyes. In an experimental Marathi poem of
 Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 181

metropolitan flânerie entitled “Āg” (“Fire”), laid out as a fragmentary

collage containing hallucinatory images of Bombay – probably
composed in the early 1970s, and published in Aruna kolhatakarachyā
kavitā – Kolatkar had imagined the city as a terrifying museum, whose
monumental buildings and structures were “beasts of prey” ready to
“tear into me” and “eat me alive”. In Kala Ghoda Poems that
carnivorous cityscape mutates into a museum of poverty, in which
living things as well as inanimate objects become the nightmarish
artefacts on display for the flâneur’s flinching gaze.

Kolatkar’s English oeuvre thus articulates a historical vision grounded

in the kind of uncompromising anti-traditionalism that has
characterized a strand of symbolist, Modernist, avant-garde, and
postmodernist writing continuously for the past hundred-and-fifty
years. His imagination and sensibility are anchored firmly in the
present, but his anti-traditional presentness dissects and diagnoses the
past without being predisposed to reject it out of hand. His rejection of
the past, in fact, grows out of a fiercely independent critical evaluation
of the legacies of tradition and history, of what is transmitted,
transmuted, and deposited in the repository of culture. His critical
independence, in turn, is founded upon the impersonality of his
poetry, which removes all intrusions of an existential self from the
sphere of the imagination. Sarpa Satra, Jejuri, and Kala Ghoda
Poems are deeply impersonal books, which do not contain a single
personal, autobiographical, or confessional poem, and hence do not
contain a true lyric. Of these, Sarpa Satra and Jejuri critically
(re)examine the older portions of the past; (re)assess what the ancient
epic tradition and the medieval folk-religious tradition amount to in
the present; and work out their respective rejections in detail, using a
variety of artistic means, including narrative and dramatic
representation and the poetic equivalents of documentation and
argument. In partial contrast, Kala Ghoda Poems applies this
impersonal method to colonial history and post-colonial
contemporaneity, and arrives at an equally comprehensive critical
rejection of the present – which underscores the point that Kolatkar’s
rejection of the past is not merely dogmatic as such rejections tend to
be in some forms of Modernism and the avant-garde.
274 Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English

Neela Bhattacharya Saxena is Professor of English and Women’s

Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Her publications
include In the Beginning IS Desire: Tracing Kali’s Footprints in
Indian Literature; “Gynocentric Theology of Tantric Hinduism: A
Meditation upon the Devi”, in Oxford Handbook of Feminist
Theology; “Mystery, Wonder and Knowledge in the Triadic Figure of
Mahavidya Chinnamasta”, in Woman and Goddess in Hinduism;
“Shekhinah on the ‘Plane of Immanence’: An Intimation of the Indic
Great Mother in the Hebraic Wholly Other”, in the Journal of Indo-
Judaic Studies; and “Peopling an Unaccustomed Earth: Jhumpa
Lahiri’s Supreme Fictional Journeys into Human Conditions”, in
Argument.

Vinay Dharwadker is Professor in the Department of Languages and

Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2008 his
Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (Penguin Classics: 2003, 2005) won
India’s multi-year national translation prize, and his contributions to
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture (2007)
received the American Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne
Award for best reference work. He is the South Asia editor of the new
Norton Anthology of World Literature, 3rd edition, 6 volumes (2012).
His recent essays are on “Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism” (Ashgate,
2011), “Constructions of World Literature in Colonial and
Postcolonial India” (Routledge, 2012), and “Censoring the
Ramayana” (PMLA, May 2012).

Sonjoy Dutta-Roy is Professor, Department of English Studies,

University of Allahabad. His work on the Poetry of Yeats, Tagore,
Whitman and Eliot (Re)Constructing the Poetic Self , the outcome of a
Fulbright Fellowship, was published by Pencraft International in 2001.
His essays have been published in journals in India and the USA
including Journal of Modern Literature (Philadelphia) and Yeats Eliot
Review (Arkansas). He is a poet and has published three volumes of
poetry, The Absent Words and Into Grander Space from Writers
Workshop, Calcutta and Diary Poems and Story Teller’s Rhymes from
Author House, Bloomington, USA. He is involved in Group Theatre
and has directed several Indian plays in recent years.
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