It was into this hybrid society that Kolatkar inserted himself; in 1949, he enrolled at the JJ School of Art, after which it seems a mysterious phase of drifting and formal as well as spiritual education followed, which few people appear to be clear about. At any rate, he took his diploma as late as 1957; but by this time he was already a graphic artist for the vibrant and upwardly mobile advertising world in Bombay. He was, in advertising jargon, a ‘visualiser’; and was to become one of Bombay’s most successful art directors. All this seems very far away from Jejuri, both the place and the book. The place itself would have been fairly well known to a certain kind of pilgrim-devotee and follower of the local Maharashtrian deity Khandoba (who began his career as a folk-god, a protector of cattle and sheep, and graduated slowly to Brahminical acceptance as an incarnation of Shiva); but it would probably have been obscure to Kolatkar and his friends. An interdisciplinary, but not disciplined, reader – ‘I read across disciplines, and don’t necessarily read a book from beginning to end,’ he said to the poet Eunice de Souza – he claimed, in the same conversation, that he discovered Jejuri in ‘a book on temples and legends of Maharashtra… there was a chapter on Jejuri in it. It seemed an interesting place.’ He went there first in 1963, with his brother Makarand, and his friend, the Marathi novelist Manohar Oak, both of whom, indeed, make appearances in the poem, in laidback, deadpan incarnations that are variations of the narrator.

The Sixties, for him, was a time of reappraisal and ferment. After the break-up of his first marriage, he married his second wife, Soonoo (who survives him). The discovery of, and journey towards, places like Jejuri in a time of inner transition, and all that such journeys represent, from the redemptive to the terrifying, is described in Marathi poems like ‘The Turnaround’:

Bombay made me a beggar.
Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck.
In a small village that had a waterfall
but no name
my blanket found a buyer
and I feasted on plain ordinary water.

I arrived in Nasik with
peepul leaves between my teeth.
There I sold my Tukaram
to buy some bread and mince.
(Kolatkar’s translation)

He was writing extraordinary Marathi poems, about the extremities of urban and psychological experience, which seem to be the product of a social outcast who’s been dabbling in mind-altering drugs while reading up on Surrealism, William Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Indian mythology, and Marathi devotional poets like Tukaram. The last of these was a real enthusiasm, and Kolatkar was translating, into English, the medieval poet’s rather prickly, belligerent hymns to God. These were as much translation as occasionally tough-guy reworkings of some of the songs; an unsettling form of ventriloquising. Machismo seemed to have interested him; not only its aura of power, but its disorienting humour. The proximity between the disreputable, the culpable, and the religious – a living strand in Indian devotional culture, and an everyday reality in places like Banaras and Jejuri – becomes, in the act of translation, an aesthetic:

It was a case
Of God rob God.
No cleaner job
Was ever done.

God left God
Without a bean.
God left no trace
No nail no track.

The thief was lying
Low in His flat.
When he moved
He moved fast.

Tuka says:
Nobody was
Nowhere. None
Was plundered
And lost nothing.

And so some of his own ‘Marathi’ poems of the Fifties and Sixties 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 Sixties, gave him these languages and also the passages of transition between these worlds, the movement from street to library to cinema hall.

There was also, at this time, a musical transformation, a musical moment. Kolatkar had learnt Western musical notation. He’d also taken lessons in playing the pakhawaj, the venerable Indian drum that predates the tabla; in the early Seventies, he began to compose his peculiar and compelling versions of rock music. He recorded a demo of four songs with a group of local musicians in a studio in 1973; he was forty one years old. Though nothing came of that experiment, it sounds now, more than ever, like groundbreaking, astonishing stuff. The first song, ‘I am a poor man from a poor land’, has an ananda-lahari – one of the instruments played by Baul singers, mendicant devotees of Krishna, in Bengal – in the background. The first line is something Kolatkar read on a piece of paper of the sort that the semi-educated beggar in India used to hand out to people, often stating his profession and including a message in English, perhaps to keep some of his dignity intact. In the foreground is Kolatkar’s scolding but very musical vocalising; a spin-off on the beggar’s plea that becomes a demand to the consumer, the singer asking his listener to pay up for his ‘damn’ good song’. The genre, here and in the other songs, is metropolitan and immediate and hybrid; inescapably but complicatedly ‘Indian’, without any of the sentimental assumptions of ‘world music’. It’s a style that hasn’t occurred before or since. As in Jejuri, the devotional is inserted forcefully into the economic, where it always resided anyway in India, into the bread-and-butter transaction, the duty and slightly disreputable compulsion to earn a living.

