533691

research-article2014

JCL0010.1177/0021989414533691The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureRavinthiran

THE JOURNAL OF

C O M M O N W E A LT H
L I T E R A T U R E

Article

Arun Kolatkars description

of India

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

2014, Vol. 49(3) 359377
The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0021989414533691
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Vidyan Ravinthiran

Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also
by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be
like. (Description, in this context, isnt simply a stylistic term it relates to how a style
influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun
Kolatkars descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumbai a type of exact
factuality with aspirations toward something more: a nuanced understanding of India and its
history. His tropes of sight affirm the importance of accurate reportage while also promulgating
an unillusioned view of his nations colonial past. Documenting the lives of the poor and those
caught between a superstitious and a rational understanding of the world, Kolatkar alludes to
the larger processes of cultural and technological reorganization which condition their existence
while stressing that individuals are more than the product of their surroundings. His verse
demands for its appreciation a true poetics of world literature, which would understand the
tiniest cells of stylistic texture as historically expressive. This article therefore features several
close readings of individual poems in which effects of rhyme, assonance, syntax, and tone outline
a self-critical intelligence unique to Kolatkars poems in English. Which start, mischievously, to
interpret themselves critical analysis should not jettison the playfulness which cannot quite
disguise the poets longing, when he writes in this language, for a greater intimacy with the people
and places he describes.

Keywords
description, India, Kolatkar, poetry, style

To the historian, poetic description might seem at the very least irresponsible, and at the
most a contradiction in terms; an unlikely fusion of the subjective and the objective, difficult to validate. Is it creation, or a responsible accounting of the world? Two quotations
may help draw out a range of pre-existing evaluative assumptions. The first is from a letter
Corresponding author:
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Selwyn College, Grange Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DQ, UK.
Email: vr244@cam.ac.uk

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in which the young Ted Hughes discusses Albert Namatjira, an Aboriginal painter of the
Western Aranda tribe. Although he grouches about visual art, Hughes is ultimately interested in the creative possibilities available to a poet; the descriptive writer is inevitably
compared to the visual media of photography, painting and film. Race is also relevant
here, as Hughes tries crudely to make a point about art and civilization. This black, he
writes to his brother Gerald,
certainly has a talent for handling watercolours, but I envy it no more than I envy a mirror its
ability to reproduce every detail that it looks into. Its just not art, water-colour paint technique
it certainly is, but theres no more art in it than in a photograph.
[] Looking at the Blacks [sic] you dont get the impression of a tremendous or even an
ordinary spirit, only of tremendous labour of reproduction and all his genius gone into mere
technical skill. (2007: 1719)

Hughes understands painterly reproduction as the resource of the unthinking primitive.

It is all technique and no spirit a mindless iteration of ones surroundings which omits
the crucial element of mastery and transformation which would affirm the artist as a
specially cultivated being.
Warner Berthoff provides an alternative perspective in his book about Herman
Melville one of the definitive works on that authors prose style. Ostensibly discussing prose, Berthoff nevertheless invokes Keats and Pound among the canonical opponents of description:
The contemplative, passively appreciative attitude of observation adopted by the connoisseur
of scenic patterns and prospects speaks for the broadening personal security allowed by the
modern bourgeois order of life to its privileged classes (anxieties aside), with its grant of
immunity from the immediate struggle with natural conditions. So one is free to admire or to
relish what scenes one finds oneself free to come and go among, what has clearly been subdued
by the expropriating advance of civilization, what no longer in any given place has to be taken
as the whole decisive environment of economic occupation. No wonder then that scenic
description in literature including more recently the paysage of industrialism and the city
runs as much risk of complacency and insipidness as anecdotal painting or program music;
and no wonder that moralists of style as various as Stendhal, Keats, Flaubert, Dr. Johnson, and
Ezra Pound should all have spoken out against it. (1962: 64)

Hughes characterizes as uncultured and spiritless the mere reproduction of ones surroundings; to merely transcribe ones environment is to add nothing to it. Berthoff suggests that literary description may function as quite the opposite: an overplus of subjective
response, untroubled by either political or natural conditions. It is, potentially, the
plaything of the privileged classes; to describe is to be above things, comfortably
aloof. Sufficiently protected by wealth and status, one enjoys life the details of nature,
of the city as an aesthetic phenomenon.
The poet who would look at the world closely and capture its specificity and peculiarity by way of his or her own must inhabit this difficult space between objective reproduction and impressionistic paysage. They might in fact come to understand their own
procedures using the visual terms deployed by critics; this is where a poets self-presentation links up with compositional practice. Indeed, Arun Kolatkar worked as a

