Arun Kolatkar - Historical Imagination
Arun Kolatkar - Historical Imagination
(1932-2004)
VINAY DHARWADKER
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
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
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
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
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:
turn out to be
Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 161
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
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
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
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
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
24
Arun Kolatkar, “Water Supply”, in Jejuri, Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 2001, 14.
168 Vinay Dharwadker
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
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”:
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.
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”:
is overrun by swirling
galaxies of backsliding foam
that collide,
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.
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
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
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