I’ve said that, in the larger, unfolding story of the independent nation, writing poetry in English was a minor, marginal, and occasionally controversial activity. This remained so in spite of Nissim Ezekiel’s attempts to invest the enterprise with seriousness, to stir Anglophone readers as well as writers in the vernaculars, both of whom were busy with more important projects, to see it as something more than, at best, a genteel and harmless preoccupation; at worst, as a waste of time, even a betrayal. Ezekel defied this combination of indifference and moral and nationalistic chauvinism with a critical puritanism, and had a small measure of success. But marginal endeavours have their own excitements, disappointments, and dangers. Among the excitements was the creation, in 1976, of Clearing House, brought into being by Jussawalla, Mehrotra, Kolatkar and Gieve Patel to publish, in the first instance, their own poetry. Like the writing of the poetry itself, the publishing venture was undertaken as things are in sub-cultures: with love, as a semi-private affair, partly for the eyes of other poets and fellow travellers. Books were supplied to a handful of bookshops, and also on the basis of ‘subscriptions’; that is, orders from friends and supporters. The four titles published that year were Patel’s How Do you Withstand, Body; Jussawalla’s Missing Person; Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures; and Jejuri. Kolatkar had designed the covers, and chosen the typeface, turning the books – again, this is something we associate with sub-cultures rather than mass markets – into objets d’art.

But, along with their passion and enterprise, sub-cultures are also characterised by disabling forms of self-doubt that often express themselves as doubts about the larger world. In the case of the poets I’ve just mentioned, this took the form of a wariness about committing words to paper, or the written word to print, or the printed word to wider circulation. This is not writer’s block, but a strategic and partial withdrawal from the world; at its best, writing for a handful of readers, some of them friends, entailed a greater sense of responsibility, of judiciousness, about the task of writing. In Kolatkar’s case, it meant that he wrote steadily after Jejuri (as he had before its publication), in both English and Marathi, but published only very sporadically in journals. Two collections of his Marathi poetry appeared in 2003; but the English works, the Kala Ghoda Poems and the political/mythological fable in verse Sarpa Satra, would see the light of day only after he knew he was dying. The book launches of his final works were, bizarrely, events surrounding a dying man who, on the evidence of his poetry, was still possessed by the youthfulness of the Sixties: both celebration, then, and premature memorial.

When I first met Kolatkar in 2000, Bombay had already become Mumbai, and the Hindu chauvinist parties, the Shiv Sena and the BJP, were at their most active and aggressive in the city – perhaps in prescient nervousness at an election defeat later that year. Bombay was trying to rebuild its old cosmopolitanism and sense of personal and physical freedom, its delight in the wayward and the aleatory, after more than a decade of religious and economic divisiveness, and from having become the commercial capital of a globalised India. My trip coincided with Valentine’s Day, and it re-emphasised the different, exacerbated, poles of ‘Mumbai’. On the one hand, the Valentine’s Day industry had reached a new zenith, and well-to-do teenagers were wandering about in an ingenuous swoon of love; on the other, Shiv Sena cadres were vandalising shops selling the day’s paraphernalia, and, in a ritual meant to attract the media, burning Valentine’s Day cards. The distance between this moral policing and the xenophobia that animated Shiv Sena slogans like ‘Mumbai for Mumbaikars’, where ‘Mumbaikar’ really meant Maharashtrian Hindus, was frighteningly small.

The Shiv Sena, which started as a Marathi chauvinist organisation under the leadership of Bal Thackeray, a cartoonist and admirer of Hitler, reinvented itself as a Hindu chauvinist one and came to power in Maharashtra in1995 in an alliance with the BJP, and soon changed the name of its capital city to Mumbai. Both parties had taken advantage of a moral vacuum in secular politics at the time, as well as a new state of polarisation that had been building up between Hindus and Muslims. This polarisation was confirmed with the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by BJP extremists in December 1992. Bombay bore the imprint of these events; in the riots and violence in early 1993, and then the series of explosions in March that year. It also bore the most visible imprint anywhere in India of the economic ‘liberalisation’ that took place in 1991; the troubled city was booming, and growing beyond recognition. What was once outskirt or hinterland was now integrated into the city’s teeming, self-generating expansion.

