Toothsoup

I have this slight obsession with Arun Kolatkar at the moment and have been wanting to get some of his books for myself. I’ve managed to locate a copy of Kala Ghoda Poems and hopefully I’ll get down to buying it this month. Meanwhile, Kk very sweetly crawled the internet to find me some of his poems.  Here is a combination of his and my efforts.

Introduction to Kolatkar, adapted from Wikipedia

Arun Kolatkar (1932 - 2004) wrote in both  Marathi and English. Although a major influence on Marathi poetry, he is internationally known for his first book of English poetry, Jejuri (1976), a sequence of 31 poems about a visit to the temple-town of Jejuri in Maharashtra. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1977, and his Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award (2004).

Radically experimental, his Marathi poetry displayed the influences of European avant-garde trends like surrealism, expressionism and Beat generation poetry. These poems are oblique, whimsical and at the same time dark, sinister, and exceedingly funny. Some of these characteristics can be seen in Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems in English, but his early Marathi poems are far more radical, dark and humorous than his English poems.

Kolatkar read widely and unsystematically. When asked by an interviewer, “Who are your favourite poets and writers?”, he set out a huge multi-lingual list. While the answer is part rebuff, the list is indicative of the wide, fragmented sources he may have mined, and is worth quoting in full: “Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, C, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller … Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.”

Pankaj Mishra on Kolatkar (Times Literary Supplement, 3 December 2004)

Indian poetry in English has a longer and more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English, and may finally become better known in the West when Arun Kolatkar’s narrative poem, Jejuri (1976), is published by the New York Review of Books in 2005. Kolatkar published two volumes of poetry, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra (both by Pras Prakashan) before his untimely death this year. Moving deftly from street life in Bombay to Hindu myths, these last poems confirm his cult reputation as the greatest Indian poet of his generation.

CP Surendran on Kolatkar (Tehelka, 9 October 2004)

Kolatkar was a private man in a world that had become manically public.

Nilanjana S Roy on Kolatkar (Business Standard, 28 September 2004)

He wasn’t quite as reclusive as reputation had it; resistant to intrusion, certainly, as his notorious refusal to install a telephone in his house demonstrated.

But his friends knew where to find him: the former adman (he worked at Lintas for a long while) had a favourite restaurant in Kala Ghoda, and no doubt future devotees of his work will make pilgrimages there to go and genuflect at the tables. I imagine his ghost will look on sardonically.

Bruce King on Kolatkar’s early poetry (’2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar’, 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

Kolatkar early explored the possibilities of the highly imagistic and its opposite, the anti-poetic. His best-known early poem is ‘Three Cups of Tea’, supposedly orginally written in Bombay-Hindi and translated into an amusing American tough-guy realism that sounds like something written in the 1930s or 40s:

i want to my pay i said
to the manager
you’ll get paid said
the manager
but not before the first
don’t you know the rules?

While ‘Three Cups of Tea’ has attracted much attention in India because it was in a very local form of Hindi before being translated by the author into a particular kind of American realism, I think it really shows Kolatkar’s love of parody, tone, postures, and language; this is a poet with a sense of humour and a delight in pastiche.

Amit Chaudhuri on Jejuri (The Guardian, 21 October 2006)

In December 1973, Kolatkar began to write Jejuri, which is, on its most obvious level (and a very rich level in terms of realism, observation, irony), an account of a man who arrives at the pilgrimage town on a “state transport bus” in the company of people whose intent is clearly more devotional than his, and has less to do with a seemingly unfathomable curiosity. They seem to thus reproach him by their opacity, their inaccessibility, their very presence: “Your own divided face in a pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose / is all the countryside you get to see.” The rest of the poem is about the narrator’s idiosyncratic reading of the place. Jejuri appears to him a mixture of temples in disrepair, unreliable priests, and legends and religious practices of dubious provenance. It nevertheless excites him oddly, though not to worship, but to a state akin to it but also quite unlike it. He leaves later on a train from the railway station, still evidently in a state of confusion over what’s secular and what miraculous: “a wooden saint / in need of plaster / … the indicator / has turned inward / ten times over”.

Jejuri was received with unusual enthusiasm by the standards of poetry publishing in Anglophone India but the critical response was unremarkable. One reason was that the poem, like its author, resisted being pigeonholed into quasi-religious categories; in response to an interviewer asking him, in 1978, if he believed in God, Kolatkar had said: “I leave the question alone. I don’t think I have to take a position about God one way or the other.” This discomfort with the either/or lies at the heart of the poem. Most of the Marathi critics opted, conveniently, for simplification and chauvinism.

Jeet Thayil on Jejuri (60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

A possible reason for [Jejuri's] popularity may be the Kolatkarean voice: unhurried, lit with whimsy, unpretentious even when making learned literary or mythological allusions. And whatever the poet’s eye alights on — particularly the odd, the misshapen, and the famished — receives the gift of close attention, which is a kind of love.

