Arun Kolatkar as a Modernist Poet PDF

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Keywords: Kolkatar, Bhabha, Cosmopolitanism, Modernism, Indian Poetry in English...

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Arka Mukhopadhyay Professor Ira Raja English 0403(ii) 03 May 2018 Arun Kolatkar as a Modernist Poet “I have lived that moment of the scattering of people that in other times and other places, in the nation of others, become a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of the ‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gathering in the ghettos or cafes of city centres; gathering in the half-light half-life of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language;” – Homi. K. Bhabha Arun Kolatkar is a bilingual poet, an advertising agent, a visual artist, an experimentalist, a ‘flaneur,’ a travelling hippie to his contemporaries and a rebel of the tradition. However, the poet asserts, ‘I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition.’ (De Souza 34) And this very radical internationalist approach in his poetry, in turn, is the product of a vast tradition that the poet wants to ‘reclaim’, a tradition ranging from Japanese haiku to Chinese ideogram to Western cubism and imagism, while being tethered in the native tradition of Bhakti. This paper will try to reflect upon the hybrid position of the poet as a tourist to his own spatial and temporal reality, and consider how the poet, by morphing time and space carves out a hybrid identity for himself. Through a close reading of poems like ‘The Bus’ and ‘Crabs’, the paper will finally try to assert Kolatkar’s modernist position in the Indo-Anglican canon. Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the hybrid space is marked by a flexibility of cultural positioning, a rooted sense of cosmopolitanism, and a rejection of constricting dichotomies in

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favour of an internationalist ethic. The quote placed in the beginning, in turn, also brings into mind the ‘modernist’ modes of artistic expression which emerged in Europe as a direct consequence of the Great War. A prominent example would be that of Zurich, where Cabaret Voltaire became a point of convergence for a group of exiled and émigré artists who went on to initiate the Dada movement. A similar phenomenon can be seen in Paris where artists like Picasso, Braque Vlaminick and Derain brought about a revolution in the name of cubism by breaking down the normative theory of perception in art. In the words of Pound, the project of cultural modernism in Europe is characterized by a deliberate urge to ‘make it new’ – propelled by a thorough rejection of the canonical tradition, modernists tend to take up the natural and mundane, rid the images from their romanticizing connotations to depict the anxiety and alienation of life in the asphalt jungle. Hailing from the literary scene of Bombay of the 1970s, Arun Kolatkar is a poet of the urban intelligentsia. Winner of the Commonwealth Prize for the best first book in poetry for his book Jejuri, Kolatkar’s poetry is significantly cosmopolitan in its structural and thematic simplicity, though there are subaltern repercussions throughout the poems of Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems. Jejuri comes off as an antithesis to the flowery, rhetorical style of much of the early poetry of the Indo-Anglican canon. Let us take up the first poem of the much celebrated collection, ‘The Bus’, which can be read as the poet’s radical manifesto against a decaying tradition. The poem begins with the carving out of a spatial-temporal framework, a hybrid domain within which the modern Indian poet writing in English should operate: ‘The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down on the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri.’ (Kolatkar 9)

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The poet carves out a space inside the bus where his cosmopolitan poetry can thrive, and the ‘state transport bus’ brings to mind a colloquial image of modern existence. It’s also a dynamic space, as the movement of the bus parallels to the passage of time. The bus is easily transformed into a subaltern space where the urbane and the rural may coexist, and the hybrid identity of the poet manifests as his ‘own divided face’ – wrapped up in his own reflections, the poet cannot look past the old man’s face to catch a glimpse of the ‘countryside’. The sun ‘shoots at’ the old man’s glasses, and the image of the sun, replete with traditional connotations is casually transformed into an objective correlative. In the use of the word ‘caste-mark’, Kolatkar refers to a social tradition of casteism as well as the literary tradition of Indo-Anglican canon, as the word brings into mind the Saojini Naidu poem ‘Leilei’: ‘A caste-mark on the azure brow of heaven The golden moon burns sacred, solemn, bright.’ (Ramamurti 21) Also, the poem appropriates a cubist technique in the presentation of an image with all the dimensions present: ‘At the end of the bumpy ride With your own face on either side’ (Kolatkar 9) In the use of the cubism, Kolatkar’s poetry harks back to that of his western predecessors like Apollinaire and Riverdy. However, the poet doesn’t want to conform to any tradition of the past, and therefore dismisses the possibility of stepping inside ‘the old man’s head’. Kolatkar was a student of the visual art himself, and his poetry often embodies the experimental techniques professed by schools of artistic modernism: Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism and so on. If ‘The Bus’ uses the cubist mode to depict the

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hybrid position, one of his earlier poems, ‘Crabs’, is a surrealist evocation of the fear of alienation which also figures in much of the poetry of modern existence. ‘Look, look. Just look at them.’ (Kolatkar 58) Through the act of looking, the latent fear of the unconscious manifests as subjective ‘crabs’ who’ll eventually bring about blindness, exile and alienation. ‘Alienation’ as understood by Marx, is the loss of reality in an economy, marked by the act of one’s eyes being eaten out in the poem. The social dislocation of the poetic self is mirrored in a psychological dislocation of the psyche. In his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot argues how the ‘historical sense’, which is ‘a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together’ (Eliot 39) makes a writer traditional as well as most acutely aware of his time. Kolatkar has this gift of a keen ‘historical sense’, and the modernism in his poetry is firmly rooted in the native tradition. The philosophical and spiritual anguish characterized in the poems of Jejuri find their precursors in the Bhakti movement, and the implicit reference to poets like Sarojini Naidu translates into an act of rediscovering the past tradition in a cosmopolitan urbane modernity. And even then, Kolatkar remains remarkably modern, in his use of visual images characterized by a lucid simplicity, in the enjambments, in the thwarted seriousness of the formal diction he maintains throughout his poetry. Like Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, Kolatkar’s ‘Biograph’ figures in a cacophony of many voices evoked in the carnivalesque of the poetic life. His poetic self, like Benjamin’s ‘flaneur’, occupies a liminal space between his close attention to an object and his ability to imbue the object with a sense of foreignness.

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Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The location of culture. routledge, 2012. De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "Tradition and the individual talent." Perspecta 19 (1982): 36-42. Kolatkar, Arun. "Jejuri. Bombay." Clearing House (1976). Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992. Ramamurti, K. S. "Twenty-five Indian poets in English." (1995)....