Nobody with even a passing knowledge of Indian poetry in English or Marathi literature needs an introduction to Arun Kolatkar. English poetry readers will know him for the long poem Jejuri which has the status of a modern classic (the NYRB now has an edition of it in its Modern Classics series which is fitting, as the influences in it, and indeed almost all of Kolatkar’s work are largely American — blues, jazz), a funky secular poem about a visit to a religious site; Marathi readers will know him from another dazzling long poem Bhijki Vahi (Tear-stained Notebook) where he speaks through several female characters, historical and literary.
Kolatkar died of stomach cancer in 2004 and Ashok Shahane of Pras Prakashan, Kolatkar’s dear friend and a firm believer in the value of his work, has been publishing all his unpublished work in both Marathi and English ever since, forming the definitive Kolatkar archive. Kolatkar was not the most public of poets. Like most Indian-English poets his work was published in obscure, long-dead journals and he had no literary executor or estate. The Boatride and Other Poems, then, is, more than anything else, a labour of love, the love of all his friends who carefully kept pretty much every scrap of paper Kolatkar used and, among these friends, principally the love of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra who worked as meticulously as possible to put this edition together.
It brings together Kolatkar’s long poem, “The Boatride,” many uncollected and several unpublished English and Marathi poems, a collection of his songs (one of the many surprises of this book is that Kolatkar wanted to cut an album of blues-like songs in the late 60s), his translations (mainly from Bhakti poetry and from that corpus, principally, of Tukaram) and some jottings about his own work (very unusual for Kolatkar). For the Kolatkar reader, then, this is nothing short of a grand treat.
The book opens with a densely cultural, resonant and theoretically remarkably alive introduction by Mehrotra that somehow still maintains a deeply personal register. Tracing the personal, historical and political journey of Kolatkar’s poetic career, it, along with the notes at the end, constitutes nothing short of a cultural history of Bombay and the cosmopolitan Bombay poet from the 50s to the 80s. This makes the introduction’s title “Death of a Poet” ironic because what it is, in fact, is an account of the life of the poet, the life of a city, a culture, a world.
The English poems in the first section have all the wry humour, the sparse observation and the
defamiliarising perspective of Jejuri. Consider the shock and then the resonances of this wonderful poem Kolatkar read at Jehangir Art Gallery in 1967 before fleeing the place, entitled “My Name is Arun Kolatkar”:
My name is Arun Kolatkar
I had a little matchbox/I lost it/then I found it/I kept it/In my right hand pocket/It is still there...
and contains other gems like “Irani Restaurant” and the chilling “Dreaming of Snakes.”
The Marathi poems are written in a language that replicates the blues, borrow from street talk and have the same eye for detail, for linguistic idiosyncrasy, for the surreal that somehow illuminates the real. It’s tough to tell that these are original Marathi poems and the particular relationship
between Marathi and English for Kolatkar (which both he and Mehrotra dwell upon) makes for fascinating reading. For example, Kolatkar often started a poem in Marathi and ended it in English or wrote one in English and then immediately translated it into Marathi. The section contains some remarkable anthropological poems about Balwantbua (from the collection Chirimiri), an old bhajan singer whose life — once again full of micro-events, absurdities and the minutiae of subaltern history — Kolatkar found fascinating and turned into some riveting poems. Unlike Nissim Ezekiel, Kolatkar never caricatures the very Indian figures he writes about. Instead, he sees the world from their perspective. In an Irani restaurant, he does not, like Ezekiel, just look for signs in wrong English to note them down as a poem. Instead, he offers a whole cosmology of the space and an interiority of its inhabitants that leaves you stunned not just by its descriptive exactness but by how he makes that detail build a sense of perspective, world-view.
This is true also of the songs section “Words for Music” and uncannily enough, his crop of translations from bhakti poetry. It’s tough to tell where Tukaram ends and Kolatkar starts. The icing on the cake is “The Boatride,” a long poem about a boatride from the Gateway of India, executed with the same loving detail but dry-eyed vision. The appendices are a bonus and collector’s items, each one of them. Elegantly produced as always, this Pras Prakashan book is a treasure. If you care at all for Indian
poetry, go out and buy it.