This article was downloaded by: [York University Libraries]On: 18 November 2014, At: 02:52Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

World Literature Written in EnglishPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw19

Arun Kolatkar: A Bilingual poetVrinda Nabar aa University of BombayPublished online: 18 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Vrinda Nabar (1977) Arun Kolatkar: A Bilingual poet, World Literature Written in English, 16:2, 368-375,DOI: 10.1080/17449857708588478

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449857708588478

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representationsor warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyoneis expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

ARUN KOLATKAR: A BILINGUAL POET

Arun Kolatkar (b. 1932) has been writing in Marathi and Eng-lish for more than twenty years. In the Anthology of Marathi Poetry(1945-1965), the editor, Dilip Chltre, refers to Kolatkar's most "pro-ductive" period as being between 1955-1962. Kolatkar's poetry has beenanthologlsed as well as published In various journals, but his first bookof poems appeared only in December 1976. It was published by ClearingHouse, ' a "collective enterprise of poets, " one of whom is Kolatkar. Itis in English'and consists of a thirty-one-poem sequence called Jejuri.Kolatkar's first book of poems in the Marathi language was publishedthis year.

To say Arun Kolatkar is bilingual is also to draw attention tothe peculiar nature of that bilingualism as it appears in India. Webster'sdictionary defines the term "bilingual" as "using or able to use two lan-guages especially with the fluency characteristic of a native speaker. "This is the sense in which many writers and translators are bilingual.Or, to take another example, the sense in which students are bilingualwhen they major in French or Russian and spend the rest of their livesinterpreting for UNESCO or functioning in a comparable way.

In a more basic sense, bilingualism is an essential aspect ofthe life of an educated, working, urban Indian. The average executivedresses his part according to what our leading tailors believe is the"fashion" abroad. He dictates letters, attends meetings, gives orders,conducts business, all in English. He returns home, discards his modishsuit for Indian clothes, the English language for his Indian mother-tongue.This dual role, part of his daily routine, is a typical example of what theword bilingual means in the nonliterary sense In India.

When one comes to the question of Indian literary bilingualism,one sees the phenomenon in a more positive form. There are writerswho use a regional language and those who write only in English, but evenamong the regional writers there are hardly any who have not been in-fluenced by Western thought and literature. Their bookshelves arestacked with Marx, Camus, Sartre, Eliot, etc., and their work showsthe influence of these writers even when their themes are local or re-gional.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

369

I would see this as an important, if partially concealed, formof bilingualism. Its explicit manifestations are usually disastrous, aswhen a Marathi, or Gujerati, or Hindi writer assumes that he can alsowrite in English because he knows it, speaks it fluently, and has readwidely in it. Or, when he undertakes to translate his own work into Eng-lish. In the second instance, there is an overrigid insistence on theliteral translation without any feeling for the nuances of the two languagesconcerned. It violates what Sujit Mukherjee accurately sums up as thetwo primary norms in translation: the need to (1) make allowances forthe "unavoidable lexical or linguistic, cultural or environmental adjust-ments with the original"; (2) ascertain that the Englishof the translationsis "of an accepted standard, not only by grammatical measure but byidiomatic accuracy as well. "

The Indian writer in English faces a Babel of criticism whichtries to outline his do's and don't's. Must Indians write in. English?Must Indian poetry in English always follow England? The Indo-Angliancannot fly his own flag or blow his own trumpet, i . e . , evolve his ownidiom. We (the Indo-Anglian writers) are all experimentalists. And (notfinally, but I must get on to the next part of my argument) there is alsothe frequent demand for the creation of a special Indian English both toreflect the language as it is actually spoken In the country and to trans-literate the idiom of a particular Indian language.

Along with this confusing cloud of criticism goes the assump-tion that the Indo-English writer is an "alien" to his culture, a rootlesssinger of an empty song. The earlier Indo-English poets did create thissituation as a result of their historical position. Manmohan Ghose, forexample, wrote of daffodils, violets, and of Perseus the Gorgon-slayer.His verse-drama, Nollo and Damayanti. was only an Indian story in veryWestern dress, complete with a villain who breaks into "Ah!" and "Ha-ha!" with all the appropriateness of Victorian melodrama. More r e -cently there have been attempts to exalt some early poetry by Indians onthe critical grounds that its sentiment Is very Indian or in the Indianquasi-mystical tradition.

While some forms of bilingualism belong to the modern Indianethos, the Indian who writes well in both a regional language and in Eng-lish is a comparatively infrequent phenomenon. There are writers whocould do it, but who choose one language or the other. Among the Indo-English writers, there is R. K. Narayan who would probably have writ-ten as well in his mother-tongue. A. K. Ramanujan is another example:he wrote in English and in his mother-tongue, Tamil, to start with, and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

370

translated both from Tamil and Kannada into English. Parthasarathyresolved some time back to return to Tamil but continued to write inEnglish, though his output is small. A run Kolatkar, to whom I am de-voting this paper, is bilingual in a wider sense.

