Arun Kolatkar: the lavish gift of the artist
About a year back Arun Kolatkar's book of poems titled Kala Ghoda Poems landed on my desk, waiting to be reviewed. Then other things intervened; time blew by; I forgot. It is time to make small amends. Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1932-2004) was born in November 1932 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He was a bilingual poet, writing in both Marathi (a language in which he was heir to a long and distinguished literary heritage) as well as in English. Kolatkar was what is sometimes referred to as a poet's poet, a diversely talented being who studied in India's JJ School of Fine Arts, became a prize-winning art director and graphic designer in Bombay/Mumbai, and wrote Jejuri, which if I'm not mistaken was the only book of English poems by an Indian to ever win the Commonwealth Prize in 1977. He was also a determined loner, somebody who never had a phone (Amit Chaudhuri wrote that he had to call Kolatkar on his neighbour's phone in order to talk to Arun long distance), and could be found one day of the week at the Wayside Inn at Kala Ghoda crossroads in Mumbai, a haunt of his for 20 years where he drank coffee, doodled, and from whose window he looked out at the city's castoffs, low life, sundry lost souls, vagrants and their surreal crawl. It was out of those afternoons at Kala Ghoda that this book of poems came out. It is in some ways an extraordinary rendering of Mumbai, a book in which a city is simultaneously observed and is observer, is spoken about and yet is speaking to itself, in precisely observed details and finely calibrated sentences to only fitfully lapse into mumbling in half-understood street argot, in which shards of light fall across the brooding shadows in no particular pattern, and where, in his attempt to limn and capture Mumbai's vast contradictions are reflected the same insidious, untenable, insufferable, unsupportable oppositions, contradictions and dualisms that confront us in our daily lives in innumerable ways: knowledge versus belief, the general versus the specific, appearance versus reality, mind versus body. At another level, of course, by recording the vast, sheer, brute, immoveable, undeniable physicality of the world of the poor and the floating, Kolatkar was bestowing - concealed in the corners of his lines, beneath the sardonic recording eye - a strained mercy on these blighted lives, which is the last, lavish gift of the artist. Following is an extract from the poem 'Meera', about a woman garbage collector on the Mumbai's streets trundling her 'honey cart'- the cart for hauling garbage originally designed for London streets and which then was transplanted to Mumbai: 5.
Euclid would have loved it
- that rickety looking rattletrap,
that garbage trolley. The honey cart,
that looks like a theorem picked
clean of proof, has all the starkness
and simplicity of a child's drawing
done in black crayon. It's a wrought-iron tray
that cradles two wicker bins the size
of laundry baskets Held in place by two
equilateral triangles on either side.
it stays close to the ground 6.
When it is full
nearly to the brim,
she climbs to the top and begins to dance
within the narrow compass
of the wicker bin like a Meera before her Lord,
a Meera
with a broomstick for a lute; shifting her weight
from one foot to the other,
she turns around herself by slow degrees,
giving her toes
enough time to genuflect and offer
Obeisance
to all the cardinal points, to each of
the thirty-two compass points,
in turn. Her free arm, raised
in the air,
is a flamingo in flight.
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