Some time after the demo, Kolatkar, in December 1973, began to write Jejuri. The impetus was provided by the twenty-six-year-old Arvind Krishna Mehortra, who’d just returned to India from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and had been asked by its director, Paul Engle, if he’d compile an anthology of Indian poetry for the program’s anthology series. Mehrotra asked Kolatkar if he had a suitable poem for the compilation. It was now that Kolatkar got down to writing the poem. Amazingly, he’d written a version before, from which a single poem, ‘A Low Temple’, had been published in a little magazine of the mid-Sixties in Bombay, Dionysius. The editor lost the manuscript; there was no copy. Kolatkar finished this sequence, with all its immediacy, a few months later after he began it, in early 1974, and sent it to Mehrotra; though the compilation was never completed, the entire poem was published that year in the Opinion Literary Quarterly.

This wasn’t the first time Kolatkar had published a poem-sequence in English (few poets have cultivated the sequence as Kolatkar did); in 1968, ‘the boatride’ had appeared in Mehrotra’s little magazine, damn you/ a magazine of the arts. With this poem – an arresting record of a steamer-ride taken from the Gateway of India – Kolatkar had announced what his metier would largely be as an English poet: the urban everyday, or a view of the material universe informed deeply by it. The banishment of capital letters, the treasuring of the concrete: these features of ‘the boatride’, as well as of the magazine it was published in, alert us, again, to the presence of the Americans – e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, the ‘Beat’ poets. A generation of Indian poets in English (AK Ramanujan, Mehrotra, Kolatkar) had turned to the idiosyncratic language, and the capacity for eye-level attentiveness, of American poetry to create yet another mongrel Indian diction – to reorder familiar experience, and to fashion a demotic that escaped the echoes of both Queen’s English and the sonorous effusions of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri and the poorly-translated but ubiquitous Gitanjali of Tagore; to bypass, as it were, the expectations that terms like ‘English literature’ and ‘Indian culture’ raised.

Jejuri is, on its most obvious level (and a very rich level that is, 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 is, 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, which seems to him a mixture of temples in disrepair, unreliable priests, and legends and religious practices of dubious provenance, 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’. The typographical flourish in the penultimate poem, in, and through, which the narrator records the experience of witnessing cocks and hens dancing in a field on the way to the station, is the closest the poem comes to imitating a religious ecstasy and abandon, on the brink where both irony and the verbal are obliterated.

Jejuri was received with unusual enthusiasm by the standards of poetry publishing in Anglophone India; the book was reprinted twice at short intervals, and then twice again at longer ones. The critical response, by any standards, was unremarkable and intermittent. One of the reasons was that the poem, like its author, was resistant to 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. The novelist and critic Balachandra Nemade’s response, in a 1985 essay, is characteristic: ‘Kolatkar comes and goes like a weekend tourist from Bombay.’ There was, of course, the occasionally sensitive retrospective reappraisal, of which Bruce King’s chapter on Kolatkar in Modern Poetry in English is an example; but the poem was to receive, decisively, a fresh lease of life, and the oxygen of good criticism, from Mehrotra in his anthology, The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Poets. Sixteen years after the poem had first appeared, Mehrotra seemed to be in no doubt about the its place in the canon of Indian poetry in English: ‘among the finest single poems written in India in the last forty years’. The religious question he settled robustly and acutely, if, perhaps, temporarily: ‘The presiding deity of Jejuri is not Khandoba, but the human eye.’

next >>