Kolatkar's early education was in Marathi, his mother-tongue.He studied at a school in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He began writing po-etry around 1951, and has always written more or less simultaneouslyin both English and Marathi. Dilip Chitre's anthology contains some ofKolatkar's "English versions" of his Marathi poems. In addition to writ-ing poetry Kolatkar was also involved, in the mid-fifties, in the produc-tion of a mimeographed monthly magazine of Marathi poetry, Shabda,brought out jointly with Ramesh Samartha, BanduWaze, and DllipChitre.

Kolatkar's early poetry indicates, to some extent, what wastaking place in Marathi poetry as a whole. The first part of the twenti-eth century exhibited the inevitable Romantic hangover which followedthe exposure of the poets to The Golden Treasury. Along with this wentan attachment to a debased, elaborately embellished form of the classi-cal Sanskrit tradition. In the forties, poets like Bal Sitaram Mardhekarbroke away from this dated Romanticism. In a sense, Mardhekar did,in Marathi, what Kolatkar was later to do in English: he went back tothe Marathi saint poets, to a poetic tradition that was authentically Ma-harashtrian, but he used it to express a modern temperament. Poetslike Mardhekar were also influenced by what was happening in the West.With them, contemporary European poetry began to be a part of theMarathi consciousness.

In the first phase of bis writing, Kolatkar's work shows theImpact of European surrealist poetry. Reading the "English versions"of his Marathi poems, one may well conclude that they have been sub-stantially modified in translation: their tonal quality is not in the leaststilted nor, in any way, unnatural to English. The Marathi originals,however, are largely similar. The essential mood is almost consistentlymacabre:

The Hag

death pins his abstraction like a rare but uglybutterfly on her brain, tells an offcolourjoke, she laughs of necessity, a little vaguely.

the hag is stone deaf: you wouldn't even guess.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

371

the window has a curtain, it's florid, it 's grimy,entrenched behind it she devours oranges

in self defence, she likes them baggy, she paws,she claws, an orange isn't peeled, it's torn, eachfruit a vapid debacle, an invalid pose

in tattered filigree, the hag incites her mandiblesto mob and maul a piece, her entire faceconverges in a featureless fury rushes to the battle's

toothless centre, eyes, like a dead horseon a battle field her eyes deny the avid farce.

t

There is a deliberate emphasis on what is sordid. A womanis never seen romantically, or even normally. She collects cats andnames them, is impaled by a spiked man, adds new recipes to her scrap-book,'. shaves her legs, poisons cockroaches, and reads thrillers bor-rowed from a circulating library. The ne'er-do-well, who tries to se -duce his sister-in-law, sees only obscenity in the act. Threatened byher husband, he is disgusted that a "bloody cunt" could make one "punk"want to kill his brother.

The poem "Three Cups of Tea," from which the last referencewas taken, uses a slangy American idiom to transliterate the pidgin un-derworld Marathi—"Bombay Hindi, " actually—of the original. The fla-vour of this transliteration points to a significant feature of Kolatkar'searly work: its taste for the Bohemian, which is comparatively rare inIndian life and literature. The influence of the surrealists is seen in theheavy dependence on images, and in the technique used in a poem like"The Hag. " Its appeal, though limited, can be traced to Kolatkar's tem-peramental affinity with the surrealists.

The "flaws" in this poetry do not arise from the imposition ofa "foreign" influence on the handling of an Indian language. Nor does theexperience—its "common" essence, rather—seem forced in Marathi.The limitations are inthe treatment of a particular technique. The over-emphasis on images occasionally traps the poetry in a network of ver-biage:

At the swollen and black bottom of helpless insomniac sleepSwift and free-flowing fingers whisper at the poresBubbles sputter up thump and climb the spiral staircase of sleep

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

372

And spread a murderous oil on the vast and splashed up terrace. . . .(from "At the Swollen and Black, "translated by Dilip Chitre)

Another marked drawback is the frequent use of adjectives.In one poem, "The Frog-Hour, " they proliferate the already existentqualification of "hour" (in the title) through nineteen lines: swampy hour,wooden hour, rusted hour, fissile hour, demented hour, collapsed hour.In addition, one has swollen foot (of the wooden hour!), hysterical star,missing hands, and earthy finger. A twenty-four-line poem, "Irani Res-taurant, Bombay," has sixteen such adjectives: cockeyed shah of iran,cracked showcase, operational base, dogmatically green, elaboratetrees, crooked swan, and so on. Adjectival emphasis is a common tech-nical weakness'in poetry, is not restricted to any particular language,and provides an easy answer. The poet need not work out his idea ormetaphor when, a one-word qualification is available, but the device bogsthe reader down in each detail. In the same poem, the reader respondsmore freely to a line like: "an instant of mirrors turns the tables onspace. " It is not epithet-ridden, and it anticipates the kind of poetryKolatkar is to write later.