Eric Ormsby on Jejuri (The New York Sun, 31 January 2007)

To American readers, Kolatkar’s dry, spare verse will seem deceptively familiar but it is the very antithesis of the florid, highly rhetorical poetry long favored by Indian poets writing in English. Kolatkar’s tone too strikes a new note, by turns caustic and tender; there’s an unexpected affection in his contempt. Of an itinerant priest, with his “lazy lizard stare,” he writes

The sun takes up the priest’s head and pats his cheek familiarly like the village barber.

This doesn’t blind him to the priest’s mercenary intentions; when the bus stops, “purring softly in front of the priest,” it reveals

A catgrin on its face and a live, ready to eat pilgrim held between its teeth.

Khademul Islam on Jejuri (The Daily Star, 2 October 2004)

… it is not gods and faith that interest Kolatkar but its opposite: the nothingness at their center. And he attends to this all-abiding nothingness by recording with whimsical accuracy every visual detail, the very recording of which means there is really nothing else to record at the shrine. The noncommittal insouciant tone erases gods, negates the very idea of mythopoeic imagination, places temple priest and temple rat on an equal footing.

Bruce King on Jejuri (’2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar’, 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

Jejuri offers more than a sceptical, bored, tourist’s perspective. Three of the poems allude to Chaitanya, a Bengali saint who tired to reform Jejuri [...] After Chaitanya left, the holy place returned to cow-like mindless faith, ‘the herd of legends / returned to its gazing’. Contrasted to the lack of dynamism in the shrines, there is the life the poet sees around him in butterflies and in chickens dancing [...]  ‘Jejuri’ is less a poem about loss of faith than, indirectly, about a national loss of the kinds of dynamism that produced the saints and their shrines, an energy found in nature (which some Hindus would claim is the actual source of religion.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on Jejuri (Quoted in The Hindu, 27 September 2004)

The presiding deity of Jejuri is not Khandoba, but the human eye.

Arun Kolatkar on Jejuri being “taught” in the classroom (Interview in The Hindu, 5 September 2004)

Once a few students wrote to me saying they disagreed with their teacher’s interpretation of my poem. I almost replied. (Guffawing) Some school children actually went on a picnic to Jejuri and had puran poli there. They shouldn’t be reading prescribed texts anyway, I never did. Funny, my poems were prescribed in British schools too, and the BBC was here filming background material. I read a few poems, but refused to talk.

… and on the sacred

The tumbled bricks and broken slabs are not what make the spot holy, but wherever a bitch gives birth is probably a holy place.

Poems from Jejuri

‘An Old Woman’
‘The Butterfly’
‘Yeshwant Rao’
‘A Low Temple’, ‘The Horseshoe Shrine’, ‘The Pattern’, ‘The Manohar’ and ‘A Scratch’
‘The Pattern’ and ‘Chaitanya’

Bruce King on Kala Ghoda Poems (’2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar’, 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

[In] ‘Pi-Dog’, a nine-part sequence which begins Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), a volume of thematic connected poetry [...] a mangy street dog rests on a traffic island thinking of its ancestors and circumstances while Bombay sleeps [...] The poem rapidly moves by way of whimsy to the history and mixed culture of the city. The dog claims his body looks like ‘a seventeenth-century map of Bombay’ with its seven islands black irregular spots ‘on a body the colour of old parchment’. According to ‘a strong family tradition’ he is a descendant, ‘matrilineally / to the only bitch’ among thirty hounds which survived the sea voyage from England, imported

by Sir Bartle Frere
in eighteen hundred and sixty-four,
with the crazy idea

of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay.
Just the sort of thing,
he felt the city badly needed.

Kolatkar is a master of the incongruous and the absurd. Sir Bartle Frere actually existed. He was a British colonial administrator and famous in his time; there are mountain peaks, fruits, and other memorials in former British colonies. It is typical of Kolatkar to focus on the importation of hunting hounds to show bout the British influence on Indian culture and some of its inappropriateness.

Bruce King on Sarpa Satra (’2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar’, 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

Sarpa Satra, one of the two final volumes he published knowing he would soon die, retells from an alternative perspective the snake sacrifice performed by King Janamejaya in the Mahabharata. If, by the way, you do not know this section of the Mahabharata (Book VI, 90, 1-27) you should read it as it is great, a wild precursor of both Star Wars‘ futuristic space battles and Uccello’s stylishly patterned manneristic scenes of warfare. The sacrifice is intended to annihilate the Nagas, or Snake People, and, like much of the Mahabharata, uses war between various groups to teach a spiritual message. Such wars and stories are usually allegorized as alluding to actual historical battles. Unfortunately, most translations of the Mahabharata are barely readable. Sapra Satra modernizes and makes colloquial the often incomprehensible language common to translations of Sanskrit into English:

And I think it’s your job
Aastika.
I mean who else is there to do it?

[...] Kolatkar does not need to make explicit the application of this story to contemporary India with is intense religious, caste and other communal conflicts. In modernizing the language and tones of the Mahabharata he is also offering a liberal or common sense revisioning of what in India has become a text used to justify the violence of reactionary Hinduism. It is like putting the Bible into contemporary speech and retelling it to give emphasis to its message of Love.