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visualizer for advertising agencies and listed not just writers but also film directors
among his influences. Yet this essay is primarily concerned with how an Indian poet
who wrote about his nation in both English and Marathi might feel like Berthoffs elevated describer at some times and not others. Kolatkar critiques, celebrates, satirizes
and documents the living texture of twentieth-century India: the temple town of Jejuri,
lingeringly scattered with divinity and ritual practices; the filthy, poverty-stricken street
excitements of Mumbai. Amit Chaudhuri describes him as Walter Benjamins flneur
a figure whose inclination to savour is not necessarily supported, as Berthoff has it,
by economic and cultural capital, but is a critical method (2008: 232). Yet this insistence
on a clear-eyed view, not only of what the poet sees before him but also of Indias colonial history, is necessarily mediated through style. Seeking to capture, and also create
significance, Kolatkar presses back against a long-standing misvaluation of literary
description based not only on the assumptions given voice by Hughes and Berthoff, but
also the strongly held beliefs of Indian critics about the ideal structure of poems about
their country. He holds up the very type of literary writing accused of having no complexity at all, and shows that to truly apprehend it, we must understand even the tiniest
stylistic details as historically expressive.
Here, then, is verse which demands a true poetics of world literature, that would
understand the socio-historical intelligence of individual lyrics as inextricable from their
craft. Where that word, craft, would not function as an abstract utopian descriptor, but
renew a kind of close reading which takes seriously the specificity of its subject-matter,
while refusing to disclaim or disguise the subjective aspect of its own practice. Kolatkars
descriptions of India provide a salutary model for both poets and critics attentive to cognitive form the linkage of concept and detail; value and fact; style and history. What
is required is a flexibility of attention which does not seek refuge in a newly-minted
technical vocabulary, but is tested against the experience of individual poems. So this
essay approaches Kolatkars verse with a lingering stylistic focus typically reserved for
more canonical, and usually Western poets. Moving from quotation to quotation, I allow
for the emergence of a critical intelligence unique to Kolatkars poems in English, out of
their own effects of rhyme, assonance, syntax, and tone. His English lyrics grow conscious of their distance from a culture no longer experienced as unselfconsciously their
own; Shirish Chindhade remarks of Jejuri that it is striking and intriguing to note that
the experience is so familiar and yet so foreign to the protagonist who is an Indian
(2001: 92), though the blandness of his critical language might obscure the fact that for
him this is no virtue or appreciable complexity.
Description is not quite the same thing as the observation which precedes it, yet the
immediacy of Kolatkars verse attempts a fusion: he may be termed, as Willard
Spiegelman labels Charles Tomlinson, a phenomenological poet, whose language
and form force his readers to confront a verbal reproduction of his own confrontation
with an external scene (2005: 32). This is the sense in which I use description in this
essay. It is related to poetic language and form, and also seeks to mediate between the
poets subjective experience of what he sees, and a matter-of-fact account of what is
actually there. The concept has also been invoked in a curiously unexamined way by
those who find Kolatkar insufficiently or inauthentically Indian. So Chindhade describes
the camera eye of Kolatkars protagonist; remarks his highly sensitive eye for graphic

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detail; and suggests a mergence of poet and speaker in an Andrea del Sarto-like painter
[] perfect in techniques of imagery, narrative skill and delineations, and superb in
detail but far from being truly Indian in sensibility (2001: 93; 106; 107). Since descriptions are what Kolatkar does well, Chindhade strains to deem them both superfluous
and symptomatic of his failures as a poet:
This is where the towering paradox of Jejuri becomes prominent: it is a starkly secular poem
about a candidly religious experience. On the level of style, descriptions, analysis and humour
it is a striking success; on the level of the idiom and sensibility it is an equally remarkable
failure, appearing almost like a travesty of an age old culture. (2001: 106)

Chindhade can only understand this divided viewpoint as an artistic failure, rather than a
way of being true to contrary impulses. Kolatkar would describe faithfully where that
word suggests a nuanced and self-critical accommodation of both empirical reality and
spiritual values. Chindhade responds clumsily to this paradox; also to how Kolatkar
writes about India in a style which asks to be admired through the lens of analytical practices developed within the Anglo-American literary cultures with which he engages. I
say India because although Kolatkar wrote more locally of Mumbai and Jejuri, even
his most apparently straightforward description trembles on the brink of larger meanings
a cultural analysis of his nation and its history.
The Bus, the first poem of Kolatkars award-winning debut Jejuri, is muchdiscussed. Yet it has not been examined with the ear for sound and syntax which it
requires. I quote the first four stanzas:
The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down
on the windows of the state transport bus
all the way up to Jejuri.
A cold wind keeps whipping
and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin
at your elbow.
You look down the roaring road.
You search for signs of daybreak in
what little light spills out of the bus.
Your own divided face in a pair of glasses
on an old mans nose
is all the countryside you get to see. (Kolatkar, 2010: 42)1

The first poem of his first full collection immediately expresses Kolatkars interest in
looking, and description. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre, Spiegelman suggests that
description is never neutral [] it always carries the freight of an unannounced purpose (2005: 6). Kolatkars poem seems to realize this as it goes along. Because the flaps
are buttoned down, you Emma Bird has written sensitively of how Kolatkar uses
this word to implicate the reader (2012: 238) can only see the road ahead, not the

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landscape on either side. The descriptive impulse is frustrated and gradually forced to
become something else.
It is worth returning, here, to Chindhade. Not because his brand of nationalist distaste
hasnt been persuasively countered by critics such as Chaudhuri and Arvind Mehrotra,
but because his analysis leans on a misunderstanding of poetic description which reproduces many of Berthoffs terms:
In traditional Hinduism metaphysical ignorance is said to pose as a curtain between the devotee
and the deity, the same way as the tarpaulin flap prevents glimpses of the landscape outside the
bus. The journey to Jejuri is made by the state transport bus and the return journey is by train,
both being comparatively very comfortable modes in view of the fact that most devotees choose
to take a dindi gods banner and walk miles together from everywhere to Jejuri. Thus the
protagonists physical comfort seems to engender an idle occupation of indulgence in minor
material superficialities. Eventually he seems to be rendered incapable of stepping inside the
old mans head with the caste mark which obviously symbolizes deep devotion. (2001: 93)

