The cartography of the local in Arun Kolatkar's poetry

Abstract

The post-independence bilingual Indian poet Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004) uses cartographic images and narratives of travel to interrogate the newly independent Indian nation. Focusing on the city of Bombay/Mumbai, the poet persistently maps the city and its environs in unconventional ways: on foot, through eating habits and clothing. Such walking documentation of city spaces provides a resistant alternative to privileged viewpoints of spaces and people, as de Certeau points out, and Kolatkar’s poetry targets the neoliberal world of post-independence India by juxtaposing the cartographic global with the intensely local. But he goes farther. This essay shows that the cartographic impulse in Kolatkar’s poetry is based on the poet’s contradictory desire to achieve two concurrent yet opposite goals: one, to document the periphery of the modern world of Bombay/Mumbai (and therefore to make this subprime indigent life visible within authoritative contexts); two, to simultaneously also shield this periphery from the consuming eyes of the rest of the world (including from those of the reader of his own work). The poet’s goal is to highlight the resistant edge and then make disappear this vehemently local element before it gets devoured by the exoticizing gaze of the global and the metropolitan.

Keywords:

• cartography
• Certeau
• Bombay
• poetry
• Kolatkar
• space

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mrs Soonoo Kolatkar for giving access to the Kolatkar archive and for permission to quote from and translate parts of Kolatkar's published and unpublished writing, and to Ashok Shahane and Michael Perreira for making this access possible. I must also thank the anonymous Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers of my article for several valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. Six years after his death in 2004, Kolatkar’s manuscript for the Marathi book of poems on the same place/theme was published by Pras publications. All references to Jejuri here are to the English edition, unless otherwise specified.

2. The city of “Bombay” was officially renamed “Mumbai” (its Marathi name) after an agitation by Hindu nationalists in the 1990s. Kolatkar continued to refer to the city as “Mumbai” in Marathi and “Bombay” in English (he did not accede to the larger parochial demands of these regional political parties and this might have been one way of indicating that opposition). To indicate that practice, I will also continue to do the same in this essay, even though “Mumbai” is now the broadly accepted name in both English and Marathi.

3. The “trisland” is a word used by Kolatkar to describe the triangular space of the traffic island at Kala Ghoda.

4. For a detailed account of the origin of the poem and its relation to the poet’s biography, see the Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s introduction to The Boatride and Other Poems (14–19).

5. Sant Tukaram (1609-50) is a popular saint in the state of Maharashtra and his abhangs (songs) are part of the everyday culture in the region. See Chitre and Kolatkar (Boatride) for an English translation of his songs.

6. In a way, this is connected to the theme of Kolatkar’s first book of poems, Jejuri, which also depicts the walking journey of a poetic persona through the temple town of Jejuri, perhaps in search of some meaning not available in the urban life of Mumbai; the poet finds that (other than the butterfly and the excited fowl in the field) this site of pilgrimage is as empty of significance as the consumerist world of Bombay. See Amit Chaudhuri’s introduction to the NYRB edition of Jejuri.

7. Idlis are steamed cakes of black lentil and rice that are eaten as a snack, or breakfast. They are usually paired with (and dunked in) sambar, a spicy lentil soup.

8. See Nerlekar for a detailed reading of this poem.

9. “The time is thus over in which the ‘real’ appeared to come into the text to be manufactured and exported. [ … ] It is no more than an illusory sacrament of the real, a space of laughter at the expense of yesterday’s axioms” (de Certeau 152).