Kolatkar's Description of India

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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature2014, Vol. 49(3) 359 –377

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Arun Kolatkar’s description of India

Vidyan RavinthiranSelwyn College, University of Cambridge, UK

AbstractLiterary 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, isn’t simply a stylistic term — it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar’s 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 nation’s 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 Kolatkar’s poems in English. Which start, mischievously, to interpret themselves — critical analysis should not jettison the playfulness which cannot quite disguise the poet’s longing, when he writes in this language, for a greater intimacy with the people and places he describes.

KeywordsDescription, 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, dif-ficult 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: [email protected]

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360 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3)

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 inter-ested 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. It’s just not art, water-colour paint technique it certainly is, but there’s no more art in it than in a photograph.

[…] Looking at the Black’s [sic] you don’t 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: 17–19)

Hughes understands painterly “reproduction” as the resource of the unthinking primitive. It is all technique and no spirit — a mindless iteration of one’s 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 author’s prose style. Ostensibly discuss-ing prose, Berthoff nevertheless invokes Keats and Pound among the canonical oppo-nents 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 one’s sur-roundings; to merely transcribe one’s environment is to add nothing to it. Berthoff sug-gests 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 peculi-arity by way of his or her own must inhabit this difficult space between objective repro-duction and impressionistic paysage. They might in fact come to understand their own procedures using the visual terms deployed by critics; this is where a poet’s self-presen-tation 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 Berthoff’s ele-vated 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 Benjamin’s flâneur — 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 India’s colo-nial 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 com-plexity 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. Kolatkar’s descriptions of India provide a salutary model for both poets and critics attentive to cog-nitive 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 Kolatkar’s 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 Kolatkar’s poems in English, out of their own effects of rhyme, assonance, syntax, and tone. His English lyrics grow con-scious 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 Kolatkar’s 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 poet’s 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 Kolatkar’s protagonist; remarks his “highly sensitive eye for graphic




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 “descrip-tions” 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 prac-tices 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 Kolatkar’s award-winning debut Jejuri, is much-discussed. 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 downon the windows of the state transport busall the way up to Jejuri.

A cold wind keeps whippingand slapping a corner of the tarpaulinat your elbow.

You look down the roaring road.You search for signs of daybreak inwhat little light spills out of the bus.

Your own divided face in a pair of glasseson an old man’s noseis all the countryside you get to see. (Kolatkar, 2010: 42)1

The first poem of his first full collection immediately expresses Kolatkar’s interest in looking, and description. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre, Spiegelman suggests that “description is never neutral […] it always carries the freight of an unannounced pur-pose” (2005: 6). Kolatkar’s 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 hasn’t been persuasively countered by critics such as Chaudhuri and Arvind Mehrotra, but because his analysis leans on a misunderstanding of poetic description which repro-duces many of Berthoff’s 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 — god’s banner — and walk miles together from everywhere to Jejuri. Thus the protagonist’s 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 man’s 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 meta-physics is important, but the phrasing of his final two sentences suggests a fundamental unease with literary ambiguity; Chindhade doesn’t consider that Kolatkar’s 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 man’s 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 speaker’s 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 previ-ously available sounds. But really the distinctive caution of the procedure is more impor-tant. 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 we’re led by the intelligence of the verse itself, its formal self-consciousness, into a cultural discussion.

The caste mark, for example, doesn’t 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 forwardtowards a destinationjust beyond the caste mark between his eyebrows.




The previous stanza describes “all the countryside you get to see” as amounting to the speaker’s face reflected in the old man’s glasses: not countryside at all, but a confronta-tion with a “divided” self. As see is reconfigured, over the stanza break, into seem — this reveals Kolatkar’s skill with English free verse, how he uses assonance to limberly con-nect 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 poet’s competence with literary English, as well as the instances of “Indian English” he deploys lyrically — we are ushered into interpretation by the succes-sive 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 Kolatkar’s reuse of the metaphor in a Marathi poem translated as “Greetings”:

the donkey of the caste system is deadit just collapse and dieand now its blocking the roadand getting in everyone’s way (264)

The road journey in “The Bus” is towards Jejuri. Yet Kolatkar’s 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 isn’t sim-ply 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 Berthoff’s 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, Kolatkar’s 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 particu-lar historical situation.

The face divided, in a literal sense, between the lenses of the old man’s glasses pro-vides an example of Kolatkar’s 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 doesn’t pos-sess an iconic certainty. And the poem doesn’t end at this point:

Outside, the sun has risen quietly.It aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulinand shoots at the old man’s glasses.

A sawed off sunbeam comes to restgently against the driver’s right temple.The bus seems to change direction.