Ranjit Hoskote on Sarpa Satra (The Hindu, 27 September 2004)

In Sarpa Satra, he assumed the alternately elegiac and excoriating voice of a private self beset by public terrors, tempted into cynicism but mandated to bear witness to history. Through the narrative of Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, held by the ruler to avenge his father’s killing by a snake-king, Mr. Kolatkar addressed mythic themes that still resonate in India’s public life — ecological devastation, the military occupation of farflung provinces, and the staging of pogroms.

Pankti Desai on Sarpa Satra (NEW Quest 171, January - March 2008)

Arun Kolatkar’s style of narration is a contemporary version of oral narration, as he uses the story-within-a-story device of narration and also employs very conversational and dialogic style. It seems as if he is within the same tradition of oral narrative of Vyasa’s master narrative and at the same time, he is subverting this master narrative. In short, Kolatkar’s poem can be read as a deconstruction of Vyasa’s Mahabharata. [It] is also an allegory of extremism and the recurrent theme of seemingly perpetual cycle of violence and counter violence. Takshaka’s revenge of destruction of Khandava Forest by assassinating Arjuna’s grandson Parikshit is in Jaratkaru’s view a terrorist act.

Amit Chaudhuri on language in Kolatkar’s poetry (The Guardian, 21 October 2006)

[Some of his] “Marathi” poems of the 50s and 60s are written in the Bombay argot of the migrant working classes and the underworld, part Hindi, part Marathi, which the Hindi film industry would make proper use of only decades later. These poems he then often translated into an Americanese which, at the time, would have made respectable Americans blush; “maderchod” rendered, for instance, as “motherfucker”. Bombay in the 60s gave him these languages and also the transition between these worlds, the movement from street to library to cinema hall.

Ranjit Hoskote on language in Kolatkar’s poetry (The Hindu, 27 September 2004)

As a bilingual writer operating from a postmodern position, Mr. Kolatkar eluded the vigilance squads of linguistic absolutism. Working between and across both his languages, he was pointedly demotic rather than classical in his emphasis; so that, while his English is often the American of the cowboy Western or the film noir, his Marathi is invariably veined with the ‘Bambaiyya Hindi’ patois. Mr. 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.

Ayappa Paniker on language in Kolatkar’s poetry (Quoted in Kolatkar’s bio at The Daily Star)

Arun Kolatkar, being a bilingual poet, is heir to the western modernist ironic mode as well as the medieval Indian devotional mode. The two modes in their strange combination give strange results. His apparent simplicity of syntax heightens his subtlety and surrealistic power. His irony is not untouched by a deep personal concern.

Bruce King on language in Kolatkar’s poetry (’2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar’, 60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008)

If Moraes is a master of older verse idioms, Kolatkar’s realm is street talk, the colloquial, the poetry of the ordinary and anonymous.

Miscellaneous poems

‘A game of tigers and sheep’ and ‘Traffic lights’

Sachin Ketkar on reading Kolatkar (‘A Third Way of Reading Kolatkar: Beyond Formalism and Politics’, first appeared in NEW Quest 162, October - December 2005)

While formalist criticism will find Kolatkar poems teeming with literary devices of ‘defamiliarization’ due to his oblique idiosyncratic vision , the opposite approach, which is usually some version of socialism, will focus on the theme of alienation of an elite English educated bourgeoisie from his cultural context. Both these approaches have predetermined notions of what Kolatkar’s poetry will yield. However, I believe that a successful work of art transcending the polarities of ’social existence’ and ‘individual vision’. One only has to take a closer look at Kolatkar’s poems to see that they are not only, in Bruce King’s phrase ‘defamiliarization and transformation of the commonplace’, but are also deeply embedded in the cultural and historical milieu.

Further reading

‘Remembering Arun Kolatkar’ - Dilip Chitre
‘The bhakti poet of our times’ - Gowri Ramnarayan
‘Poems of remarkable resonance’ - Prabhakar Acharya
‘Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar’ - Bookslut
‘Song of Subaltern: Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems’ - Hemang A Desai
‘A matchbox in the right hand pocket’ - Ashley Tellis
An obituary - Pune Newsline

Addendum

I am not entirely sure which poems go where, so if I’ve made any mistakes under the two headings ‘Poems from Jejuri‘ and ‘Miscellaneous poems’, please let me know. Also, all of these resources are available online, as evidenced by all the links, barring the bits I took from 60 Indian Poets, which I recommend buying. If I find more stuff, I’ll tack it on, so yes, please send me anything that might be relevant to this resource.

What purpose shall this serve? Well, if not anything else, perhaps some desperate literature student will find this blog post and filch a quote or two to use in her essay. Preferably, someone with a more earnest (and more fun) interest in Kolatkar will find this useful — not in finding that all these excerpts are the word on his poetry, but in experiencing varied readings of his work, and discovering, possibly, a new way to enjoy him.

As for me, I have realised that I don’t actually dislike critical material as long as it’s not an exam. I had a few extracts of Jejuri for one of my literature papers this semester and I shamelessly did not read even the Bruce King essay in my copy of 60 Indian Poets. A week later I find all this stuff and no, I don’t feel regret,  but I think, “Hey, what if someone else wants to read this?”

I feel a glow within myself. This is as charitable as I get.