Arun Kolatkar

Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet who wrote in both Marathi and English. His poems are known for expressing the humour in everyday life. Kolatkar is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be featured on the World Classics titles of New York Review of Books.

His first collection of English poetry, Jejuri, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. The floors had to be "plastered with cowdung every week."

He attended Rajaram High School in Kolhapur, where Marathi was the medium of instruction. After graduation in 1949, he joined S. B. College of Arts, Gulbarga, from which he graduated in 1957.

In 1953, he married Darshan Chhabda (the sister of well-known painter Bal Chhabda). The marriage was opposed by both families, partly because Kolatkar had yet to sell any of his paintings.

His early years in Mumbai were poor but eventful, especially his life as an upcoming artist in the Rampart Row neighborhood, where the Artists' Aid Fund Center was located.

After many years of struggle, he started work as an art director and graphic designer in several advertising agencies, such as Lintas. By the mid-60s he was established as a graphic artist and joined an eclectic group of creatives headed by

the legendary advertising professional Kersy Katrak. It was Katrak, himself a poet, who pushed Kolatkar into bringing out Jejuri. Kolatkar was, in advertising jargon, a 'visualizer,' and soon became one of Mumbai's most successful art directors. He won the prestigious CAG award for advertising six times and was admitted to the CAG Hall of Fame.

By 1966, his marriage with Darshan was in trouble, and Kolatkar developed a drinking problem. This faded after the marriage was dissolved by mutual agreement and he married his second wife, Soonu.

To match this in his English translation, he sometimes adopts "a cowboy variety":

{| style="text-align:left;" align="center"

|         allow me beautiful i said to my sister in law          to step in my brother's booties                you had it coming said rehman        a gun in his hand              shoot me punk kill your brother i said           for a bloody cunt (Three cups of Tea

He won the Kusumagraj Puraskar given by the Marathwada Sahitya Parishad in 1991 and Bahinabai Puraskar given by Bahinabai Prathistan in 1995.

His Marathi poetry collections include:

Arun Kolatkarcha Kavita (1977)
Chirimiri (2004)
Bhijki Vahi (2004) (Sahitya Akademi award, 2005)
Droan (2004)

Kolatkar was among a group of post-independence bilingual poets who fused the diction of their mother tongues along with international styles to break new ground in their poetic traditions; others in this group included Gopalakrishna Adiga

(Kannada), Raghuvir Sahay (Hindi), Dilip Chitre (also Marathi), Sunil Gangopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury (Bengali), etc.

Influences

Marathi devotional poetry and popular theater (tamasha) had early influences on Kolatkar. American beat poetry, especially of William Carlos Williams For some years, some of his poems were also included in school texts.

The poem sequence deals with a visit to Jejuri, a pilgrimage site for the local Maharashtrian deity Khandoba (a local deity, also an incarnation of Shiva). In a conversation with poet Eunice de Souza, Kolatkar says he discovered Jejuri in 'a book on temples and legends of Maharashtra... there was a chapter on Jejuri in it. It seemed an interesting place'. was published soon in a magazine called Dionysius, but both the original manuscript and this magazine were lost. Subsequently, the poems were recreated in the 1970s, published in a literary quarterly in 1974, and the book came out in 1976.

The poems evoke a series of images to highlight the ambiguities in modern-day life. Although situated in a religious setting, they are not religious; in 1978, an interviewer asked him if he believed in God, and Kolatkar said: 'I leave the question alone. I don't think I have to take a position about God one way or the other.'

Before Jejuri, Kolatkar had also published other poem sequences, including the boatride, which appeared in the little magazine, damn you: a magazine of the arts in 1968, and was anthologized twice. A few of his early poems in English also appeared in Dilip Chitre's Anthology of Marathi poetry 1945-1965 (1967). Although some of these poems claim to be an 'English version by poet', "their Marathi originals were never committed to paper." (this is also true of some other bilingual poets like Vilas Sarang.

Later work

A reclusive figure all his life, he lived without a telephone and was hesitant about bringing out his work. It was only after he was diagnosed with cancer that two volumes were brought out by friends are about the dark underside of Mumbai's underbelly. The bewilderingly heterogeneous megapolis is envisioned in various oblique and whimsical perspectives of an underdog. Like Jejuri, Kala Ghoda is also 'a place poem' exploring the myth, history, geography, and ethos of the place in a typical Kolatkaresque style. While Jejuri, a very popular place for pilgrimage to a pastoral god, could never become Kolatkar's home, Kala Ghoda is about exploring the baffling complexities of the great metropolis. While Jejuri can be considered as an example of searching for belonging, which happens to be the major fixation of the previous generation of Indian poets in English, Kala Ghoda poems do not betray any anxieties and agonies of 'belonging'. With Kala Ghoda Poems, Indian poetry in English seems to have grown up, shedding adolescent 'identity crises' and goose pimples. The remarkable maturity of poetic vision embodied in the Kala Ghoda Poems makes it something of a milestone in Indian poetry in English.

After his death, a new edition of the hard to obtain Jejuri was published in the New York Review Books Classics series with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri (2006). Around the time of his death, he had also requested Arvind Krishna Mehrotra to edit some of his uncollected poems. These were published as The Boatride and Other Poems by Pras Prakashan in 2008. His Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.

He was survived by his wife Soonu Kolatkar.

Appearances in the following poetry Anthologies

The Golden Treasure of Writers Workshop Poetry (2008) ed. by Rubana Huq and published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta
Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) ed. by R. Parthasarathy and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) ed. by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Strangertime: An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English (1977) ed. by Pritish Nandy and published by Hind Pocket Books, New Delhi

References

Sources

Influences

Later work

Appearances in the following poetry Anthologies

Further reading

See also

References

Sources

External links