Short Biography of Arun Kolatkar

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Arun Kolatkar (1932), works in Bombay for an advertising agency. He is a bilingual poet who writes in both English

and Marathi. His Jejuri published in 1976 won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize awarded for the best first book of

poetry in English. His works have appeared in Opinion, Literary Quarterly, New Writing in India (Penguin) and The

Shell and the Rain (George Allen & Unwin, 1973).

Kolatkar’s first long poem The Boatride has come up for considerable critical attention. The poem strikes the reader

as a series of snapshots presenting scenes which shift constantly from the movement of the pair of knees streaking

up and down to the spreading of the sail, the appearance of the stony-faced woman and her child. The surge of the

sea which provides the basic rhythm to the poem lends a sense of unity and continuity to the whole poem bringing

the snapshot perceptions into a well-unified orchestration.

Jejuri is again a long poem written in thirty-one sections and this is perhaps Kolatkar’s best work. The poem has been

considered as “the poet’s irreverent Odyssey to the temple of Khandoba at Jejuri, a small town in Western

Maharashtra” (R. Parthasarathy). Written in a style which is ironic and humorous the poem has a colloquial flavour

which goes well with the level at which life is portrayed.

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The poem is actually about the spiritual journey of the city-bred man to the temple at Jejuri and each of the thirty-one

sections is a poem in itself and together they make for a pattern of pilgrimage, namely the arrival, the round of visits

and the return. The irony of the entire work lies in the fact that it is a pilgrimage without any religious or spiritual

purpose or vision and that the “pilgrim” shows little interest in or sensitivity to the presence of so many gods in the

place.

“The Bus” is the first poem in the series and describes the arrival of the pilgrim at Jejuri on a rainy dawn.

Poesie: A Poetic Journey
APRIL 5, 2011   / 1 COMMENT

Poetry is hardly anyone’s cup of tea today, most prefer TV, radio, internet, music, or
other novels to read. However, poetry still continues to be written and still possesses a
magic and an ability to convey the poet’s inner feelings to a perceptive audience. It can
simply display those inner feelings, or urge the readers to criticize, question certain
systems and traditions. Poetry is still relevant today and hopefully will continue to have
such functions in the future.
 Taken from napekshaashokshahane.blogspot.com

‘Jejuri‘ written by an eminent Indian poet named Arun Kolatkar is a collection of 31

poems about a place called Jejuri in Maharashtra, near Pune. Kolatkar hasn’t simply
described the place and but rather has questioned sharply the institution of religion in
India and specifically in Jejuri. All the poems in this collection more or less share this
quality. Kolatkar gives a description of a particular curious object/scene/setting/area
withing Jejuri and through those descriptions raises those questions. All the poems have
a tinge on skepticism-an aspect that attests to the unbeliever in Kolatkar which is
clearly seen in the first poem, ‘The Bus’ wherein the poet cannot connect with the mind
of a religious man in the bus that takes him to Jejuri. The poem starts the poet’s journey
to this religious place and immediately sets the tone of skepticism right there that can
be seen in all the subsequent poems as well. This skepticism takes away spirituality of
the poet for religious places. The collection ends with six poems under the title:’The
Railway Station.’ Kolatkar apparently is going to take a train to depart from Jejuri and
even in the six poems about the railway station, Kolatkar presents a unique portrait of
the mundane aspects of most Indian railway station and colours them with a new form
so that the reader will be able to discern beyond the obvious. Even in Jejuri’s railway
station, Kolatkar sees signs of religion that pervades the rest of the town.
The other poems have descriptions of numerous aspects of Jejuri from the most
important to the most trivial. But to each aspect, Kolatkar is able to give a vividness and
novelty that is not usually associated with that particular aspect.