Chindhade locates the descriptive writer comfortably above the immediate struggle with
natural conditions which, according to the perspective Berthoff summarizes, would
redeem his observations; the automotive, not pedestrian journey to Jejuri marks the speaker
of the poem as one of a privileged class separated from the start from the traditional culture
he has no hope of understanding and can only mock. The connection with Hindu metaphysics is important, but the phrasing of his final two sentences suggests a fundamental
unease with literary ambiguity; Chindhade doesnt consider that Kolatkars protagonist
might be in a position of doubt or even subjecting himself to outright self-criticism.
In fact, the poem features moments of felicity and also strain, as its very form encodes
the subjective agency ostensibly lacking from the story it tells. We see this as the sounds
of light and bus come together, over a stanza break, in the phrase divided face, underlining
it; a slant-rhyme is also carried through glasses towards the old mans nose. The chime
linking that word with bus makes for additional impact; the image is brilliantly specific.
Yet as significance builds from one meaningful sound to the next, description, reduced to
a minimum, looks to transform into an interpretation of the events, an understanding
of the culture and the speakers place in it. We might say that the journey the poem
describes is evoked, mimetically, by how its free verse picks up and reproduces its previously available sounds. But really the distinctive caution of the procedure is more important. Traditional close reading sets out to praise, to validate the complexity of the text
which merits such intensive scrutiny. Yet in this case the identification of instances of
stylistic propriety is less important than how were led by the intelligence of the verse
itself, its formal self-consciousness, into a cultural discussion.
The caste mark, for example, doesnt simply represent a religious mindset which the
speaker is incapable of inhabiting. We need to look more closely at the word seem,
which Chindhade picks up from the poem and embroiders into soupy prose without
attending to its depth:
You seem to move continually forward
towards a destination
just beyond the caste mark between his eyebrows.

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The previous stanza describes all the countryside you get to see as amounting to the
speakers face reflected in the old mans glasses: not countryside at all, but a confrontation with a divided self. As see is reconfigured, over the stanza break, into seem this
reveals Kolatkars skill with English free verse, how he uses assonance to limberly connect apparently free-standing verses the second word is, as it were, italicized. That is,
precisely at the moment when objective experience is welded to interpretation, we are
allowed to witness the awkward fit between what is and what only seems to be the case.
We should also be made uneasy by the potentially banal tautology which follows. You
seem to move continually forward / toward a destination as if a bus journey could go
any other way. Yet just as this query is raised there is always the difficult question,
about an Indian poets competence with literary English, as well as the instances of
Indian English he deploys lyrically we are ushered into interpretation by the successive line about the caste mark. We must move forward ourselves, from line to line,
until sense is made.
That there is a larger meaning here which Chindhade refuses to contemplate is
evidenced by Kolatkars reuse of the metaphor in a Marathi poem translated as
Greetings:
the donkey of the caste system is dead
it just collapse and die
and now its blocking the road
and getting in everyones way (264)

The road journey in The Bus is towards Jejuri. Yet Kolatkars tip-toe phrasing, and his
work with the word seem, suggests a journey also towards a destination beyond the
nets of caste. (How the word just is used in The Bus does make that poem sceptical
of a complete renovation of the national consciousness.) It turns out Kolatkar isnt simply describing a bus trip to Jejuri, but also thinking about India more generally. His poem
anticipates a now familiar transaction between postcolonial poet and critic, although the
acoustically-engineered tendentiousness of that word seem remains his way of being
more interesting than this; of gesturing towards a primordial uncertainty which pre-exists
both his and our habits of interpretation. Indeed, the interpretation attained by the stanza
about the caste mark is only reached as a result of a privation: the tarpaulin which
makes it impossible simply to look through the window and take on the role of Berthoffs
scenic connoisseur. Although Chindhade describes a state of comfort, there is little of
this in the poem. Instead, conceptual enquiry regarding Indian selfhood is made to appear
something of a last resort. If, as Bruce King argues, Kolatkars poems in English are
written from the perspective of someone who has disengaged from society (2001:
181), this poem does not present that disengaged perspective as a choice so much as in
this moment of transition, of minimal stimuli a necessity, which dramatizes a particular historical situation.
The face divided, in a literal sense, between the lenses of the old mans glasses provides an example of Kolatkars descriptive gift. As visualizer for Ajanta Advertising
and other agencies, he knew how to create such binding images, and also understood
their potentially pernicious hold on the imagination. In attending to the acoustic texture

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of the poem, we come to understand the constructedness of this image it doesnt possess an iconic certainty. And the poem doesnt end at this point:
Outside, the sun has risen quietly.
It aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulin
and shoots at the old mans glasses.
A sawed off sunbeam comes to rest
gently against the drivers right temple.
The bus seems to change direction.
At the end of a bumpy ride
with your own face on either side
when you get off the bus
you dont step inside the old mans head.