When I reread Jejuri now I realise how important the modern metropolis – the city as it was before globalisation – with its secret openings and avenues, its pockets of daydreaming, idling, and loitering, its loucheness, is fundamental to Kolatkar as a way of seeing, as a means of renovating experience. For no other Indian poet in English, and for few other writers, is Walter Benjamin’s flaneur an analogue for receptivity and creativity as he is for Kolatkar, in a way, and in contexts and situations, that perhaps Benjamin wouldn’t have been able to imagine. What the German writer (whom Kolatkar wouldn’t have read) discovered in Paris, and imagined his flaneur came upon in the 19th-century Parisian boulevards and arcades, Kolatkar did in Kala Ghoda – not only a range of details and particulars, but a restructuring of the way we experience them. Hannah Arendt, in her revealing commentary on Benjamin, notes how the line that divides interior from exterior, domestic from public space, even the ‘natural’ from the urban and manufactured, is dimmed and blurred constantly for the flaneur; he loiters about on the street, inspecting its everyday marvels (or what to him is marvellous), as if it were an extension of his drawing room. Even the sky in Paris, says Arendt, took on, for the flaneur, the artificial appearance of a great ceiling.

When I think of Kolatkar by his window in the Wayside Inn, looking out, for decades, on families of pavement dwellers and itinerant workers bathing themselves, eating, and raising their children before the Jehangir Art Gallery, I’m reminded of that indeterminate space, where the street turns into an interior, and which complicates the urban boundary separating room from pavement that’s so crucial to the flaneur’s experience of reality. For Kolatkar, in his personal life, what was dwelling and what place of transit was at times almost interchangeable. During some of his most successful years, Kolatkar and his wife were ‘paying guests’ – that is, lodgers – in one of Bombay’s most expensive areas; they then moved to a single-room, book-lined apartment in Prabhadevi, a fairly middle-class location that’s not anywhere near the centre of the city. Notwithstanding a very happy domestic life, and the fact that he wrote productively in his tiny flat, he did spend a great deal of time, sometimes breakfast onward, at the Inn, at the confluence of public and street life and private reverie.

I am reminded of these things as I reread Jejuri; that, although it’s about a journey to a remote (for many) pilgrimage town in Maharashtra, it’s less about the transformations of the journey than about a man who never left the city, or downtown, or a cosmopolitan, modernist idea of the metropolis; that his journey, and his sense of travelling and of wonder, brought him back to where he was – and where he was is metropolitan, shabby, and dislocating. And so, in the third poem itself, the four-line ‘The Doorstep’, the newcomer to the pilgrimage town speaks in the voice of the flaneur, for whom the line dividing public from private space is never final; the title names an object, a threshold, while the first two lines retract that meaning: ‘That’s no doorstep./ That’s a pillar on its side.’ The flaneur stops, starts, pauses again, ponders, constantly struck by the unremarkable object that the city’s passers-by don’t notice. Things, thresholds, buildings that have either fallen out of use or look like they have, that disturb and ironicise the logic and flow of capital (and, in independent India, Bombay has been as much the centre of expanding capitalism as Paris was in France in the 19th century) – this is what he’s besotted with. So, in Jejuri, part network of shrines, part downtown, he’s transfixed by the journey of a ‘conduit pipe’ around a wall; with a broken door that’s leaning against an ‘old doorway to sober up/ like the local drunk’; with the invitation to what seems to be ‘another temple’ – ‘The door was open’ – but turns out to be ‘just a cowshed’.

Benjamin discovered, on his first visit to Paris in 1913, that the houses that formed the Parisian boulevards ‘do not seem to be made to be lived in, but are like stone sets for people to walk between’; in other words, architecture and buildings – the locations of life and livelihood – become a sort of theatre, but a theatre that’s only available to the loiterer. Similarly, the temple that becomes a cowshed; the slightly off-kilter construction and vision of the concluding lines of ‘Heart of Ruin’, ‘No more a place of worship this place/ is nothing less than the house of god’; the theatrical gap between assertion and reality that was enacted in ‘A Doorstep’ and recurs in ‘A Low Temple’: ‘Who was that, you ask./ The eight-arm goddess, the priest replies./… But she has eighteen, you protest.’ This is the moment of theatre that neither the pilgrim at the holy shrine nor the ordinary city dweller can see. Both invest their surroundings with certain unalterable meanings; and it’s these unalterable meanings that make the flaneur’s drama and his irony, as well his odd sense of wonder, possible. The difference between the pilgrim – or, for that matter, the office-goer – and the flaneur is the latter’s passionate disengagement; he doesn’t rush toward a site hallowed by authority or tradition, he gravitates towards, hovers, steps back, idles, stands outside, dawdles. So, in ‘A Low Temple’, after his experience with the ‘eight-arm goddess’, the narrator ‘come[s] out into the sun and light[s] a charminar’: the ‘charminar’ being a cheap filtreless cigarette once popular with the artistic fraternity. In another poem, ‘Makarand’, the narrator, invited to offer prayers inside a temple, replies, ‘No thanks.’ He has both a flaneur’s democratic generosity and his curious at-homeness in thresholds and spaces that have no clear function, rather than in interiors that have designated uses: ‘you go right ahead/ if that’s what you want to do,’ he reassures his companion, while confessing, ‘I will be out in the courtyard/ where no one will mind/ if I smoke’.

