Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004) was one of Indias greatest modern poets.

He wrote
prolically, in both Marathi and English, publishing in magazines and anthologies
from 1955, but did not bring out a book of poems until he was 44. His rst book of
poetry, Jejuri (1976), won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His third Marathi
publication, Bhijki Vahi, won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004. Both an epic poem,
or sequence, celebrating life in the Indian city (and site of pilgrimage) of that name
in the state of Maharashtra, Jejuri was later published in the US in the NYRB Classics
series, with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri, an edited version of which was
published by The Guardian in 2006: see this link for Chaudhuri's account of 'the
poet who deserves to be as well-known as Salman Rushdie'.

Always hesitant about publishing his work, Kolatkar waited until 2004, when he
knew he was dying from cancer, before bringing out two further books, Kala Ghoda
Poems (a portrait of all life happening in Kala Ghoda, his favourite street) and Sarpa
Satra. A posthumous selection, The Boatride and Other Poems (2008), edited by his
friend, the poet and critic Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, contained his previous
uncollected English poems as well as translations of his Marathi poems; among the
books surprises were his translations of bhakti poetry, song lyrics, and a long love
poem, the only one he wrote, cleverly disguised as light verse. Arun Kolatkar's
Collected Poems in English, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010, also edited by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, brought together work from the four volumes published in
India by Ashok Shahane at Pras Prakashan.

Jejuri offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex
act of devotion, discovering the divine trace in a degenerate world. Salman Rushdie
called it sprightly, clear-sighted, deeply felta modern classic. For Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra, it was among the nest single poems written in India in the last forty
yearsit surprises by revealing the familiar, the hidden that is always before us.
Jeet Thayil attributed its popularity in India to the Kolatkarean voice: unhurried, lit
with whimsy, unpretentious even when making learned literary or mythological
allusions. And whatever the poets eye alights on particularly the odd, the
misshapen, and the famished receives the gift of close attention.

Although the four volumes which comprise the Collected Poems in English have
been published in India, the book itself has not yet been published there, and for
the moment Indian readers have had to buy copies of the Bloodaxe edition from the
Strand Bookstore in Mumbai.

The Independent's literary editor Boyd Tonkin made it one of his books of the year in
2010: 'My discovery of the year arrived from India, in Collected Poems in English by
Arun Kolatkar. Sublime and satirical, comic and visionary by turns, close to the
gutter but looking at the stars, Kolatkar over many years became a Bombay bard to
march, or outperform, the city's novelists. Any reader of Midnight's Children, and of
its tribe of ctional children, should get to know Kolatkar too.' And writing in The
Tablet, Michael Glover said: 'The best new discovery of the season is Collected
Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, one of the great poets of post-war India The
poetry is utterly fearless. No topic is out of bounds What is so delightfully
unexpected, always, is his angle of attack. You can never quite prejudge how he will
view the odd, improverished particularities of the topsy-turvy world that he studies
with such care and irreverent fondness.' Stephen Knight, reviewing the book for
Poetry Review, declared that 'Collected Poems in English must already be regarded
as a classic of English language poetry from India. In time, if there is any justice, its
reputation will cross the globe.'

Regrettably, this work by a literary genius of world stature a landmark in modern

Indian literature has not received very much attention in Britain, apart from those
three notices and a few reviews, published or imminent, in the poetry magazines
and journals. Even in India, Arun Kolatkar's prole was never as high as that of the
much more widely published Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, but the Collected
Poems in English should establish his reputation as to quote Michael Glover 'one
of the great poets of post-war India', in English as well as in Marathi.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra introduces the Collected Poems in English with a

marvellous essay, 'Death of a Poet', prefaced by his 'Editor's Note'. These two
pieces form the best possible introduction to Kolatkar's life and work.
how poets of Kolatkar's generation became modern Indian writers while tracing a
lineage to medieval oral traditions. She considers how literary bilingualism allowed
Kolatkar to blur the boundaries between Marathi and English, 'Indian' and 'Western
sources; how he used his outsider position to privilege the quotidian and minor and
revived the spirit of popular devotion.