All the poems are written in a simple language, using colloquial and Americanized
words. Hardly any poems are long with the exception of ‘Ajamil and the Tigers’ which is
a modern form of ballad incorporating certain Indian styles of story narration. Since
‘Jejuri‘ is a collection of poems that presents the poet’s journey to Jejuri, it would be
advisable to read all the poems in the collection to get a sense of Kolatkar’s skepticism
and questioning of the commercialization of religion. It is not at all taxing to read any
poems, being mostly short and straightforward and having none of the subtle messages
that poems usually do. Most poems also are laced with sarcasm. The collection is a
fascinating(though one sided) view of one of the important places of religious worship
for any devout Indian Hindu or any other pilgrim.
What is disappointing is that Kolatkar does not give a broader view of Jejuri. He sees it
through his lens of skepticism and scorn of faith and fails to look at the spirituality of the
place that attracts many devotees there. He imbibes it in all aspects and so the reader
looks at Jejuri only through his perspective and for those who have never been there
(like me) will come to believe that is a drab, dingy place with nothing substantial to
boast of except some temple ruins and some stones that people worship.

Aside that aspect, ‘Jejuri‘ is a relatively good collection of poems that is lovely to read
and that transports the reader to this strangely religious place and make them
experience everything in Jejuri in a novel way. A definite must read. Need another boost
to pick up this poetry book? ‘Jejuri‘ won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize’ in 1977. Now,
you must be thinking that if it won this prestigious prize, there definitely must be
something good in this collection, right? Absolutely, which is why I recommend
everyone to read ‘Jejuri‘ to one’s heart’s content.
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Irani restaurant bombay

In 1962, when he wrote ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’, Kolatkar wouldn’t have read Walter Benjamin’s essays, which
were not then available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard of the arcade-haunting Parisian
flaneur. But as a Bombay loafer himself, someone who daily trudged the city’s footpaths, particularly the area
of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognized the figure. 

‘Salo loafer!’ says a character in Cyrus Mistry’s play Doongaji’s House. Over the centuries, ‘loafer’ has
become almost an Indian word of abuse, suggesting a good-for-nothing who drifts through the city in self-
absorbed fashion when, in fact, he is streetwise and his keen eye doesn’t miss a thing. Kolatkar himself seldom
walked past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure. This is true of the loafer even when he appears
most relaxed, having tea, say, in an Irani restaurant, a portrait of ‘the cockeyed shah of Iran’ displayed
above the till and the whole place buzzing with flies. On these occasions, he is like a papyrologist in a
library poring over a classical document, though the objects he could be studying are the tables, chairs,
mirrors, and bazaar prints in whose midst he sits.

“Irani Restaurant Bombay” (More

Poems About Food and Drink)
Posted on April 26, 2020, 1:00 by My Annoying Opinions

Here is the second entry in my occasional series on poems that deal passingly or centrally
with themes, locations and/or images of food/eating/hunger etc. (See here for the first entry,
on Imtiaz Dharker’s, “At the Lahore Karhai.) This week’s poem takes on a very different
geography than Dharker’s poem (Bombay rather than London) and is formally more…well,
formal and forbidding: in place of free verse, a set rhyme scheme—though not meter—and in
place of declaration, elliptical, almost opaque observation.
But I’ve started in on the poem itself without telling you anything about the poet. Arun
Kolatkar (1932-2004) was and is by any measure one of the most significant writers of the
20th century and a giant particularly in the world of Indian poetry, specifically Indian poetry in
English. He was one of the central figures in the modernist flowering in the little magazines
published in Bombay in the 1960s and 1970s and influential despite the fact that very few
collections of his poetry were published  when he was most active as a poet. His first English
collection, Jejuri, only came out in 1975 (when it won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry) and
two others only emerged in 2004 after his cancer diagnosis.
Kolatkar was also significant—though not unique in his milieu in this regard—in that he was a
bilingual writer. Where the vast majority of Indian literary production is by writers whose
output is monolingual, writers like Kolatkar, Vilas Sarang and Shanta Gokhale worked in both
Marathi and English. For more on the larger literary scene from which Kolatkar emerged and
of which he was a part, see my friend Anjali Nerlekar’s excellent survey and analysis of
Kolatkar and his world, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. It’s an
academic book and therefore unconscionably expensive but if you’re interested the entire
book is available online as a pdf (legally). Anjali is an energetic and engaging writer and her
prose rarely takes a turn towards academese.
Kolatkar was, among other things, one of the great cartographers of Bombay. His poetry
records the city at street level, from the democratic spaces being left behind—and now mostly
disappeared—in the rapidly modernizing and homogenizing megalopolis. He observes with an
eye sometimes documentarian (as in the wonderful sequence “Breakfast Time at Kala
Ghoda”), sometimes elliptical (as in this poem) but always unsentimental. The poet, as
marginal—if not in the same way—as the subjects and scenes he records, writes them into the
city’s memory.

