Arun Kolatkar’s Bhijakī Vahī: Sacrifice and residues

ABSTRACT

Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some from mythology and folktales, others from contemporary history – in his collection Bhijakī Vahī (Sodden Notebook), first published in 2003 a few months before his death. The poems, each devoted to a different woman and sometimes narrated from their point of view, articulate tales of suffering, grief, and loss. The subjects include mythological figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Helen of Troy, but also real women such as the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, photographed by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. The symbolic apparatus of sacrifice, with its notions of residues, substitution, victims, and apotheosis, is consistently deployed around these figures as a way of approaching modern conflicts, and especially projects of mass extermination. These questions gain particular salience in the contemporary political conjuncture in India, defined by the rise of violent, majoritarian ideologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Sacrifice
• Indian poetry
• Marathi poetry
• modernism
• Arun Kolatkar
• women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Bhijakī Vahī was first published by Pras Prakashan (Kolatkar 2003); two further editions followed in 2006 and 2016. The 2003 and 2006 editions do not differ substantially, but the 2016 publication conforms more closely with Arun Kolatkar’s original vision. The first two editions displayed a stylized version of the Egyptian “Eye of Horus”, designed by Kolatkar, against the cover’s black background. The initial vision however, only realized in the 2016 edition, features on the book’s spine Nick Ut’s photograph of the young Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc, fleeing naked on a highway away from the site of an American bombing raid with her arms extending on to the front and back covers.

2. Nerlekar (2017) has identified an entire period within Indian literature from c.1955–80, also known as the satthotaari (or 1960s onwards) movement, with the “rapid emergence and equally quick disappearance of the little magazines” (40). Kolatkar is situated at the centre of this group of writers, and “created the modern poetic canon of English and Marathi poetry” (40). Several of Kolatkar’s poems that later appeared in book form were first published in little magazines like ezra 1, Shabda, damn you: a magazine of the arts, Vrischik, or Aso.

3. Only two poems from Bhijakī Vahī are currently available in English. “Sarpa Satra” was translated by Kolatkar, published as a stand-alone book (2004), and later included in his Collected Poems in English (2010). Kolatkar’s friend and colleague, the bilingual poet Dilip Chitre (2004), translated “The Last Teardrop” in his article “Losing Contemporaries” in the journal New Quest. All other translations in this article are my own.

4. In comparing her bloodied corpse to a “used sanitary pad”, the poem also alludes to a story regarding Hypatia recounted by the ancient author Damascius. He refers to rumours spread by Hypatia’s detractors about her having an affair with Orestes, the Roman governor of the city. Hypatia then furiously brandished her menstrual rag in front of men at a public assembly to prove her celibacy.

5. A marsiya is an elegiac song associated with Shia Islamic rites of mourning.

6. Zecchini’s work on the Kolatkar “shelves” of the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute in Pune confirms that Kolatkar collected newspaper clippings and books on the Balkans, Rwanda, the Crusades, and other major religious and ethnic conflicts, including the 1992–93 Bombay riots and the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat such as the Srikrishna Commission report on the Bombay riots, and books on the mosque in Ayodhya (Zecchini 2014, 180).

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Nachiket Joshi

Nachiket Joshi is a PhD candidate at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO), Paris. His research explores the conjunction of notions of violence, sacrifice, and femininity in the work of three modern Indian poets. He completed his masters in cultural analysis from the University of Amsterdam after graduating with a BA in sociology from the University of Mumbai.