Graphic artist, poet and songwriter, storyteller of Bombay and world history, poet in
Marathi, in English and in 'Americanese', non-committal and deeply political,
Kolatkar made lines wobble and treasured impermanence. Steeped in world
literature, in European avant-garde poetry, American pop and folk culture, in a 'little
magazine' Bombay bohemia and a specic Marathi ethos, Kolatkar makes for a
fascinating subject to explore and explain the story of modernism in India.

Arun Kolatkar rst published Jejuri in 1976, and he passed away in 2004, but book
and author are both still subjects of widespread discussion. Kolatkar was born in
Kolhapur, in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, in 1932. He wrote often in his
native tongue of Marathi, but he wrote Jejuri in English, a choice that may seem
simple today. Over the past three decades, this choice has had vast political and
artistic interpretations. The debates are too numerous and complex to describe
here, but Kolatkars writing has been cited and dissected for decades, while he
remained mischievously quiet on the subjects.

In the introduction to this new, beautiful edition, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri
compares the two diverging lineages of Indian literature written in English.
Salman Rushdie seeded one line with Midnights Children, and Kolatkar founded the
other with Jejuri. Though Rushdies book was published ve years after Jejuri, people
the world around know it well, while Kolatkars book is still rather obscure. One
reason is that Jejuri was not published outside of India until 2003; to our detriment,
not many people outside of India are familiar with his work.

Kolatkar wrote Jejuri during the early years of newly independent India, but the
subject of the book is difficult to pinpoint. When I read it, the narrative runs
smoothly, simply, and concretely. Kolatkar takes me on a journey and releases me
at the end. Once I leave the book, all of the discussion about Kolatkars life and
artistic choices -- that is, writing in English, intentionally printing his work in tiny
batches -- pounces on me and starts to confound. The only solution, sometimes, is
to go back to page one and start the journey all over again and reenter a world that
is at once mystical and mundane.

Jejuri describes a day trip to the town of Jejuri, a pilgrimage town in Maharashtra.
Both devotion and commercialism populate the town, and the man we follow
doesnt search for enlightenment; hes sightseeing. His straightforward voice colors
most of the poems, though Kolatkar does hop into the mind of the priest and the
god at points. Though the traveler becomes more enchanted with the town as the
day goes on, he retains his sense of humor, as in Manohar:

The door was open.

Manohar thought
It was one more temple.

He looked inside
Wondering
Which god he was going to nd.

He quickly turned away

When a wide eyed calf
Looked back at him.

It isnt another temple,

He said,
Its just a cowshed.

The traveler arrived with a secular itinerary, but as he observes the bustle of the
town and its contradictory trappings of mysticism and urbanity, he allows the
surroundings to present their many faces. Temples, mongrels, beggars, even the
hillside all start to swing between what they appear to be and what they could
mean. Though Kolatkar generally dismisses the monumental -- his traveler takes
more interest in a stray dog than the temple that she inhabits -- his observations of
the everyday show for the reader the changeableness of the worlds objects, large
or small. For example, he flips the countryside upside down in "Hills":

hills
demons
sand blasted shoulders
bladed with shale

demons
hills

cactus thrust
up through ribs of rock

hills
demons
kneequartz
limestone loins

demons
hills
cactus fang
in sky meat

Kolatkars skillful metaphors and playful imagery carry the reader on this irregular
religious experience, but the author wont let you stay there. At the end of the book,
we wearily follow the traveler to the railway station, overwhelmed by the oceanic
legends of Jejuris gods. We have started to understand the devotional poses of the
pilgrims we saw in town, and even take some vows:

Slaughter a goat before the clock

Smash a coconut on the railway track
Smear the indicator with the blood of a cock
Bathe the station master in milk
And promise you will give
A solid gold toy train to the booking clerk
If only someone would tell you
When the next train is due

Kolatkar is not ready to relinquish his sharp powers of observation to the rounded
edge of faith, and wont let his reader do so either.