Kolatkar's new Marathi poetry book consists almost entirelyof poems written in the fifties and early sixties. In the sixties he movedaway from the heavily surrealist poetry of the first phase and towards a"bhakti" tradition which was a little over three centuries old. In 1966Poetry India, edited by Nissim Ezekiel, published Kolatkar's transla-tions of the seventeenth-century saint poet, Tukaram. Tukaram's de-votional verses have profoundly affected the Maharashtrian mind. Helived in Dehu, on the banks of the Alandi, a sacred river. His familyworshipped at the shrine of the Vaishnav deiiy, Vithoba, in Pandharpur,Sholapur district. A series of family tragedies wore down Tukaram'sinterest in the mundane life of his early years. His verses tell of a totalsurrender to his love for God:

Tuka is stark raving madHe talks too much

His vocabulary:Ram Krishna Govind Hari

Of any God save PandurangTuka is ignorant

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

373

He expects revelationAt any time, from any one

Words on him are wastedHe dances before God, naked

Weary of men and mannersWith pleasure he rolls in gutters

Ignoring instruction, allHe ever says is "Vithal, Vithal"

O pundits, O learned ones' Spit him out at once.

The mystical one-ness which Tukaram experiences, and de-scribes in his songs is central to Hindu religious poetry. Dnyandeva inMaharashtra, and Mirabal in Rajasthan, to mention only two such relig-ious poets, had also sung of a poetic frenzy that transcended all worldlyknowledge. Kolatkar's translations preserve the mood of Tukaram'ssongs, but he avoids the kind of dated idiom most Indian translatorswould have chosen, using contemporary English. The overmodernistictouches are negligible—one poem mentions the "grumpy" village chief-tain, for example, or "exhibitionist" Tukaram—while the current idiomgives the sentiment a certain living force to which the reader respondsdirectly. If one compares these translations with SriAurobindo's "high-est heights, " a phrase used by Professor V. K. Gokak, or even with theVictorian romanticisms of the Tagore translations, Kolatkar's achieve-ment is at once apparent. He has transferred, to English, a traditionwhose associational values are Indian, and even more narrowly region-al—Maharashtrian.

This ability to move from one language to another, to incor-porate ideaüonal peculiarities and make of them a meaningful experi-ence, is a necessary aspect of bilingualism. It is also the most notice-able thing about Kolatkar's later work, Jejurl, which first appeared inOpinion Literary Quarterly, Monsoon Issue, 1974.

Jejuri, a little village near Satara to the south of Maharashtra,contains the shrine of Khandoba, often described as a "people's god. "This means he does not attract Hindu upper-class worshippers. Thelandscape of Jejuri is rocky and barren, but prolific in legends. Manya stone has claims to godhead. A "giant hunk of rock" is Khandoba's

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

374

wife, the crack on it a scar inflicted by him:

scratch a rockand a legend springs

("A Scratch")

The movement in Jejurl is towards a freer form of verse,technical simplicity, a reliance on innuendoes. I mention this not merelyto comment on the poetry j>er _se, but to focus on the similarity betweenKolatkar's technique and that seen in the native Maharashtrian traditionof poets like Tukaram.

Jejuri exhibits Kolatkar's ability to handle effectively, in Eng-lish, a subject-that is essentially regional. The acerbic tone of his ear-lier work gives way to a restrained, perceptive irony, a sardonic humourwhich infects the entire sequence. It takes in the waiting priest and ex-poses his mundane anxieties:

Is the bus a little late?The priest wonders.Will there be a puran poli in his plate?

("The Priest")

It takes note of the temple-roof collapsing onMaruti's head, of the mon-grel bitch who shelters there, the dung beetle scuttling for safety, andthe broken collection box(Maruti, who stands for devotion, begets none).It follows the tortuous journey of a conduit pipe and tries to depict, inthe manner of concrete poetry, a dozen cocks and hens executing a "kindof a harvest dance. "

The objective situations in the poems are familiar to everyIndian, but the interpretation is part of a sustained poetic attitude:

the two headed station masterbelongs to a sectthat rejects every timetablenot published in the year the track was laidas apocryphalbut interprets the first timetablewith a freedom that allows him to readevery subsequent timetable betweenthe lines of its text

("The Railway Station": section 4:"the station master")

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14

375

The station master's voice is unmistakable: it is the voice-ofofficial Bumbledom, the voice that produces the near hysteria in sec-tion 5 of the poem ("vows"). Since Jejuri is a place of pilgrimage thesacramental hue tinges all operations, including the washing of teacups.The novice at the "tea stall, " (section 3) when questioned, "exorcises"you by "sprinkling dishwater in your face" before he continues with his"ablutions" in the sink. Over the whole scene hangs the setting sun,"large as a wheel, " holding out a promise at that point in the distancewhere the parallel rails meet.

Jejuri reinforces Kolatkar's bilingualism. It would workequally well in Marathi. Its present form wears down the specious dis-tinction between the Indo-English poets and poets writing in the regionallanguages. Though the language of Jejurl is English, its appeal is Ma-harashtrian, Indian, and universal.

Vrinda NabarUniversity of Bombay

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

2:52

18

Nov

embe

r 20

14