The quiet sun contrasts with the roaring road another strange observation because
sunrises are supposed to be silent anyway. Again, we have to read on before the obviousness of the observation is redeemed, this time by a personification of the sun as a sniper
or hitman which, though playful sawed off sunbeam preserves a sense of genuine threat. Once again, we have the word seems (which rhymes internally with sunbeam) and in the light of the other poems in Jejuri, temple is also worth a second
glance. Kolatkar suggests a dissipation of the religious mentality the speaker is travelling
to the temple town to record; the old mans way of life is under fire from the forces of the
new day.
The singsong rhyme on ride and side is unusual for Kolatkar, who prefers slantrhyme. It makes the close of the poem seem rather deliberate and willed; a rejection of
organic form implies that the poet has to instate a conclusion, which is therefore provisional and potentially inauthentic. It may be seen as the response to a formless accidentality which can no longer be borne; Bird observes of the resting sunbeam that the image
is entirely contingent, depicting a scenario unlikely to ever be repeated in the same way
(2012: 237). A similar moment occurs in Woman, whose protagonists insomnia may
seep through the great walls of history of whom moonlight may intercept the bangle
/ circling her wrist (222). These irrecoverable visual moments are, Kolatkar suggests,
where the individual enters history, and becomes writable.
The way in which the old mans head nearly, but not quite rhymes with the previous couplet captures the distance between him and the observer. Sympathetic identification may not be possible, and its also unclear if, stepping off the bus into Jejuri, it
will be possible to exceed the self-regard, the narrowing of cultural imagination,
enshrined in that image of ones own face. (Inside repeats side too clearly, so we
pause in the middle of the final line before attending to the additional phrase, which
seems to exceed the poems proper conclusion.) The negated description of The Bus
therefore anticipates a failure to connect with styles of existence which may be passing
away. If, as Chindhade has it, the poem depicts a state of intellectual self-absorption,
this condition is resisted by the host of sound-connections that preserve in its texture

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the sense of an active intelligence under historical duress. Vilas Sarang describes both
Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre as writing different kinds of poems in English compared to
their work in Marathi: the English poems are often largely descriptive, or, significantly, ironic and satirical, and thus closer to the conscious mind (1990: 8; emphasis
added). Poetic description is therefore implicated in a strategy, or conflicted awareness, of cultural distancing. It is not, as Chindhade has it, a ruthlessly satirical mode
which aspires to a dispassionate empirical objectivity destructive of Hindu beliefs. In
not overpretending at belonging, Kolatkars descriptions of Jejuri refuse to speak on
behalf of a unitary traditional culture, while also framing in careful outline spiritual
values he cannot unproblematically share. His English poems about Mumbai maintain
this complicatedly cherishing attentiveness which requires a certain distance to operate; his style understands itself as non-identical with the people and buildings it
describes and yearns to depict from the inside out. In exploring the apparently stylistic
vocabulary of description important to critics as various as Chindhade and Sarang,
we should note its disguised relationship with conflicting visions of what the English
poems of Indian poets about their country should be like.
Discussing how Kolatkars art dramatizes the predicament of a society whose assimilation into a rapidly globalizing modernity is marked by multiple forms of resistance
(2009: 200), Rajeev S. Patke concentrates on Takta, which the poet wrote in Marathi
and then translated as Pictures from a Marathi Alphabet Chart:
Pineapple. Mother. Pants. Lemon.
Mortar. Sugarcane. Ram.
How secure they all look
each ensconced in its own separate square. (259)

As the poem continues, this unchanging order is placed in a new light No, you dont
have to worry. / Theres going to be no trouble in this peaceable kingdom. Patke identifies a prophylactic against social mobility; the poem satirizes how the pictorial convention of separating each letter and corresponding image in a box [] becomes the first
intimation, in the childs world, of the kind of classification system that created the caste
system of India (2009: 205). Yet once again, Kolatkars verse appears strangely selfinterpreting, and it is unclear if the poem truly suggests that such pedagogy prepares
Indian children for the mutilations of caste, or if the poet is simply exploiting a mischievous parallel. We are made to question the analytical project which, presuming the poet
to have begun, we wish to continue. Is it the critics task simply to lift out of a poem the
meaning which is obviously already there? Pictures from a Marathi Alphabet Chart
actually reveals Kolatkars interest a poets imaginative complicity with his subject
in the aesthetic of clean lines he evokes. His descriptions of India try to reclaim the
sense-making, ordering gaze were apt to align with colonial power and its attempt to
subjugate and classify in the interests of social and economic dominion. He is concerned
with Indian selfhood, and this requires an appreciation of the boundary line separating
self from world if we are to understand subjectivity as more than the product of its surroundings. His flexible use of poetic form assumes its overlap with the most fundamental
processes of perception.

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Here is the first part of Lice, a poem whose very separation into three sections suggests Kolatkars interest in both a cinematic or pictorial style we might think of the
jump-cuts of modern film, or a triptych and the possibility of an undominating order.
As Anjali Nerlekar (2012: 2) remarks, he is a poet who is not just aware of, but obsessed
with, the understanding of space:
She hasnt been a woman for very long,
that girl who looks
like a stick of cinnamon.
Yes, the one in the mustard coloured sari
and red glass bangles,
sitting on that upright concrete block
as if it were a throne,
though its hardly broad enough
for a kitten to curl up on.
The slender wooden pillar
of the Wayside Inn porch
rises behind her
like some kind of exotic backrest
how well it seems to fit
the space between her shoulder blades. (108)