After you put down Jejuri, you have to marvel that it was written in a language other
than Kolatkars mother tongue. Some critics say his writing was facetious (scratch
a rock/and a legend springs), some say transcendental (No more a place of
worship this place/is nothing less than the house of god), some say political (lets
see the color of your money rst) and some say anti-theocratic (A catgrin on its
face/and a live, ready to eat pilgrim/held between its teeth.) I say that he took
complex concepts from his native Marathi tongue and wrote them simply in English,
with a style that would make a poet in any language envious.
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (Marathi: ) (1 November 1932 25
September 2004) was a poet from Maharashtra, India. Writing in both Marathi and
English, his poems found humor in many everyday matters. His poetry had an
influence on modern Marathi poets. His rst book of English poetry, Jejuri, is a
collection 31 poems pertaining to a visit of his to a religious place with the same
name Jejuri in Maharashtra; the book won Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1977.[1]
His Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. His
Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in
Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.

Trained as an artist from the J. J. School of Art, he was also a noted graphics
designer, with many awards for his work. Kolatkar was born in Kolhapur,
Maharashtra, where his father Tatya Kolatkar was an officer in the Education
department. He lived in a traditional patriarchal Hindu extended family, along with
his uncle's family. He has described their nine-room house as "a house of cards. Five
in a row on the ground, topped by three on the rst, and one on the second floor.".
[2] The floors had to be "plastered with cowdung every week".

He attended Rajaram High School in Kolhapur, where Marathi was the medium of
instruction. After graduation in 1949, much against his father's wishes, he joined the
s b college of arts gulbarga of art, where his childhood friend Baburao Sadwelkar
was enrolled. His college years saw a "mysterious phase of drifting and formal as
well as spiritual education",[3] and he graduated in 1957.

In 1953, he married Darshan Chhabda (sister of well-known painter Bal Chhabda).

[4] The marriage was opposed by both families, partly because Kolatkar was yet to
sell any of his paintings.

His early years in Mumbai were poor but eventful, especially his life as an upcoming
artist, in the Rampart Row neighborhood, where the Artists' Aid Fund Centre was
located.[4] Around this time, he also translated Tukaram into English. This period of
struggle and transition has been captured in his Marathi poem 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. (translation by Kolatkar)[3]
After many years of struggle, he started work as an art director and graphic
designer in several advertising agencies like Lintas. By mid-60s he was established
as a graphic artist, and joined Mass Communication and Marketing, an eclectic
group of creatives headed by the legendary advertiser Kersy Katrak. It was Katrak,
himself a poet, who pushed Kolatkar into bringing out Jejuri.[5] Kolatkar was, in
advertising jargon, a visualizer; and soon became one of Mumbais most successful
art directors. He won the prestigious CAG award for advertising six times, and was
admitted to the CAG Hall of Fame.[6]

By 1966, his marriage with Darshan was in trouble, and Kolatkar developed a
drinking problem. This went down after the marriage was dissolved by mutual
agreement and he married his second wife, Soonu. 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 lm industry would make
proper use of only decades later. In Marathi, his poetry is the quintessence of the
modernist as manifested in the 'little magazine movement' in the 1950s and 60s.

His early Marathi poetry was radically experimental and 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. His early Marathi poetry is far more audacious
and takes greater liberties with language. However, in his later Marathi poetry, the
poetic language is more accessible and less radical compared to earlier works. His
later works Chirimiri, Bhijki Vahi and Droan are less introverted and less
nightmarish. They show a greater social awareness and his satire becomes more
direct. Bilingual poet and anthologist Vilas Sarang assigns great importance to
Kolatkar's contribution to Marathi poetry, pointing to Chirimiri in particular as "a
work that must give inspiration and direction to all future Marathi poets. Kolatkar
was among a group of post-independence bilingual poets who fused the diction of
their mother tongues along with international styles to break new ground in their
poetic traditionsKolatkar was hesitant about bringing out his English verse, but his
very rst book, Jejuri, had a wide impact among fellow poets and littrateurs like
Nissim Ezekiel and Salman Rushdie. Brought out from a small press, it was reprinted
twice in quick succession, and Pritish Nandy was quick to anthologize him in the cult
collection, Strangertime.[12] For some years, some of his poems were also included
in school texts.[11][13]