The junk of the urban everyday – a stained doorknob, a disused threshold, a tile – fills the flaneur with momentary excitement and adoration; these random items seem to possess a mystery that derives from being part of a larger narrative, an unspoken theology or mythology. The objects the flaneur lights upon in streets, by-lanes, alleys, have, for him, an aura, an air of sacredness, that’s almost religious. Kolatkar’s metaphor for urban junk transformed by a small abrasion into something significant, or poetic, is, in Jejuri, the simple stone or rock – like junk, entirely useless – which is changed by a mark into a holy object. So, in ‘The Horseshoe Shrine’, the ‘nick in the rock/ is really a kick in the side of the hill’, where the hoof of Khandoba’s horse struck it ‘like a thunderbolt’ as he rode with his wife ‘across the valley’, like a spark ‘fleeing from flint’. The astonishing translation of urban junk into the realm of the modern imagination is what informs these famous lines from ‘A Scratch’: ‘scratch a rock/ and a legend springs’; it is this process of translation and refashioning, and not devotion, that makes Yeshwant Rao - ‘a second class god’ whose place ‘is just outside the main temple’, a ‘mass of basalt,/ bright as any post box,/ the shape of protoplasm/ or a king size lava pie’ – an object of the poet’s wry wonder. The religious is implicit in the transitory objects that Benjamin’s flaneur discovers, hoards, and cherishes in the city; Kolatkar reworks and inverts this casually, but profoundly, in Jejuri – in his poem, a religious landscape is pregnant with the implications, the wonders, of the urban.

In ‘Heart of Ruin’ (which describes how a temple to the god Maruti is now inhabited by a ‘mongrel bitch’ and her puppies), there are lines – ‘The bitch looks at you guardedly/ past a doorway cluttered with broken tiles’; ‘The black eared puppy has gone a little too far./ A tile clicks under its foot.’ – which lead us directly to a moment and to the exposition of a certain sensibility in Benjamin’s ‘The Return of the Flaneur’. This essay, written in 1929, became available too late in the day to the Anglophone world for Kolatkar to have read it in the early Seventies, but the concordances in imagery and in sentiment are startling. Benjamin asks us why the flaneur is ‘the creation of Paris’, and not Rome, despite the latter’s various landmarks and monuments. He quickly concludes Rome is ‘too full of temples, enclosed squares, and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by’

The great reminiscences, the historical frissons – these are all so much junk to the flaneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artists’ quarters, birthplaces, and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile – that which any old dog carries away.

The inversion in Benjamin, where history and its imperial monuments (for which ‘Rome’ is a metaphor) becomes ‘so much junk’, and junk, like the tile that ‘any old dog’ might carry away, is aggrandised and magnified - this inversion is especially true of the Kolatkar of Jejuri (where the puppies and the loose tile in the temple supersede the importance of the temple, the monument, itself) and the Kala Ghoda Poems. The latter, indeed, abounds in images of junk; of the spokes and wheels that the children of pavement-dwellers recycle for their own recreation. Benjamin’s notion of flanerie is crucial to our understanding of Kolatkar’s poetics, and also of his position in the narrative of Indian writing in English.

In 1981, five years after Jejuri had been published, Midnight’s Children inaugurated a monumental view of Indian history in literature – in fact, a monumental view of literature itself in India. It brought into being, in effect, a lineage of writing about the ‘great reminiscences, the historical frissons’, everything that was ‘so much junk to the flaneur’, as Kolatkar’s art had so passionately and contrarily proved. I’m not setting up a crude opposition between the two writers here; Kolatkar admired Rushdie’s novel, as Rushdie does Kolatkar’s work. But I am suggesting that there is another lineage and avenue in Indian writing in English than the one Midnight’s Children opened up, along with an obsession with the monumental; and its source lies in Jejuri. Younger writers haven’t looked at the possibilities of this lineage, with its idiosyncratic delight in the freedom to withhold, assign, and create meaning, its consignment of History to the scrap-yard, and its bringing of the scrap-yard into history, closely enough. If it does exist in some form, critics haven’t done enough to uncover and identify it. Had they done so, our view of Indian writing in English would be a different, a more heterogeneous and unexpected, one than it has been in the last twenty five years. For now, the place of Kolatkar’s legacy – no less far-reaching, potentially, than that of Midnight’s Children – hovers on the edges; which is where, as we see in Jejuri, he liked to be.

Introduction to the New York Review of Books Classic edition of Jejuri