As the poem continues, it becomes clear that, despite her bright garments, the girl is of
the underclass she speaks to her dirty no-good lover, a yob freshly released from
jail, and is busy removing from his hair arpeggios of lice / and harmonics of nits (109).
That phrasing, like the concrete block the girl treats as a throne, suggests both a satirical
contrast of high culture and low as well as a finding of value in the ordinary, and the
depressingly less than ordinary. Such is Kolatkars moral vision, as Mehrotra puts it,
whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, rapturously observed; where the
distinction between precision and rapture may relate to the interplay of description with
poetic form (2010: 13).
This first section isolates the young woman from those around her we dont know
yet that she dandles the head of her lover in her lap, or is watched by, among others, that
fellow / with a foot on the fender / and an elbow on the bonnet of a parked Fiat (109).
(The poet is simply one onlooker one voyeur? among others.) This is because the
poem is concerned, as the final stanza suggests, with the fit between her and her surroundings. The neatness of that fit suggests a type of urban dexterity or survival potential
while preserving, since it isnt absolute, a sense of her individuality as separate from
and not entirely produced by her reduced circumstances. Seem appears, once again, at
a moment of imaginative pressure, just as meaning is affixed to the scene. Yet although
this move towards interpretation is only overtly made in the final stanza quoted,
Kolatkars gently structured free verse is relevant throughout. The subtle rhymes, or

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almost-rhymes on woman, long and cinnamon; looks and block; throne and on; pillar
and behind her intimate, not beyond but within the details they sensitize, a significance which exceeds the watching eye. Kolatkar demonstrates his talent with a literary
style that draws on modern Anglo-American verse and targets readers versed in that
tradition and its mid-century shift from closed to open forms.
The incomplete fragments of Making Love to a Poem reveal the trope of vision as
central to Kolatkars self-understanding, or lack thereof, as a bilingual poet. The disarray
of these notes (which appear to be coalescing into a cut-up poem) makes it unclear
whether he is talking about the Indian robbed of his mother tongue or someone like
me who doesnt even have / that excuse:

a cultural bypass operation
opening wide windows
picture windows
in one wall
with sea view westerly breeze
out of which for him to look out of
boarding up another
so as to keep him from looking at what is happening in his own backyard
a window to the world wide world
cutting off his lifelines (351)

This blockage of sight recalls The Bus, although there is also the idea that as one window opens, another closes. It is somehow because of his ability to write in English, to
gaze upon the wide world, that the poet loses sight of his own country. As if there were
a conspiracy designed to prevent the cosmopolitan writer from noticing whats going on
in India the clich about whats happening in his own backyard has a political suggestiveness and intimates that he is in some way manipulated by global forces.
Spiegelman elegantly remarks that like traveling, through which we expect to
look closely and eagerly at foreign landscapes, just examining the more domestic
details of nature in ones backyard can stem from a comparably inarticulable dread,
failure, or void within ones heart (2005: 83). In Kolatkars work, this dread is perhaps uniquely articulated by his work in English, which must register the poets
distance when he writes in this language from what he describes. Mehrotra tells
a touching story:
A few weeks before he died in September 2004, as we were on our way by taxi from Prabhadevi
where he lived to Caf Military, Kolatkar, looking out of the taxi window and then at me,
remarked on his English and Marathi oeuvres. With the exception of Sarpa Satra, he said, his
stance in the boatride, Jejuri, and Kala Ghoda Poems [] had been that of an observer; he
was on the outside looking in. He wondered whether hed have gone on writing the same way
if hed lived for another ten years. The Marathi books, on the other hand, were all quite different,
he said, and there was no obvious thread connecting Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, Chirimiri, and
Bhijki Vahi. (2012: 266)

Kolatkars English descriptions of India crave the intimacy Berthoffs describer is determined to avoid they are energized by an alienation they attempt to work through. The
notes of Making Love to a Poem do not comprise a finished work and their self-doubt

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is unusually explicit. Yet we can identify something of Kolatkars uncertain relationship

to his surroundings in the stanzas from Lice. Both the sound-patterning and the visual
specificity of that poem bespeak a transnational sensibility which, as Mehrotra
observes, is partly derived from the wide dissemination of Western paperback literature
through the metropolitan centres of India (2012: 255). We feel Kolatkars verse come
close to the woman he describes, but contact is never made. The poems tripartite form
separates her from her surroundings, so we appreciate her as an individual from whom
we and the poet are also separated, by a critical distance enshrined in the technicalities of
the verse. Such is the shaping tendency which Kolatkar disguises, but refuses to collapse
into sheer reportage.
The comparison of the narrow concrete block to a throne is particularly interesting, as
the kind of ingenious descriptive accomplishment Berthoff aligns with an economicallyprotected observer is lent to the girl herself, who seemingly possesses the ability to redescribe her environment. A key phrase appears in the second line, where the line-break
preserves a sense of her as an active observer in her own right: that girl who looks. The
way in which Kolatkar deploys the word look here recalls Pictures from a Marathi
Alphabet Chart: How secure they all look / each ensconced in its own separate square.
Yet we realize that the girl exactly placed on top of the pillar neatly fitted into her
culture, into this first section of a three-part poem is not as secure as she appears; she
is a vulnerable figure. (Later her lover dreams of being holed up in a mossy cave, hearing the distant bark of police dogs he finds a defensive enclosure in her maternal
embrace.) Kolatkars description is protective, as if the poem could not only preserve on
the page something of a transitory working-class Indian life but also offer a reassurance
not wholly different to the deceptions of the alphabet chart. Description as magic, a protective ritual, rather than a rational enumeration of what is actually there though ultimately I hear a wishfulness in that final stanza. The interjection hopes for the happiness
it cannot verify, since description, as a way of being true to the only tenuously crossable
distances between people, gives us what the young woman looks and sounds like, not
what she feels. Kolatkars street dwellers remain unknowable in the end, writes
Nerlekar, and beyond the grasp of homogenizing and universalizing structures of representation (2012: 12).
Reading Kolatkar, we feel that description may become a compulsion; it might also
be considered a duty. (Indeed, if we arent to think of it, in Berthoffs terms, as selfindulgence, it is tempting to reconceive of it as one or the other.) Black Handkerchief,
originally published in the Marathi collection Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, reveals the
poets desire like that of another politically sensitive describer, Elizabeth Bishop to
stop looking so closely for once and blindfold himself:
Not the whole time, mind you.
No, that wont do.
You will also have to go on doing whatever it is you do
to make some kind of living you know.
But as often as you can.
Every chance you get. (258)

