Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004)

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Years ago, when I interviewed my first Indian poet, I thought longingly of Arun Kolatkar. The poet in question was a woman only too eager to expound on the meaning and beauty of her verse, which was of the sort that would have been mediocre if it had aspirations of any kind.

I'd just finished reading Jejuri, Arun Kolatkar's cycle of poems set in a temple town where the narrator finds moments of beauty among darkness and squalor, devotion not in the sanctum sanctorum, but an awareness that, as the poet would say in an interview, "wherever a bitch gives birth is probably a holy place". To move from Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt to this was an illumination, an epiphany.

And as the woman poet droned on and on, I thought of all the questions I wanted so desperately to ask Kolatkar about his poems, his images; questions that I and most ordinary readers would never be able to ask him, even by proxy, because of his contempt for and resistance to the whole process of mythmaking around poetry.

I can't ask Kolatkar these questions any more, because he died on Sunday of cancer, but it doesn't matter. His poems and writings, from Jejuri to the recently released Kala Ghoda poems and Sarpa Satra poems, were dismissive of questions and critical notes, intolerant of footnotes, contemptuous of explanatory essays. If you didn't find what you were looking for in the poetry itself, you had no business reading it.

He wasn't quite as reclusive as reputation had it; resistant to intrusion, certainly, as his notorious refusal to install a telephone in his house demonstrated.

But his friends knew where to find him: the former adman (he worked at Lintas for a long while) had a favourite restaurant in Kala Ghoda, and no doubt future devotees of his work will make pilgrimages there to go and genuflect at the tables. I imagine his ghost will look on sardonically.

My favourite Arun Kolatkar story concerns his response to an interviewer who asked him the standard question: "Who are your favourite poets and writers?"

The question infuriated Kolatkar, but then most questions did: he was the master of the freezing silence, the riposte in the form of another question, the non sequitor, the bland digression. This time, he let rip.

"There are a lot of poets and writers I have liked. You want me to give you a list? Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Ramjoshi, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller ... Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy."

I look at those names now, and I think, okay, that's a poem right there. It speaks for all of us, for our hybrid heritage, our right to claim everything that comes from our "roots", everything that comes from "elsewhere" and to put the two together in one defiant, all-inclusive category.

Osip Mandelstam sculpts his protests against a repressive regime alongside Namdeo Dhasal, the defiant poet speaking for the downtrodden, the Dalits, in a language he claimed as his own, alongside Lenny Bruce's anarchist humour and Laurel and Hardy's equally anarchist pratfalls. It's the only possible answer to the questions that would have bored Kolatkar silly, the "which-language-do-you-prefer-Marathi-or-English" question, the "is-this-autobiographical" question, the "what-were-your-influences" question, the "how-do-we-understand-you" question. To all of these he would have had one reply: read the work. Go back to the poems. I can't help you.

I'm supposed to be a critic, but I can't help you when it comes to explaining why Jejuri became, for many generations of Indians, the iconic set of modern poems.

Perhaps I can do this another way, by tracing my memories of the ways in which I read Jejuri. The first time was within the bland pages of my English textbook, which was called something like 'A Radiant Reader of English Poetry' and introduced us, daringly, to Ramanujan and Ezekiel and Kolatkar while balancing them with Alfred Noyes' preposterous 'The Highwayman' and Walter Scott's 'Lochinvar'.

As we turned the pages, drowsing through Lord Ullin's Daughter and chanting wearily "Lightly, o lightly we bear her along', we came up against Kolatkar's images of sunlight as a sawn-off shotgun with a shock that I can still feel today, so many decades later.

In college, someone had a battered cyclostyled copy of Jejuri, the print smudging blackly across the lines, Kolatkar's words obscured by chai stains and flyspecks. Those were brushed off each time so that we could read the poems, but they always came back, so that we always read Kolatkar through a living prism of India.

Squashed samosas merged into type when we were well off; sweat stains splotched those pages in summer. Four years later, I'd graduated to a samizdat copy of Jejuri""it remained persistently either out of print, or when it did emerge briefly into print, it was out of the reach of my meagre funds.

This was wrapped within the folds of a calendar that featured a manically grinning Ma Durga whose face had the exaggerated pout of filmstar Sridevi, and whose body was draped in the kind of sari Mandakini would later make famous under a waterfall. Given Kolatkar's views on religion, this seemed appropriate.

Jejuri is to be published within respectable covers this year, and the two books of poetry released a bare month before Kolatkar died bear no resemblance to the crumpled and life-stained palimpsests in which I met his poetry first.

I don't know whether I can handle the newness, the respectability, but then again, as I learned first from Arun Kolatkar, iconoclast, recluse, thinker, poet, it's not the book that matters but the words.

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