At the end of a bumpy ridewith your own face on either sidewhen you get off the bus

you don’t step inside the old man’s 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 obvious-ness 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 genu-ine threat. Once again, we have the word “seems” (which rhymes internally with “sun-beam”) 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 man’s 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 slant-rhyme. 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 provi-sional and potentially inauthentic. It may be seen as the response to a formless acciden-tality 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 protagonist’s “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 man’s head” nearly, but not quite rhymes with the previ-ous couplet captures the distance between him and the observer. Sympathetic identifi-cation may not be possible, and it’s 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 one’s “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 poem’s 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




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, signifi-cantly, ironic and satirical, and thus closer to the conscious mind” (1990: 8; emphasis added). Poetic description is therefore implicated in a strategy, or conflicted aware-ness, 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, Kolatkar’s 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 oper-ate; 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 “Kolatkar’s art dramatizes the predicament of a society whose assim-ilation 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 lookeach ensconced in its own separate square. (259)

As the poem continues, this unchanging order is placed in a new light — “No, you don’t have to worry. / There’s going to be no trouble in this peaceable kingdom”. Patke identi-fies “a prophylactic against social mobility”; the poem satirizes how “the pictorial con-vention of separating each letter and corresponding image in a box […] becomes the first intimation, in the child’s world, of the kind of classification system that created the caste system of India” (2009: 205). Yet once again, Kolatkar’s verse appears strangely self-interpreting, 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 mischie-vous parallel. We are made to question the analytical project which, presuming the poet to have begun, we wish to continue. Is it the critic’s task simply to lift out of a poem the meaning which is obviously already there? “Pictures from a Marathi Alphabet Chart” actually reveals Kolatkar’s interest — a poet’s 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 we’re 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 sur-roundings. 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 sug-gests Kolatkar’s 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 hasn’t been a woman for very long,that girl who lookslike a stick of cinnamon.

Yes, the one in the mustard coloured sariand red glass bangles,sitting on that upright concrete block

as if it were a throne,though it’s hardly broad enoughfor a kitten to curl up on.

The slender wooden pillarof the Wayside Inn porchrises behind her

like some kind of exotic backrest— how well it seems to fitthe 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 Kolatkar’s “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 don’t 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 sur-roundings. The neatness of that fit suggests a type of urban dexterity or survival potential — while preserving, since it isn’t 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, Kolatkar’s gently structured free verse is relevant throughout. The subtle rhymes, or




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 signifi-cance 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 Kolatkar’s 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 doesn’t even have / that excuse”:

a cultural bypass operationopening wide windows picture windowsin one wall with sea view westerly breezeout of which for him to look out ofboarding up anotherso as to keep him from looking at what is happening in his own backyarda window to the world wide worldcutting off his lifelines (351)

This blockage of sight recalls “The Bus”, although there is also the idea that as one win-dow 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 what’s going on in India — the cliché about what’s “happening in his own backyard” has a political sug-gestiveness 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 one’s backyard can stem from a comparably inarticulable dread, failure, or void within one’s heart” (2005: 83). In Kolatkar’s work, this dread is per-haps uniquely articulated by his work in English, which must register the poet’s 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 Café 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 he’d have gone on writing the same way if he’d 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)

Kolatkar’s English descriptions of India crave the intimacy Berthoff’s describer is deter-mined 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 Kolatkar’s 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 Kolatkar’s verse come close to the woman he describes, but contact is never made. The poem’s 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 economically-protected observer is lent to the girl herself, who seemingly possesses the ability to rede-scribe 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”, hear-ing “the distant bark of police dogs” — he finds a defensive enclosure in her maternal embrace.) Kolatkar’s 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 pro-tective ritual, rather than a rational enumeration of what is actually there — though ulti-mately 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. Kolatkar’s street dwellers “remain unknowable in the end”, writes Nerlekar, “and beyond the grasp of homogenizing and universalizing structures of repre-sentation” (2012: 12).

Reading Kolatkar, we feel that description may become a compulsion; it might also be considered a duty. (Indeed, if we aren’t to think of it, in Berthoff’s terms, as self-indulgence, 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 poet’s 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 won’t do.You will also have to go on doing whatever it is you doto make some kind of living you know.

But as often as you can.Every chance you get. (258)




We pick up signs of Kolatkar’s discontent with the profession of advertising here and there in his work; the desired blindfold could be read in these terms. “To a Cloud”, trans-lated 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.I’m impressed.I cannot think of anyone else who offers such a wide range.In all sizes and in all possible and impossible colours.I’m 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 poet’s 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 Kolatkar’s description, which sometimes has a strangely willed quality, and appears else-where 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 “seem-ingly gives us a plain list of the kinds of dishes that are served in the restaurants around Bombay” — “aab gosht at Sarvi’s, / 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, wouldn’t it?” She redeems this description, or tran-scription, 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 Man’s Lunch Hour” describes at some length the construction of the man’s “one-legged poster”:

An expressionless oblong of white canvasstretched on a wooden frame,

with a wooden bar that divides itvertically in two equal halves

and continues past the baseto form a short stumpy leg

with a chunky three-inch wheelgrafted onto its club-foot,



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the whole construct designednever to challenge

the average Indian malevertically. (162)

Kolatkar’s 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 Kolatkar’s profession of advertis-ing 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 getsmore and more unrecognisablewith every passing year.