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We pick up signs of Kolatkars discontent with the profession of advertising here and
there in his work; the desired blindfold could be read in these terms. To a Cloud, translated from the Marathi, is more explicit about the relationship between description and
the language of capitalism:
I will have to describe you as an explosion of cheeks.
Im impressed.
I cannot think of anyone else who offers such a wide range.
In all sizes and in all possible and impossible colours.
Im not being sarcastic. (254)

The trace of compulsion in the first line might relate to the fatigued length of this poem,
which runs longer than it needs to and suggests the need to go on doing whatever it is
you do that being the poets habit of intensive, and in this case, self-exhausted
description. The anarchic self-fashioning of the cloud expresses a free-market nihilism,
liable to ride roughshod over the individual; the harassed speaker really wants to be left
alone / to study the ceiling in peace (255). This suggests the conflict at the heart of
Kolatkars description, which sometimes has a strangely willed quality, and appears elsewhere to express the astonishing purity of an impulse. A psychophysiological gift is
reconstrued as a way of being, yet there remains something perverse about the extended
description which Kolatkar permits himself, since it co-exists with a stylistic intelligence
that aims at, and is capable of, an ever-surprising brevity.
Discussing poem 7 of the long sequence Breakfast at Kala Ghoda, which seemingly gives us a plain list of the kinds of dishes that are served in the restaurants around
Bombay aab gosht at Sarvis, / kebabs with sprigs of mint at Gulshan-e-Iran
Nerlekar says this seems obvious and therefore inane: of course, each restaurant would
serve a different variety of dishes, wouldnt it? She redeems this description, or transcription, by pointing out how each dish declares the existence of a different social and
communal group [] at a time when the Shiv Sena, the radical regionalist political party,
was in the ascendant and asking for a Marathi/Hindu-only Bombay (2012: 5).
Nevertheless, her first reaction is also right: when Kolatkar goes on at such length it
seems as if he wishes to disavow poetry entirely, and simply put the overflowing world
on the page. We experience the withdrawal of his formal intelligence as a deprivation;
perhaps we are even impatient. The first section of The Rat-poison Mans Lunch Hour
describes at some length the construction of the mans one-legged poster:
An expressionless oblong of white canvas
stretched on a wooden frame,
with a wooden bar that divides it
vertically in two equal halves
and continues past the base
to form a short stumpy leg
with a chunky three-inch wheel
grafted onto its club-foot,

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the whole construct designed
never to challenge
the average Indian male
vertically. (162)

Kolatkars work with poetic form is a way of both cleaving to and also pointing beyond
what is empirically available. This description is prepared to bore; to substitute for poetic
evocativeness the exactitude of a technical manual. Fact is severed from value, material
from meaning. Nevertheless, a type of personification looks forward to the impish twist
about the average Indian male and never to challenge hints at a political reading
not pushed through. And of course the sign represents Kolatkars profession of advertising reduced to an honest minimum.
In the long poem David Sassoon, the eponymous Jewish merchant (really a stone
head stuck on a wall, as unresponsive and unseeing as that sign) finds himself cast in a
role I detest:
that of an observer,
a spectator,
reduced to making faces,
rolling his eyes,
and sticking his tongue out occasionally
at this city that gets
more and more unrecognisable
with every passing year.
Responses
that may have to make way for tears,
for what I see now is a sick city. (173)

Kolatkar writes from this impossible perspective to dramatize the impotence of the spectator, and perhaps also to comment on how his own verse has settled into a role, a way of
proceeding that he is less than comfortable with. His descriptions of India operate under
the felt pressure to provide a better response to what is seen than simply making faces.
His humour and satire does want to deepen into analytic critique, but acknowledges the
problems involved in doing so. Can poetry provide what we get from journalism, cultural
history, social criticism; and if so, does it want to? The verse isnt sure, and our reading
of it should not jettison this rich uncertainty. There are times when we are simply
instructed to look:
look
the moon has come down
to graze along the hill top

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you dare not ride off with it

dont you see khandobas brand on its flank
you horse thief
look
thats his name
tattooed just below the left collar bone (58)
~
Look:
The lady with a head of wirewool hair,
peppercorn eyes,
and a motherly smile for everyone
is here already (130)

