TRK
Travelogues
Manohar Shetty
The Wayfarer of ‘Wayside Inn'
‘The
Boatride and
Other Poems’ by Arun Kolatkar; Pras Prakashan, Mumbai;
Rs480; Pp. 262
(First published in ‘Sunday Deccan
Herald’, Bangalore, 2nd
August ’09)
Every Thursday afternoon, after his
stint with an ad agency
as a graphic artist, Arun Kolatkar used to make his way to the now
defunct
‘Wayside Inn’ at Kala Ghoda in Bombay. Here, for several years, around
a
checked tablecloth and pots of tea, a motley crowd gathered round him.
This
included a bearded man who reared pet crows in his balcony in Colaba, a
ginger-haired manufacturer of safety belts for cars and planes, an
ageing folk
singer with mischievous eyes and a pakhwaj player, another lean, dapper
man
with a profound interest in hats who ran an art gallery, a busy, hollow-cheeked
Marathi publisher, a
PR officer and poet who worked for a multinational corporation at
Churchgate,
and another youngish poet who looked like a bartender and in fact ran a
bar and
restaurant in Tamarind Lane close by. Occasionally, other ‘senior’
poets or
visiting poets from abroad would join in. The occasion was not exactly
a
‘poetry darbar’, with the conversation ranging from the history of the
city to
the news in the afternoon papers which Kolatkar bought diligently every
day.
The conversation was often bilingual, in English and in Marathi. This
eclecticism and bilingualism is at the heart of Kolatakar’s poetry, an
art he
practiced in both languages with equal ease.
Born in Kolhapur where he did his
schooling in Marathi, his
work embodies both the rustic and the urban. In those ‘Wayside’ days,
Kolatkar,
despite his huge reputation as a poet, had published just one book of
poems in
English, ‘Jejuri’, a remarkably sustained piece of writing centred
around the
pilgrimage town of Jejuriin Maharashtra. The book became a totemic
byword in
the annals of poetry in English in India; it also won a Commonwealth
Poetry
Prize in 1977. After that, and indeed even before the publication of
‘Jejuri’,
only occasional poems in English by Kolatkar found their way into
print.
It was almost three decades later
that two books appeared
simultaneously, in 2004, just a few months before he died in Pune in
September
of that year. These were ‘Kala Ghoda Poems’ and ‘Sarpa Satra’, the
former a
long cycle of closely observed poems set around the busy Kala Ghoda
area that
Kolatkar frequented and the latter about a mythological snake sacrifice
theme
from the ‘Mahabharata’, the subjects reflecting Kolatkar’s own diverse
leanings.
The remarkably long gap between the
publication of those
books and ‘Jejuri’ did not in any way reflect a prolonged dry spell
that poets
often go through. It meant that Kolatkar was not a conventional ‘career
poet’,
bringing out a book every few years to remind critics and academics of
his
presence. In fact he wrote, and revised, a great deal in Marathi and
English,
quite unconcerned over his work finding the legitimacy and sanctity of
print.
He did not see poetry merely as a ‘career’, but as a way of life, as
second
nature to his own existence.
This handsome edition of previously
uncollected poems, both
in English and in translation from Marathi, published five years after
his
death is further proof of Kolatkar’s enduring excellence and his
ambidextrous
talent. His ‘ creative schizophrenia’ is much in evidence as he wields
‘a
pencil sharpened at both ends’, the creative surge unmindful even of
the
language of its genesis, with the ‘same’ poems occasionally written
side by
side in both languages.
In multilingual India, there have
been many other bilingual
poets, but none with the same facility and easy dexterity of Arun
Kolatkar.
What distinguishes his work is a colloquial touch welded naturally and
unselfconsciously into a free flowing formality. In his illuminating
Introduction,
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra puts it well: ‘Enchanted by the ordinary,
Kolatkar made
the ordinary enchanting’. Even outright vernaculars like ‘ghatan ’or
‘dagdu,
dhondu or pandu’ fit hand-in-glove into the English text. The apparent
ease of
range, which includes some infectious and underrated Blues numbers, is
hard won
coming as it does from a wide and close reading of world literature,
ranging
from Tsvetayeva to Tukaram.
During his lifetime, Kolatkar did not
seek or crave
recognition from the West. Neither did he go down the traditional
academic path
of established figures like Nissim Ezekiel or A.K. Ramanujan. To many,
he was
the heroic ‘outsider’ who--metaphorically-- bunked Eng. Lit. classes to
write
poetry in the canteen. With his malleable mind, he was the ultimate
‘double
agent’ who declared ‘half my work will always remain invisible/ like
the other
side of the moon’.
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