POETRY
The bhakti poet of our times
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`Kolatkar's imagery has always astonished. Swift, abrupt details flash in and out. Language and form are honed — at times too relentlessly — to terse essentials.'
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HIS writing is intertwined with his life. Both are ruled by unsparing codes. Is this why Arun Kolatkar's verse is intense, stark, echoic, potent?
After a glittering, awards-winning career in advertising, Kolatkar slid into enigmatic reclusivity. In the process, he achieved a strange, exciting blend of detachment and immediacy. Wry irony rides on a rush of emotion. His subtlety is not for the hasty eye.
Cycle of revenge
Twenty-eight years after the Commonwealth Poetry Prize winning Jejuri (1977), this year saw the release of two new Kolatkar volumes, Sarpa Satra (June, 2004), a transcreation from Marathi, and The Kala Ghoda Poems in English.
Sarpa Satra has Emperor Janamejaya performing the Serpent Sacrifice to exterminate the race of serpents, because a snake (Takshaka) killed his father.
This Slaughterhouse ritual from the Mahabharata becomes an action replay of wholesale decimations, by generations, through the centuries. Intellectuals, artists, sages and statesmen relish the stench of burning flesh, as writhing snakes fall into the flames, still clutching at wives and children. The myth becomes a dim pentimento, looming under a series of visuals painted one over the other. We sense the annihilation of entire races across the continents, and those witnessed in our times in Nazi Germany, Hiroshima, Palestine, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq...
The cycle of revenge had begun with great grandfather Arjuna, when he killed Takshaka's wife along with millions of life forms in a primeval rainforest. `Five thousand kinds of butterflies alone, a golden squirrel found nowhere else, a wealth of medicinal plants, and people whose language sounded like the burbling of a brook, their songs like the twitterings of birds' became extinct. Not even a tiger moth escaped. As the lines roll on, the dirge becomes doomsday incantation. The sacrifice ends, but the volcano hides its fire, and bides its time.
Mumbai roots
Kolatkar's roots in Mumbai surface in the Kala Ghoda Poems. His imagery has always astonished. Swift, abrupt details flash in and out. Language and form are honed — at times too relentlessly — to terse essentials. The short lines (mostly in threes) vary gait and mood. The rhythms are giddy, jazzy, pricked out in rancid blues, romping with the street `saints' in the poet's favourite city haunts.
The humour ranges from the absurd-poignant to the raunchy-mordant. With the back-score of ambulance wail, magpie robin's call and rock drill, the Pi-dog claims descent from imported British foxhounds, and from the dog airlifted to heaven with Emperor Yudhishtra. Word-flakes dance with "the airdevil", the ubiquitous crow. The "infant strumpet" in tumbleweed hair and black hip string torments a puppy. The fisherwoman's claws savage the bread, unaware of the cat "kissing the shrimp" in her basket.
Cityscapes
The black farce frames cityscapes under shifting lights, films men and women below towers, clocks, churches and heritage mansions, moving for up-close shots of waifs, wastrels, trollops, thieves, drug pushers, drunks... The city dawns to breakfast, swarming around "Our Lady of Idlis" who releases a "landslide of full moons slithering past each other, humping like turtles, or oil-slick seals blinking in the sun". The Lepers Band marches past — "Trrap a boom chaka, shh chaka boom tap" — its noseless singer bawling to drums beaten by bandaged hands. Above the archway that bears his head, David Sassoon, merchant prince, unrolls the pageant of the city's past. The "Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads", tosses her damp hair back and forth, scattering spitfire droplets, draping her saree "with utter contempt for the voyeur world revolving around her — the dirty old men with clean noses, the bug-eyed painters, poets with their tongues hanging out". The stroke punctures deep. Hypocrisies gush out in a putrid burst. No wonder the poet has been accused of cynicism, even sacrilege.
Jejuri had bent English to its special needs. The new volumes, designed arrestingly by the poet himself, do far more. Magically, unobtrusively, without artifice, they quilt the language into the immediate present, words forgotten in the throb of experience.
Epic sweep
Bilingual readers insist that to taste the rasa of Kolatkar's work, his Marathi and English verses should be read together. In the Marathi books preceding the English, Chirimiri shows Balwant bua guiding a group of whores to Pandharpur. On the `pilgrimage' the whores turn gopis sporting with the Lord. Its epic sweep across time, space and cultures has made Bhijki Vahi a cult book. The title hints at saint Tukaram's trial, when his verses were flung into the waters, only to be returned unscathed by the river. It also images "weeping women" forgotten by history, from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Vietnam.
The poet may deny devotion. But these four volumes establish Arun Kolatkar as the bhakti poet of our times — unsentimental, iconoclastic, his healthy scepticism underscoring an entranced reverence for all forms of life. Kolatkar has re-invented the sacred for our deracinated times. Not in ritual or mantra, but in a tramp, a slut, a street cur, a game of pebbles.
Kala Ghoda Poems; Sarpa Satra; Arun Kolatkar, Pras Prakashan, 2004.
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
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