The second quotation is from Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda; the first, from A Song
for a Murli. Murlis, the notes to the Collected tell us, are the female devotees, courtesans and wives of the folk deity Khandoba (366). Comparing these poems, we see
how the injunction to look might insist, at some times, on an unillusioned view of the
facts, and elsewhere on the continued relevance of traditional myths and rituals liable
otherwise to drop out of memory. Kolatkar is ultimately ambivalent about the possibility
(and the desirability) of a completely disenchanted and rational description of India. This
is the dichotomy which underpins Jejuri, and is laid out most clearly in The Priests
Son, which I quote in its entirety:
these five hills
are the five demons
that khandoba killed
says the priests son
a young boy
who comes along as your guide
since the schools have vacations
do you really believe that story
you ask him
he doesnt reply
but merely looks uncomfortable
shrugs and looks away
and happens to notice
a quick wink of movement
in a scanty patch of scruffy dry grass
burnt brown in the sun
and says

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look
theres a butterfly
there (52)

The Marathi critic Bhalchandra Nemade reacts with impatience: Does one go to a historical or religious place to ask such foolish questions as the protagonist asks of the
priests son whom, like a colonial tourist, he has hired as his guide? (1985: 82). Like
Chindhade, who cites him, Nemade is unsatisfied by Kolatkars too-uncertain sense of
what it is to be Indian, and he crudely collapses into the disdain of an unsympathetic
outsider the poets fine hesitation between mythical and empirical descriptions of the
landscape. (Like a colonial tourist is the weasel phrase, as the critic turns the young
boys possibly voluntary assistance into an economic transaction.)
The speaker of the poem is in fact genuinely interested in the emotional responses the
boy has been taught to belay in favour of a pre-fabricated explanation. As the initial three
lines reproduce the boys speech, the almost-rhyme of the first and third expresses a form
of mythical logic superficially opposed to the meticulously exact description that
Kolatkar prizes elsewhere. We assume at first the sentiment is that of the poems speaker,
and only realize with the fourth line that it belongs to the boy; in this way, his mythological understanding of the hills is framed in white space and allowed its say before being
contextualized as the perhaps compromised utterance of a particular person in a particular place. The boys feelings, when pressed as to his real beliefs, are shared by the discomfiture of the verse and its awkward repetition of the word look. The different
meanings of this word include the appearance of the boy to the observer; also, the boys
own shamed gaze. Finally, it is his exclamation: an act of either joyous or deflective
pointing-out. He speaks, or fails to speak, on behalf of a culture moving from a superstitious to a rational understanding of its historical landscapes. The moment of transition is
not without its own potential; it is precisely when challenged that the boy looks off to one
side and notices the butterfly. This is kinetic description, but it also seems as if nature is
not totally disenchanted, but still conspires to help the boy out with a knowing wink as
if the human gaze at nature were returned by eyes of its own. The alliteration creates an
effect of unlovely exactitude but also, like the story about Khandoba, does something
human, meaning-making, with what is observed and described. And the slant-rhyme
moving through notice, grass and says gives the journey from observation through
description towards exclamation a sense of natural rightness.
Parameshwari presents another active enquirer whose observational powers bridge
the ages of superstition and rationality. Named for a Hindu goddess, the pipe-smoking
mama, the old lavatory attendant has kept pace with the times which have supposedly
discarded her:
The Kutchi witch with the leathery face
and shrivelled dugs
may have lost her gift of prophecy;
she cannot transform herself
into a bird, for example,
kill a milchcow with a look

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or turn a young onager

into a willing beast of burden,
but she is still as sharp as ever
and nobodys fool.
Even with her one eye dim
and mucus-green with cataract,
she can see through the new day
and know it
for the clever forgery that it is. (82)

She cannot transform herself is an important line. To be liberated from antiquated stereotypes into modern poverty is nothing to be particularly happy about. Parameshwari
cannot change her situation, but the once-occult power of vision she could have killed
a milchcow with a look may yet be redeemed as a kind of awareness, a refusal to be
taken in by the more contemporary myths of economic and cultural regeneration. There
is seeing and then there is seeing through; the latter phrase accommodates notions of
persistence and toil.
The description of Parameshwaris eye as potentially compromised yet still active
parallels the phrasing of other poems. In Jaratkaru Speaks To Her Son Aastika, the
snake-woman encourages her offspring to negotiate with their enemy Janamejaya and
move their battered people beyond the logic of tribal revenge. This is possible because of
his youth:
It means your eyesight
is good,
your vision clear.
Not spoilt by reading too many books yet,
or ruined
by the smoke of too many sacrifices,
or clouded by rage, power, ego, pride
or any of the other
common diseases of the eye. (206)

The lineation works to enhance the surprise of that final line, where personal and historical distortions of vision in a larger sense are described as actual diseases of the
eye. The long early poem, the boatride, is unpunctuated and pretends at a visual
immediacy. Yet seeing remains uninnocent and the eye itself is understood, once again,
as a historical organ:
familiar perspectives
reoccupy
a cleanlier eye

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sad as a century
the gateway of india
struggles back to its feet
wobbly but sober enough
to account for itself
details approach our memory
ingratiatingly
we are prepared to welcome
a more realistic sense
of proportion (334)