Responsesthat 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 spec-tator, 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 isn’t sure, and our reading of it should not jettison this rich uncertainty. There are times when we are simply instructed to “look”:

lookthe moon has come downto graze along the hill top




you dare not ride off with itdon’t you see khandoba’s brand on its flankyou horse thief

lookthat’s his nametattooed just below the left collar bone (58)

~

Look:The lady with a head of wirewool hair,peppercorn eyes,

and a motherly smile for everyoneis 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, cour-tesans 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 Priest’s Son”, which I quote in its entirety:

these five hillsare the five demonsthat khandoba killed

says the priest’s sona young boywho comes along as your guidesince the schools have vacations

do you really believe that storyyou ask him

he doesn’t replybut merely looks uncomfortableshrugs and looks away

and happens to noticea quick wink of movementin a scanty patch of scruffy dry grassburnt brown in the sunand says



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lookthere’s a butterflythere (52)

The Marathi critic Bhalchandra Nemade reacts with impatience: “Does one go to a his-torical or religious place to ask such foolish questions as the protagonist asks of the priest’s son whom, like a colonial tourist, he has hired as his guide?” (1985: 82). Like Chindhade, who cites him, Nemade is unsatisfied by Kolatkar’s too-uncertain sense of what it is to be Indian, and he crudely collapses into the disdain of an unsympathetic outsider the poet’s fine hesitation between mythical and empirical descriptions of the landscape. (“Like a colonial tourist” is the weasel phrase, as the critic turns the young boy’s 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 boy’s 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 poem’s speaker, and only realize with the fourth line that it belongs to the boy; in this way, his mythologi-cal 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 particu-lar place. The boy’s feelings, when pressed as to his real beliefs, are shared by the dis-comfiture 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 boy’s 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 supersti-tious 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 faceand shrivelled dugsmay have lost her gift of prophecy;

she cannot transform herselfinto a bird, for example,kill a milchcow with a look




or turn a young onagerinto a willing beast of burden,but she is still as sharp as ever

and nobody’s fool.Even with her one eye dimand mucus-green with cataract,

she can see through the new dayand know itfor the clever forgery that it is. (82)

“She cannot transform herself” is an important line. To be liberated from antiquated ste-reotypes 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 Parameshwari’s “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 eyesightis good,your vision clear.

Not spoilt by reading too many books yet,or ruinedby the smoke of too many sacrifices,

or clouded by rage, power, ego, prideor any of the othercommon diseases of the eye. (206)

The lineation works to enhance the surprise of that final line, where personal and histori-cal 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 perspectivesreoccupya cleanlier eye



Ravinthiran 375

sad as a centurythe gateway of indiastruggles back to its feetwobbly but sober enoughto account for itselfdetails approach our memoryingratiatinglywe are prepared to welcomea more realistic senseof proportion (334)

The line-break on “sense” resembles one of Wordsworth’s — it complicates, intellectual-izes, 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”, he’s remembering, and transposing into a metaphysical key, the approach of colonial merchants and ambas-sadors 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 Kolatkar’s 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 histori-cal events themselves; the orts of recycled political language make it clear this isn’t pos-sible. “Crying Mangoes in Colaba” similarly presents a voice that isn’t Kolatkar’s own, while acknowledging the poet’s unavoidably structuring influence. Published in the Marathi collection Chirimiri — the translation is taken from Kolatkar’s 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 punish-ment, 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 describ-ing 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 mebut all the same I walked past themwith a straight face and narrowed eyes,examining each fat and fruity face closely.




They all appeared about equally ripe for the knifeand each one seemed to say to me Please, Balwant, spare me,but finally it had to be done. I pickedfive of them at random you may say,pointing a finger as I said Himand 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”. We’re made complicit by conversational phrases like “you know” — on familiar terms with the speaker, it’s 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 inter-changeable 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 men’s 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 Kolatkar’s 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 poet’s own procedures. For despite their show of neutral exactitude, Kolatkar’s descrip-tions of India are never unenlivened by that passionate cultural feeling we must redis-cover within the very interstices of his craft. His descriptive verse requires literary appreciation; it also challenges us with a subjective component ultimately inexpungi-ble 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 ori-gins. (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 Kolatkar’s 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 lan-guage of historical scholarship and social science. For what Kolatkar’s 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 intel-ligence (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



Ravinthiran 377

confident, as his verse carefully isn’t, 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 he’s 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 Kolatkar’s 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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Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Documents

Kolatkar's Description of India