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EVOLUTION OF INDIAN ENGLISH WRITING WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO

ARUN KOLATKAR’S THE BUS

ANKUR SARKAR

ROLL NO.: 1703400002, PAPER: ENGL803C

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, TRIPURA UNIVERSITY

Indian English writing has a quite short but extremely charged history. Sake Dean Mahomed

wrote the first book by an Indian in English, called The Travels of Dean Mahomed which was

published in 1793. Though, most of the early Indian writing in English was based on non-

fictional work, such as biographies and political essays. This began to change in the late 19 th

century, when famous Indian authors who wrote mostly in their mother tongue, began to try

their hand at writing in English. In the early 20 th century Rabindranath Tagore began

translating his works from Bengali to English. Bankim Chandra was the first Indian who

wrote a novel in English as well as Kisari Mohan Ganguli translated Mahabharata into

English for the first time. Starting in 1917 Dhan Gopal Mukerji wrote lots of children’s

stories that were set in India. He was awarded the Newbery medal in the year 1928 for Gay

Neck, the Story of a Pigeon. Soon after, a new generation of Indian pre-independent as well

as post-independent authors, who wrote almost exclusively in English, hit the bookshelves,

beginning in 1935 with R.K. Narayan’s work Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s

work Untouchable. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura followed in 1938. And also, Arun Kolatkar’s

collection poems titled Jejuri was published in 1976.

Arun Kolatkar was a postmodern Indian English Poet who played an important role in

evolution of Indian English writing. His work Jejuri published in 1976. Arun Kolatkar's

writing in English basically his poems reveal insignificance of life, loss of identity, revenge

motif and slightly superstitious attitude. He was also a bilingual poet writing in Marathi and
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English. His poems are quite different in structure, themes as well as styles. Arun Kolatkar in

his poems finds himself irresolute between the duality of his inevitable cultural as well as

traditional roots on one hand and his predominantly westernized education on the other side.

As a result, the poetic persona is faced with a unique dilemma, refusing resolution, between

two opposing value systems generated by these two absurd positions. The strategy of

disowning one’s own chromosomal or genetically embedded culture and tradition for a newly

acquired and more modern culture corresponding to a newer education being rendered

impossible, the poet has to continue in a state of unsolved dichotomy. Poet Arun Kolatkar on

his part denies any solution to this duality which in turn, presents itself as his immediate

poetic reality. The state of irresolute undecidability and lack of resolution to any single

monolithic alternative is definitely a recent trend in Indian English poetry, though the

problematic of a dual and dichotomous existence is itself older. This has ushered in what is

popularly termed in critical parlance as postmodernism in Indian English Poetry. Faith,

religion, tradition and heritage are set against rationality, logic, science, and skepticism

corresponding to the cultural roots and new education respectively. In his poem The Bus,

taken from the collection of poems titled Jejuri, Kolatkar depicts this dualism symbolically

through a double role, that of the pilgrim and the tourist. A close reading of this poem

illustrates the hypothesis that this paper seeks to prove.

The Bus is the opening poem of the sequence of thirty-one sections of Jejuri which gives an

elucidated description of a pilgrimage from Pune or Bombay to the small town of Jejuri

where there is a temple dedicated to Khandoba, believed to be an incarnation of Lord Shiva.

The poem deals with the protagonist’s experience of a Bus journey to Jejuri. As the poem

begins, it gives out a description of the bus journey, which is a night trip of several hours.

While his co-passengers are all ‘pilgrims’ who are on this journey on devotional purpose, the

poet makes it clear that he is just a tourist whose ‘devotion’ lies in visiting the place to study
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the stone and bronze images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Here lies his dilemma, He finds

himself among a bunch of pilgrims with distinctively evident ‘marks’ of their religious

‘subscription’, which imply their position in the hierarchy as well, whereas his journey to

Jejuri is fuelled by his modern ‘rational’ education. The poet, at some point of the bumpy

ride, finds his rationality at risk of being merged with the devotional purpose of the journey

of most of his co-passengers. This bumpy ride is the struggle to sow the seeds of modern

education while being in a same journey with the stigmatised Old times.

This paradigm of duality is also the axiomatic point on which Kolatkar’s Jejuri poems in

general and The Bus in particular is based. This paper attempts to decipher the intricate fabric

of ideas underlying Kolatkar’s The Bus from this perspective. Arun Kolatkar strikes the

conscious reader with a tremendous sense of ambiguity and multivalence in a poem which is

cinematographic in its frame like movement both along the physical and mental plane.

The Bus is a purely descriptive poem which does not give us much of information about the

purpose of the journey, apart from telling us that it is going to Jejuri and that it is a night

journey, with a cold wind blowing all the way. There are a few humorous touches in this

poem The Bus as, for instance, the protagonist finding two reflections of himself in the two

glasses of the spectacles which the old man sitting opposite him is wearing. We also learn

that it is a bumpy ride at the end of which the passengers get off the bus without anybody

stepping inside the old man's head and this is another touch of witness and humour.

There was also an Indianness to the work of Arun Kolatkar, in terms of the words he used

and his way of writing. This resonated with the new, but growing ranks of Indians reading

English literature. His works were the forerunners to the wonderful diversity of Indian

writing in English that we see today and this proforma will continue tomorrow.
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WORKS CITED

Sarangi, Jaydip (ed). Exploration in Indian English Poetry, New Delhi: Authors Press, 2006

Iyengar, K.R.Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Delhi: Sterling Pub.Pvt. Ltd. 2003