The line-break on sense resembles one of Wordsworths it complicates, intellectualizes, sensory experience. Perspectives and proportion: this is not just a language of
seeing, but of cultural assessment. Built during the Raj to commemorate the visit of
George V, the Gateway of India is a spectacle of colonial power, a transformation of a
local jetty into a magnificent entry-point into India for the rich and powerful. When
Kolatkar writes that details approach our memory / ingratiatingly, hes remembering,
and transposing into a metaphysical key, the approach of colonial merchants and ambassadors towards and through the Gateway. We are prepared to welcome: into a form of
meta-description, he insinuates the ingratiating behaviour of either the colonizer or the
colonized, pressured into a dead language of fake mutuality which papers over the reality
of military force.
A minimal style reveals in this poem Kolatkars desire to vanish in the face of the
India he describes, and let it account for itself a drunk with something to expiate.
As if the describer could withdraw and allow a more authentic voice to emerge of historical events themselves; the orts of recycled political language make it clear this isnt possible. Crying Mangoes in Colaba similarly presents a voice that isnt Kolatkars own,
while acknowledging the poets unavoidably structuring influence. Published in the
Marathi collection Chirimiri the translation is taken from Kolatkars papers it
draws, the notes tell us, on the anecdotes of Balwantbua, an eighty-four-year-old bhajan
singer and raconteur the poet met in 1974. Everything he knew about life, said
Kolatkar, had come to him at first hand: from direct observation (376; 377). The poem
describes in the life of a fruitseller an incident which occurred when the boy travelled
with his father further than / we usually went, way past the military barrier. As punishment, their wares are tipped over his head and ruined by five soldiers, Brits. Kolatkar
took notes in Marathi of what Balwantbua actually told him further transformed,
through translation, into an English poem. The result is a speaker the casual shaping of
the verse encourages us to trust but also delicately points beyond, towards an underworld
of humiliation his determined insouciance only hints at. The acts of looking and describing become important when the speaker is asked by the army brass The big man,
a Brit of course to identify the assailants in a line-up:
White men you know they all look the same to me
but all the same I walked past them
with a straight face and narrowed eyes,
examining each fat and fruity face closely.

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They all appeared about equally ripe for the knife

and each one seemed to say to me Please, Balwant, spare me,
but finally it had to be done. I picked
five of them at random you may say,
pointing a finger as I said Him
and him and him and him and uh. . . was it him or him?
Let me see now. No doubt about it, it was him. (268)

This is a reversal of the colonial gaze which would see the natives, not their rulers, as
people who all look the same. Were made complicit by conversational phrases like
you know on familiar terms with the speaker, its assumed that we understand his
position, even the horrific suggestion that all the white men appeared about equally ripe
for the knife. (Or is it a case of white men we know friends of ours? looking interchangeable to him?) Like an Indian Shylock, Balwant (named for the first time at this
crucial moment) reasserts the connection between economics and human lives. He talks
of the mens faces as if they were fruit; his goods, to pick and dispose of as he sees fit.
Yet what is most important here is the conversion of description into identification a
judicial act which invokes the power of law and turns colonial authority against itself.
Although his actions are subject to irony, Balwant expresses a desire felt throughout
Kolatkars work in English: to move from seeing, through description, towards some
kind of political? action.
The pretence of dispassion, in front of the military police and also us Recovering
money, I tell you, / is the biggest headache in this line of business resembles the
poets own procedures. For despite their show of neutral exactitude, Kolatkars descriptions of India are never unenlivened by that passionate cultural feeling we must rediscover within the very interstices of his craft. His descriptive verse requires literary
appreciation; it also challenges us with a subjective component ultimately inexpungible from our dealings with world (or indeed any form of) literature. Describing India,
Kolatkar takes his place in a project of realist disenchantment familiar to us from
Anglo-American modernism. Stringently unflowery, he makes an aesthetic out of
exactitude. Yet his verse evolves an organic form; a personal intensity emerges of hard
detail as the individuality of Jejuri and Mumbai is matched by that of his perceptions.
If there is, as I have argued, a distance between the observer who writes in English and
what he writes about, there is also a correspondence, felt along the verse from line to
line as a cosmopolitan singularity acknowledges, without histrionics, its Indian origins. (A poet is compelled to describe certain things not simply because they are what
he or she has before him; to think otherwise is to be patronizing about Kolatkars
locatedness as an Indian poet.) Despite the misreadings of Chindhade and Nemade,
sympathy and historical critique are entwined. There is a lesson here for both poets and
literary critics who would disavow their subjectivity and take on too wholly the language of historical scholarship and social science. For what Kolatkars poetry reveals
is that even when one describes very carefully serious subject matter, creative form and
even pleasure are inevitable. To pretend otherwise is to substitute for the literary intelligence (which Kolatkar manifests as intensely as any canonical Western poet, in a way
which deserves to be written about and cherished) a phony righteousness rather too

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confident, as his verse carefully isnt, of its immediate political efficacy. As I have
mentioned, Kolatkar is terse at some times, and elsewhere exhaustively precise: both
are ways of being serious, of recognizing the significance of what he describes. But
hes also funny, and his humour can be caustic or liberated, setting parameters or
exploding them. Inattentive to such variations of poetic tone, we miss how they add up
to a historical sensibility ever-conscious of what can and cannot presently be achieved:
his poetics of description knows where the lines are drawn.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Note
1.

All references to Kolatkars work are from this 2010 edition of his Collected Poems in English
and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

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