The poem sequence deals with a visit to Jejuri, a pilgrimage site for the local
Maharashtrian deity Khandoba (a local deity, also an incarnation of Shiva). In a
conversation with poet Eunice de Souza, Kolatkar says 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.[3] Along with his brother and a friend, he visited Jejuri
in 1963, and appears to have composed some poems shortly thereafter. A version of
the poem A low temple[14] was published soon in a little magazine called Dionysius,
but both the original manuscript and this magazine were lost. Subsequently, the
poems were recreated in the 1970s, and were published in a literary quarterly in
1974, and the book came out in 1976.

The poems evoke a series of images to highlight the ambiguities in modern-day life.
Although situated in a religious setting, they are not religious; in 1978, an
interviewer asked him if he believed in God, and Kolatkar said: I leave the question
alone. I dont think I have to take a position about God one way or the other.[15]

Before Jejuri, Kolatkar had also published other poem sequences, including the
boatride, which appeared in his the little magazine, damn you: a magazine of the

arts in 1968, and was anthologized twice.[8][16] A few of his early poems in English
also appeared in Dilip Chitre's Anthology of Marathi poetry 1945-1965 (1967).
Interestingly, though some of these poems claim to be 'English version by poet',
"their Marathi originals were never committed to paper." (this is also true of some
other bilingual poets like Vilas Sarang.[17]

Later work[edit]
A reclusive gure all his life, he lived without a telephone,[18] and was hesitant
about bringing out his work. It was only after he was diagnosed with cancer that two
volumes were brought out by friends[1] the English poetry volumes Kala Ghoda
Poems and Sarpasatra (2004).

Sarpa Satra is an 'English version' of a poem with a similar name in Bhijki Vahi. It is
a typical Kolatkar narrative poem like Droan, mixing myth, allegory, and
contemporary history. Although Kolatkar was never known as a social commentator,
his narrative poems tend to offer a whimsical tilted commentary on social mores.
Many poems in Bhijki Vahi refer to contemporary history. However, these are not
politicians' comments but a poet's, and he avoids the typical Dalit -Leftist-Feminist
rhetoric.

While Jejuri was about the agonized relationship of a modern sensitive individual
with the indigenous culture, the Kala Ghoda poems[19] are about the dark
underside of Mumbais underbelly. The bewilderingly heterogeneous megapolis is
envisioned in various oblique and whimsical perspectives of an underdog. Like Jejuri,
Kala Ghoda is also 'a place poem' exploring the myth, history, geography, and ethos
of the place in a typical Kolatkaresque style. While Jejuri, a very popular place for
pilgrimage to a pastoral god, could never become Kolatkars home, Kala Ghoda is
about exploring the baffling complexities of the great metropolis. While Jejuri can be
considered as an example of searching for a belonging, which happens to be the
major xation of the previous generation of Indian poets in English, Kala Ghoda
poems do not betray any anxieties and agonies of 'belonging'. With Kala Ghoda
Poems, Indian poetry in English seems to have grown up, shedding adolescent
`identity crises and goose pimples. The remarkable maturity of poetic vision
embodied in the Kala Ghoda Poems makes it something of a milestone in Indian
poetry in English.

After his death, a new edition of the hard to obtain Jejuri was published in the New
York Review Books Classics series with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri (2006).

Near his death, he had also requested Arvind Krishna Mehrotra to edit some of his
uncollected poems. These poems were published as The Boatride and Other Poems
by Pras Prakashan in 2008. His Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.

He was survived by his wife Soonu Kolatkar..