Poems of remarkable resonance
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Kolatkar was a genuine major talent, feels PRABHAKAR ACHARYA.
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I STILL remember the excitement with which I read Jejuri when it first appeared in 1976. It was an unusual book: witty, playful, humane, unpretentious, a collection of lyrics that could be read as if it were a single, long poem. Here was a book, I felt, that could win a new audience for Indian poetry in English. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry Award and became an established Indian classic. With a new edition under the imprint of The New York Review of Books in the offing, it now promises to be an international classic as well.
Remarkable unity
One of the remarkable things about Jejuri is its unity: the way the 31 poems are linked together. Sometimes the poems simply follow a sequence of events, like chapters in a novel. At times they are connected organically, one poem generating another. "Hills", for example, a fine imagistic poem, describes the hills of Jejuri as if they were demons, with "sand blasted shoulders/ bladed with shale" and "cactus fang/ in sky meat". In the next poem "The Priest's Son", a young boy who comes as a guide tells the tourists that the hills they see "are the five demons/ that Khandoba killed". When he is asked if he really believes that, he "looks uncomfortable/ shrugs and looks away"; and then notices "a quick wink of a movement/ in a scanty patch of scruffy dry grass", and says
look
there's a butterfly
there.
And right on the next page you have "The Butterfly", an exquisite lyric that reminds you of Cummings at his inspired best. See the last lines:
Just a pinch of yellow,
it opens before it closes
and closes before it o
where is it
Another poem ends with the words, "scratch a rock/ and a legend springs", and on the very next page you get "Ajamil and the Tigers", a delightful exercise in legend spinning.
Jejuri is an outstanding first book. Sensuous and witty, it shows great technical and verbal skill, a puckish sense of humour, and an eye for the unusual and the incongruous. With his uncanny ability to see correspondences where no one else would, Kolatkar has created a work of remarkable resonance.
The resonance deepens, and darkens, in Kolatkar's later poetry. His recent Sarpa Satra and Kala Ghoda Poems make one feel that Jejuri, one's favourite book of poems for years, was only a first step — though a firm and confident one — by one of the most gifted poets of our age. Kala Ghoda Poems, with a magnificent chain of 31 lyrics collectively called "Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda" at its centre, is a stunning work.
The city alive
It is as if Jejuri has come home, to the heart of Mumbai, to the Kala Ghoda area. Kolatkar no longer needs Jejuri's Vaghyas and Murlis or its hills and temples to ignite his imagination. The sights and sounds of the city — and the sweepers, peddlers, beggars, lepers, street urchins and others who take it over after its office-going crowd melts away in the evenings — come to life here in a way that has never happened in poetry before. Parameshwari, the old lavatory attendant, "the Kutchi witch with the leathery face/ and shrivelled dugs"; a young girl, who "has been talking non-stop, jabbering away" because they have just let her lover out of jail, her happiness, as she busily picks lice from his head, beautifully evoked:
Her lover's lousy head,
pillowed on her thighs,
has become a harp in her hands.
As her fairy fingers run through his hair,
producing arpeggios of lice
and harmonics of nits;
the one-eyed ogress, one side of whose face, "burnt perhaps/ or melted down with acid... is all scar tissue", but who has always been "an auxiliary mother/ semi-official nanny// and baby-bather-in chief/ to a whole chain of children/ born to this street": They are characters bursting with life, their struggle for existence nothing short of heroic. Look at the way the ogress's happiness and involvement in her chosen task is described: "Give her a bucket filled with water/ a bit of soap/ and an unwashed child// — the dirtier the better — / and the wispy half-smile/ that always plays// on the good side of her face/loses/ its unfinished look". Look at the vivid, evocative description of the bathing itself, and of the boy after the bathing, "when the ogress lifts him up in the air/ and sets him down// on solid ground/ — dripping wet/ but all in one piece"; and the way he stands, "bow-legged and tottering"; and his defiant attitude to the "whole honking world/ that has massed its buildings// menacingly around him", as he "points his little/ water cannon/ at the world in general/... shoots a perfect arc of piss,// lusty/ and luminous/ in the morning sun." Has any poet ever captured life in the raw so vividly and with such luminous intensity?
Lack of space prevents me from writing on "Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda"; or on Sarpa Satra, a powerful narrative poem, in which the legend-spinning skill that delighted us in the light-hearted "Ajamil and the Tigers" is used brilliantly to produce a dark, ominous parable for our own times, about hatred nurtured on memory leading to genocide. But it is time we raise the question of Kolatkar's stature as a poet. The question is complex because he is bilingual. His first book of poems in Marathi, Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, appeared simultaneously with Jejuri. This has been followed by Chirimiri, the only book of poems in Marathi to go into a second edition within six months of its publication, Bhijki Vahi, a huge tome of 400 royal pages, and Droan.
I am told, by bilingual writers like Vilas Sarang, that Kolatkar's contribution to Marathi poetry is much greater than to English. Sarang thinks that in Chirimiri he has created a work that must give inspiration and direction to all future Marathi poets. So the question: why isn't his greatness acknowledged? Why are the literary establishments — not just in this country — so tardy in recognising such a genuine major talent?
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