“Irani Restaurant Bombay” was written in the late 1960s but was only posthumously published
in the collection, The Boatride and Other Poems. Like some (many?) of his other poems in
English it is a poem that existed first in Marathi before being recreated (rather than
translated) in English. It takes as its scene and subject one of Bombay’s iconic spaces, the
Irani restaurant or cafe. Now almost entirely extinct in its natural form, existing mostly as
fetish in the decor of restaurants such as Dishoom in London or
the Sodabottleopenerwala chain in India, Irani restaurants were central to the cosmopolitan
and artistic life of the city. Kolatkar and his friends would meet regularly at one of these
restaurants, the Wayside Inn (now gone)—a location invoked directly in his poem, “The Rat-
poison Man’s Lunch Hour”, and where decades earlier Babasaheb Ambedkar (also invoked in
that poem) wrote swathes of the Indian Constitution.
My understanding is that the restaurant in this poem is not the Wayside Inn or any other
individual Irani restaurant but a composite of several that Kolatkar frequented. What he’s after
here, at any rate, is not the recording of a particular space but the evocation of a particular
mood and subject position: that of the loafer (if you want to be fancy and French you could say
the flaneur). The loafer who is both observing and being observed in this poem does not eat or
drink anything—is the glass of water his? nobody is eating the decomposing cake. He
observes the scene and the poem observes him. The rhyme scheme is maintained (abab cdcd
and so on) but the lines are of variable length, the enjambment taking us from one image and
thought into another. The rhyme offers an order that never quite becomes available—images
proliferate but meaning eludes us.

The mood, however, does not. This is not an easy poem but—at the risk of lapsing into banality
—it evokes the ineffable lassitude, the rich solitude available uniquely in spaces as public as
restaurants and cafes, particularly ones like Irani restaurants that seem not to be interested
in the passing of capitalistic time—though, of course, they have mostly been consumed by it.

Irani Restaurant Bombay

the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake
decompose carefully in a cracked showcase;
distracted only by a fly on the make
as it finds in a loafer’s wrist an operational base.

dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat

breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon
if it disturb the pond; the road, neat
as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden.
the thirsty loafer sees the stylized perfection
of the landscape, in a glass of water, wobble.
a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention
singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table.

an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space.

while promoting darkness below the chair, the cat
in its two timing sleep dreams evenly and knows
dreaming to be an administrative problem. his cigarette

lit, the loafer, affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue,

places the burnt matchstick in the tea circle; and sees it rise:
as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue
and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice.

the burnt matchstick with the tea circle makes a rude

compass. the heretic needle jabs a black star.
tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed
and cashier is where at seams it comes apart.

You can find this poem and all of Kolatkar’s English language poetry—as well as some of his
translations from Marathi—in the excellent Arun Kolatkar: Collected Poems in English, edited by
his friend Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. (The image on the cover of is a photograph of Kolatkar at
the Wayside Inn.) The publisher is Bloodaxe, who also published Dharker’s I Speak for the Devil.
The only other extant publication of Kolatkar’s poetry that I know of is an edition of Jejuri, his
most famous work, brought out by the New York Review of Books in 2005 (a scant 30 years
after its original publication). You could buy that but you’re much better off getting a used
copy of the Collected Poems off Alibris. It’s got all of Jejuri in it and a lot else besides.
One bit of literary trivia in closing: the character of Bhupen Gandhi, a minor but important
character in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is modeled on Kolatkar.